S6E8: A Review of Museum Collections and Objects

Herre de Bondt and Rebecca Shen are back on the show to discuss Rosa Dyer’s season “Animal Collections/’Objects”. We delve into some of the key themes and tensions to emerge in the season including questions of value, colonization, ethics, and practices of preservation. We revisit a season that follows birds, bodies, and objects across museums and beyond, asking how ethics, beauty, and decay shape what gets collected, displayed, and believed. The talk moves from drawers of parrots to a living hippo, mapping the gap between preservation and care. 

• Natural history Museum in London
• Smithsonian Museum
• Pitt Rivers Museum
• Re-Animalization with Krithika Srinivasan on The Animal Turn
• Animals and Waste with Herre de Bondton The Animal Highlight 
• The Complex Relationship Between Humans and Baboons by Claudia Hirtenfelder
• The Lion’s Historian by Sandra Swart 
• Media Analysis of Racism and Speciesism (MARS) test finds Oscars so AnthropoScenic in contemporary animated films by Natalie Khazaal, Ellen Gorsevski, and Tobias Linné 
• Animals and Media on The Animal Turn
• Animapolis

Credits:

• Recorded: 10 June 2025
• Claudia Hirtenfelder, executive producer, editor and co-host 
• Rosa Dyer, script writer, narrator and co-host
• Rebecca Shen, episode artwork and logo, guest
• Herre de Bondt, guest
• Gordon Clarke, bed music
• Learn more about the team here. 

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• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/TheAnimalTurn 
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Transcript

Siobhan O'Sullivan 0:01

This is another iRaw podcast.

Meet Rosa And Co‑Hosts

Framing The Season’s Review

Claudia Hirtenfelder 0:12

Welcome back to season six of the Animal Highlight, where we're focused in on animals and museum objects slash museum collections. Throughout the season, Rosa Dyer has taken us on an incredible journey of thinking about how animals are represented in specific objects that you find in museums, to thinking about animals who live in museums, to thinking about what other kinds of spaces could be considered more than human museums, like zoos. She raised a host of questions, everything from the ways in which indigenous practices are represented in museums, to thinking about what role beauty plays in the gathering and the collecting and the making of specific objects, to thinking about how these objects bring different animals together, both in how these different animals are represented, but also in how specific animals' bodies, thinking here of the poison dart frog, are used to enhance the features of other animals who will inevitably and later be used in specific museum objects. I had so much fun working with Rosa over the course of this. We're going to finish her season off with a bit of a review. It's a discussion. Rosa joins us again. As a reminder, Rosa is a collective doctoral project PhD candidate at Birkbeck College, University of London, and at Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. Her practice-based project at the Pitt Rivers Museum focuses on featherwork collections made by South American Indigenous peoples, and her work aims to reveal the dynamic relations that exist between birds, people, and environments by working with Indigenous collaborators to reimagine how the feathered objects are represented in the museum. Hera DeBont and Rebecca Shen join me on the show once again to also talk about the season and the lessons that they learned over the course of the season, some of the questions that arose for them. As a reminder, if you haven't heard Hera or Rebecca on the show, you should definitely go and listen to Hera's season on animals and waste. It's fascinating. Really, really fascinating and interesting. And uh Rebecca Shen, she does all of the design work for us. She's done all of the posters for the animal highlights. Um, she helped me to rework the parts of the website. Her designs are beautiful. They feature on a great deal of our merch. And Rebecca is also a designer, and she's done quite a bit of work on developing scripts that focus on animals and design, but that will be forthcoming in the future. We're still working our way through that and taking our time doing it, which I think is totally fine. But you can find out more about both Hera and Rebecca, as well as Rosa, on our website. Head over, click team, and find out some of what they do. I don't want to keep you too much longer because this is a longer episode today. We're gonna clock almost an hour, but it's a really interesting conversation. And if you've listened to the episodes, I think it ties and raises a whole bunch of questions that I'm sure you had yourself. So thank you for joining me this season. I hope you enjoyed it. If you have a spot of time, please remember to leave a review wherever you listen. The Animal Highlight is a spin-off uh podcast of the Animal Turn podcast. Now, if you want to dive more into bigger concepts and deeper philosophy, head over to the Animal Turn and check that out too. But for now, happy listening. Hello, hello, hello. Welcome back to the Animal Highlight. Rosa, Hera, and Rebecca. All of you have been on the show before, so it's great to have you back. Hera, your waste season is doing very well on the airwaves. Uh, Rebecca, your sketches are garnering loads of attention. And Rosa, I am so excited that people have had a chance to listen to everything you've said about museum collections and objects and animals this uh season. I'm still so we're recording this before they've all been released. And you know, I was thinking before this episode, uh, the goal of which is to kind of do a review of your season. I was like, what do we, what do we call in your season? I know that we've played around with it a whole bunch. We've been like museum collections, museum artifacts, objects, historical objects, feathered objects. We've we've really run the run around, but I think in general, your season is focused on museum objects, right? Or or archived objects.

Rosa Dyer 4:42

I guess so, yeah. I mean, I think I'd originally gone into it as animals and museums, but actually I think one of the things that emerged very quickly was that like the animal objects very quickly escape the museum when you try and talk about them. That it's often not talking about the objects necessarily in situ, but kind of using them as a starting point to try and explore their lives before or after or around when they were in the museum, which has been at least what I find the most interesting there.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 5:07

Yeah, it's been, I mean, it's been marvelous kind of using a starting point to then think about animals who I think almost all of your animals haven't appeared on the animal highlight before. So it's been marvelous kind of learning about the histories of various animals and also thinking about the implications for them in today's world. Uh so today, uh Rosa, you and I are joined, uh Hera and Rebecca are gonna join us and we're gonna think about some of the key themes and topics to emerge over the course of your season, your seven-part season. Uh so I'm gonna open it up. Uh, Hera, Rebecca, the guests already know you. So I'm gonna just skip that part where we get to know, uh get to know you. Sorry, you're gonna have to go back and find out about them. And uh we're just gonna jump straight in. So let's go. What what for you were the key themes to emerge from this season?

Ethics Of Collecting And Extraction

Rebecca Shen 5:59

Rosa, I really enjoyed listening to your season. Um, in particular, I never really thought about animals in museums quite often, but it does, you know, it's so it intersects a lot of interests that, you know, I looked into myself. Um, for example, there's a lot of ethical questions with animals in museums. There's a lot of um, you know, there's issues of that, like whether animals should be used as fashion, and then, you know, how animals end up in these museums, and then there's the indigenous cultures aspect. So um very interesting season that intersects a lot of these topics. Um I guess I one theme that really stuck out to me was the ethics, of course, because you know, as an animal rights activist, um, you discussed a lot, or I was thinking a lot about how, you know, the violence that you discussed um with the animals and um both in their hunting, but also their um, you know, how they've been extracted um through science and end up in these museum spaces. Um I guess I would like to know what your personal experience is in um you being within these museum spaces and how you um, I guess, address these tensions with the ethics of having these animals as specimens and objects in museums.

Personal Shock In Bird Drawers

Rosa Dyer 7:29

Yeah, I think like that's a a really central point to what came up over and over again was this link between extractivism and collecting and what that means for an animal then to exist in a museum. I think you're right, like I was quite careful, I suppose, in trying to keep it complex over the series. So I think probably in um particularly in the Huya episode, in the hummingbird episode, and then in the moodg and talking about Edwin Rist and the kind of big feather heist, I think the issue of ethics and collecting comes up in different ways. Like I think when we're talking about kind of historical collecting practices where the birds were taken out of their natural environment in order to specifically be part of collections and were kind of objectified in this very extractivist way that really related to these processes of colonialism and extraction, where, you know, people from a Western or kind of Euro-American point of view would say, well, you know, this is kind of a blank slate place, you know, New Zealand or Latin America that we can extract whatever we like from and bring it back to Europe. And, you know, that's our right to do. So I think that was one process. Um, and then with Moodang, you have something slightly different where you have a living animal in that space. And that's something very different, I think, to when you're bringing a dead body into the museum. So I think it was a really complex issue. The one that I think, and for me personally, where I've kind of had to encounter it's much more directly. I mean, I've never been involved in kind of collecting in the field in terms of bringing um my research at the Mystery to do with birds, so I've never done bird skin collection. Um, it is still done. So my main experience of it is actually within the museum seeing scientific collections and working on them in that way. And um, I think I mentioned it in the episode, but a kind of moment that really struck me is I was in um the department of birds in the Smithsonian doing um forensic ornithology. So I was trying to identify bird feathers um from dead bird skins. And I opened a drawer of African greys, um African grey parrots, and my mum has got a pet African grey parrot, and the just real moment of seeing, you know, what was a whole tray of uh my mum's parrot is called gus, and seems to whole tray of gusses just sat there was a real kind of I think I'd had a quite a level of detachment from that. And um, I think particularly because when I'm looking at the objects, I'm often looking at them in quite kind of fragmented perspectives because I'm looking at individual feathers a lot of the time. So it's quite easy actually to lose perspective of the whole body and therefore the whole life of the bird. And I think that was a real moment for me of going, oh gosh, actually, it is very morgue-like and very much kind of, yeah, almost a symmetry of these animals who, you know, as I talk about in the Edwin Rist episode, like do have really important value still for science and I think are worth having. And it's not as if like Edwin Rist's kind of perspective of it when he stole all those bird skins was to say, well, they have no value anymore. Like I might as well use them for my fly fishing because they have no value to science. And I think Matt is wrong. They do continue to have value for science, but yeah, it is extremely ethically complex and something that, yeah, personally can be very emotional when you're particularly when you then explore the lives of those birds in the wild, which is something I kind of wanted to do in in the series.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 10:32

I mean, I really, I have to say, I really appreciated kind of your ethical uh ambiguity to some extent. Like sometimes we can say this is right and this is wrong, but that becomes, in fact, actually much harder when you start to look at historical stories because ideas of what are right and wrong change over time. But also you I think you did a lot of ethical probing uh and left us as listeners with an opportunity to think about uh, as you say, this kind of extractivism and then those extractive logics that often are found in archives and museum collections, and not just with regards to the animals involved, but also with regards to the indigenous uh communities. Uh and there, you know, there was one of the episodes where you said, you know, we have to we have to avoid this idea of the noble savage, right? Like so there's often this kind of really simplistic narrative of colonizers come in, they take the animals, they extract them in really violent means, and those animals continue to be consumed in places like uh museums and through science, right? Without seeing, as you say, without actually seeing the animals. You see the feather, you see the science, but you don't really see the animal. And I think that's a common uh problem in animal studies generally, or not animal studies, but in uh scholarship that considers animals. Um But I I really appreciated how you created these kinds of ethical openings for thinking about how different communities engage in different practices that could be ethically challenging. And the one that stood out for me was the I'm gonna say it wrong, the tapriage.

Rosa Dyer 12:03

The tapirage, yeah, yeah, definitely.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 12:05

Tapirage. The kind of keeping animals alive to pluck their feathers and change the colours. And that that just seemed so physical, right? And and and and personal and problematic, but also a practice that's gone now and no longer practiced. So it's uh it's definitely complex, right?

Value For Science Versus Theft

Rosa Dyer 12:27

Yeah, definitely. I think that was I quite like kind of the thread that we managed to do between the Huya episode, the hummingbird episode, and the parrot episode, where I think in all three I talk about kind of Western perspectives on it, but then also indigenous science and indigenous kind of ways of viewing the animals, but also how they kind of would be treated within those communities. Because as you say, it's not a clear thing. Um, I think I talk about it in terms of violent care, particularly with the parrots who would look after and raise them as part of their community and, you know, really take care of them and they were part of the family. But within that, they were part of the social contract, and that meant also giving something which, you know, probably involved pain and involves kind of a level of, you know, violence in the plucking of the feathers. Um, and yeah, I think, you know, it's a big part of my kind of general doctoral research as well as for this series of making sure that when we're talking about, you know, the involvement of humans, when we think of, you know, animals as objects or animals as, you know, beings that we understand that the kind of idea of Western science or academic science is not the only way for us to discuss this, actually, when you involve um, you know, uh thinking about stuff like indigenous mythology or even indigenous perspectives to conservation, like in the year episode, that those are also very valid and very important things to consider when we think about ethics, that kind of Euro-American or academic ethics is not the only way which we can kind of think about these complexities. And they remain complex. It's not, as you say, it's not the noble savage thing of, you know, indigenous people never do harm or never cause violence or never cause pain to animals or never have complex relationships with animals. Um, I think complexity is universal, but I think involving those specificities is very important.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 14:04

Yeah, I think you did a great job of kind of contrasting the different views and also how I think, particularly at the hummingbird episode, how those views can change, how like the movement of the animal slash objects changes. I thought it was quite interesting how you spoke about the hummingbird as being feisty, and then you said somewhere in the Atlantic had lost that feistiness and became pretty. And I thought that was quite a powerful um, while there are ethical challenges in different groups of people, where those challenges lie are also different. And how much Western rhetoric and ideas um were shaped by the spectacle and the beauty and the exotic was really quite pronounced. Um, Harry, do you have any thoughts here with the the theme of ethics?

Herre de Bondt 14:46

Yeah, plenty of thoughts. Um first of all, I thought this this season was really cool. And Rosa, I think you have a really nice, enthusiastic way of telling about things. Like it almost made me draft an email to Claudia being like, hey, can I can I do another season? Um, just by the sheer passion you have for this, which is really cool to listen to. And there were a few themes, and I think the ethics one was really interesting, and it also makes me think about the role of museums a lot. And and I was wondering whether it this, or maybe you work at the Pitt Rivers Museum in general, whether this made you reflect on on the role of museums nowadays, whether they're for education, conservation, what they do, because a lot of your episodes were about objects that really aren't even they're like completely different from what they are when they're not in a museum. It's crazy how how there's completely different worlds outside of the walls of a museum for the same object. So have you Yeah, do you reflect any any you have any reflections on on uh museums?

Beyond Noble Savage Narratives

Rosa Dyer 15:50

Yeah, definitely. I mean that is kind of the world I operate in usually, and I think I I've talked to Claudia a lot about this. That the really nice thing about doing this series has been that it's really made me focus in on the animal perspective because you know, I usually I am coming in from a multi-species perspective when I'm looking at objects, when I'm you know, my focus is on feather works generally, um, and I am like quite specifically looking at the birds, but I'm also looking at the people, I'm also looking at the archive, I'm looking at, you know, how they're positioned in the museum. And I think, and you know, part of um it's a practice-based project. So it's not just about writing a thesis, but it's also about producing practice in the museum, which for me, a lot of that has been um to do with public engagement and education. So trying to understand and you know, communicate stories about the objects to the general public to, you know, open the objects up to people. And I think what's been really nice about doing this series is that it's really made me in quite a kind of you know, almost blinkered way, think, okay, keep the animal at the centre here, because it's quite easy to go off into, well, you know, this is the human perspective or this is the person that made it, which are all very interesting and like valid points. But I think keeping the animal body and the kind of lived animal has been really helpful. And actually, I've had like really interesting responses from people when I've been in the museum when I've kind of refocused in on that. Because I think um, like interestingly, what I get in the museum when I ask people about the featherwork displays that I work on is I usually get one of two responses. I get, oh gosh, those poor birds, or I get, oh my god, they're so pretty. And like one's an aesthetic response to do with the objects as decoration or as kind of orderly adornment on people's. I think is quite separate from the lived animals that the objects are made from. And the other one is an acknowledgement that they do come from animals and there is a process of death and a process that makes people slightly uncomfortable when they look at them. And it's interesting, like when I've been doing surveys, I usually get about a 50-50 response for that. And I've like, that's kind of almost been one of the central things of my thesis when I've been writing them is like, how do you reconcile this, you know, complex ethical feeling about particularly having animal bodies and animal materials in a museum space versus what are inherently beautiful and inherently, you know, amazing pieces of craftsmanship a lot of the time that do have very human stories to them?

Violent Care And Tapirage

Claudia Hirtenfelder 17:56

Do you find in these interactions that when previously when you didn't center the animals? So let's say you just focused on the headdress and you were like, this headdress is made of so many feathers and came from this area, and you know, but you didn't really center the animals in their lives. Did that sway that kind of 50-50? Um, did you see that 50-50 emerge more when you censored the animal? Or in general, people seem to have a sensitivity to saying, like connecting the objects to the fact that there was a live animal prior to the object.

Rosa Dyer 18:26

So interestingly, it tended to be 50. Like I try to go in cold and not influence people. So I tend to ask them what do you think, like before saying my whole spiel about what I do or giving them any information, I asked them what they think about the displays, and even then it was still 50-50. Um, but one of the really interesting things, I mean, it's kind of difficult to describe an audio, but um the Pitt Rivers Museum is actually right next to the Oxford Natural History Museum, and you have to walk through the Natural History Museum to get to the Pitt Rivers. So people are almost primed, I think, to think about the animal as they come through to the Pitt Rivers Museum, which is an ethnographic museum. You know, it has like there are cabinets full of saddles, there are cabinets full of spoons, you know, it's it's very kind of human-centric in many ways. And kind of one of the experiments I've been doing when I give tours through the museum is I make people go into the Natural History Museum first and stand in front of this cabinet, which is a cabinet of taxidermy, quite bad taxidermy. And like a lot of the names are wrong, it's very mothy, and like all the colours are very faded, but it's a taxidermy of South American birds, and there's a toucan, there's a cock of a rock, there's various paraspecies and hummingbirds. And I ask them to look at that first, and then I take them up to the featherwork displays, which have all the same birds, but just in a different form, in the form of headdresses and, you know, anklets and necklaces and stuff. And I think that's been a really interesting way to not only get people to think about like the bird connection between the objects, but also think about the different forms of collecting and different forms of how, you know, it's still animal materials, it's the same feathers with the same species, but they're presented in very different ways in the two museums. And I think that kind of making people kind of physically move through the space has been a real, like was a real kind of key moment in uh unlocking that, you know, almost kind of conversation about what is what is almost kind of the framing device of the museum space of, you know, one is very much the framing of Western science and Western natural history. And I think the Pitt Rivers and museums like almost have a bit more of a kind of open-ended question mark to it because obviously, like anthropology and anthropology museums are hugely problematic, the Pit Rivers, particularly so. Um, and you know, during a lot of the Black Lives Matter campaigning, um, I think the Pit Rivers was called the most violent place in Oxford at one point. Like there's a it has a huge, you know, hugely difficult and problematic ethical kind of miasma around it that anyone who works there really has to deal with carefully. But I think it also, I've been kind of trying to take it positively to do it in a kind of more open way of thinking about opportunity and what kind of thinking about stuff like indigenous science, for example, or centering the bird does to allow conversations beyond what a taxidermy specimen in a natural history museum allows us to do. Um sorry, that was a very long-winded answer to your question, Terry, but I hope that it is important.

What Are Museums For Now

Claudia Hirtenfelder 21:02

I think it's easy perhaps to focus on the violence and we should focus and talk about the violence. I think it's also easy to not acknowledge the fact that these animals were once alive and oftentimes make violent ends, right? But I think it's yeah they they exist now within this museum space and it becomes a question of narrative and representation. Um, what work is their existence as objects currently doing? And if it's not doing anything to raise questions about the problematics of collecting animals, because I mean animals are still like you said in the mooding episode, you know, it's easy to think that they are not still collected for these purposes, but zoos in many ways function as living living collections, living um, living examples of of some of the problematics of these kinds of processes of of collection. Um but I I think it's really interesting in your perhaps in a space. when you're dealing with museum goers, to really be quite subversive to meet people where they're at and perhaps challenge them and get them to imagine and think in ways that are perhaps not as politicized as like a zoo. Do you know what I mean?

Herre de Bondt 22:14

I was thinking it would be so cool to have an audio tour through the Pit Rivers Museum where you just tell about the birds or the animals behind the objects that or that the the objects consist of with you know basically just these podcast episodes, but in an audio tour version in the museum. That'd be so cool.

Rosa Dyer 22:30

Yeah I'd love to do that. I think we we had talked about trying to trying to do a bit of a collaboration with the Pit Rivers that maybe you know a bit of a spoiler for something later hopefully maybe with some video as well because I think yeah um I mean as I it's very difficult to explain the Pit Rivers as a space because it's it's a lot of people kind of describe it as a museum of a museum in that its cabinets are extremely Victorian and it's very maximalist in its display you know everything is absolutely crammed in. So like the further displays I work on there's like a hundred objects in a single space. So and they describe it as um a democracy of things approach which you know I think is a bit you can go back and forth about whether you like that phrase or not. I definitely do. But um I think it does allow you I mean and I kind of in my you know quite kind of airy fairy thesis writing way call it a kind of like metonymic like fantasy avery it's the only place that you're going to see a touch next to you know uh like Scottish core sto Scottish storm petrol next to a hummingbird like you'd never see these birds next to each other in real life but in the Pyramids Museum you can through their kind of plumage being placed next to each other and what that does to how you think about kind of avian diversity I think can be really interesting. So yeah no I I'd definitely be keen.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 23:42

Rebecca what do you think here though? Because I'm coming back to your question about ethics and I think there is something important to think through about this like visual consumption of animals. Like do you think that these are connected you know in in you asked about ethics and what what are what are your views on kind of having museums as these spaces that have dead animals in effect on display um to I guess they they make money they show they also do education but in many ways this is again the same discourse that's used with with zoos and I would I know I would actively not go to a zoo right I I don't go to zoos because I don't want to engage in the kind of use of animals for these purposes but I would go to a natural history museum. So that's an interesting disconnect uh and I I just I I wanted to know your your thoughts on that.

Priming Visitors Through Space

Rebecca Shen 24:31

Yeah that's a really like tricky question because I actually went to a natural history museum in Paris recently and I was you know I went with the mindset of oh I'm so excited to learn more about animals. And that's oftentimes the reason why people also go to zoos, right? So when I went um and then saw all these skins of animals on display and the taxidermy animals there was part of me that almost um just kind of wrote it off as like oh I wish that um I dug into you know why or how these collections came to be here and where the animals or what how were the animals brought here? And you know I was like do I even know if there was um if these animals were dead already before coming to the museum and then you know making myself feel better I've learned that um a lot of them are most of them are um dead already or um used for other purposes before being brought into the museum space. So yeah these ethical questions um are you know always you know even you know people I guess maybe just we go to the museums like the Natural History Museum and don't necessarily um think about that. But um what I loved about you season Rosa was you did probe those questions as Claudia said and um we tend to think of museums as you know neutral spaces that is just to share scientific knowledge. But when we bring narrative telling and storytelling to that um which you know inevitably are supposed to evoke emotion and they're charged with um emotion um inherently so um you know especially you know Claudia and I are papers about speculation um I was you know I think Rosa what you did in your episodes was really you know in part speculate on how the animals felt during some of those processes of extraction um in order to make it to their final destination the museum but um back to your question about the um I guess the viewing of these objects I think another major theme was desire and beauty and how we you know perceive nature through that lens. And you know Kazi's episodes beauty was a theme and I took a look at the objects that you were discussing and they are undeniably beautiful, you know um and that's why things violent practices also um happen out of it. So beauty both inspires awe and then drives their the destruction of animals and species.

Beauty, Discomfort, And Display

Rosa Dyer 27:21

It's like how should museums navigate that tension between aesthetic appreciation and then the histories of damage that brought this beauty to us, to the viewers Yeah I mean I think that's a question definitely like too big for me as an individual PhD student. But I think maybe like from the particular lens of like what I've been looking at and kind of I think it came up a few times particularly in the dodo episode actually that you know one of maybe the justifications for museums or even to an extent zoos although I think that's slightly different is that they're places of conservation or preservation you know that's where we're keeping objects safe. That's where you know we can preserve these beautiful things and it stops them from decay. Actually you found in the dodo episode that so wasn't the case that the dodo, the Oxford dodo used to be a full specimen and now only is like a head and a foot and actually you can't stop these processes of change and decay. And you know museums are inherently visual you know you really cut out quite a lot of your sensory experience of the object and of you know if you're talking about animal objects of the animals by you know often just putting glass in front of them, you're limited to the visual. So I can so see how when people come into museum and go, oh they're so pretty that that is quite an inherent and quite kind of foregrounded response to the objects because you're kind of pushed to do that. And certainly across the series I think we saw with the hummingbirds even with moodeng actually aesthetics used as a kind of excuse to objectify that the inherent beauty of the animal or the inherent in moodeng maybe not beauty but cuteness perhaps I mean I think she's beautiful but you know I think that was you know um was sort of an excuse and you know Edwin Rist also used it as well you know I'd rather have like pretty or interesting or you know sell them to make pretty or interesting fishing flies rather than their use for science. So I think there is this inherent tension which the museum creates because of the museum largely being a viewing experience. It's not tactile it's not you know obviously there are audio experiences in museums but I think we can agree that like the visual is the main thing you're doing when you're viewing museum objects or visiting a museum that does put this tension between aesthetics and kind of the ethical aspects of of the object. And with that, you know comes this false idea of museums as safe spaces or museums that inherently kind of hold these objects in this pristine condition which just isn't true and which was you know not to shoe in by not to shoe horn in but it was my favourite episode like the moths and wasps aspect of like you know the the preservation is just not something that is stable at all in a museum. It's something that's constantly changing and which you know museum practitioners have to you know factor into how they talk about objects so and how they care for objects.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 30:03

It makes me think of a recent episode with um critica Shunravasan on the animal turn right where she speaks about these logic and sac logics of sacrifice and protection how like to protect often when we speak about protection there's often someone or something is being sacrificed, right? And this makes me think also of your the the the dodo in particular to to what Rebecca's point here, you really did try to kind of how much based on what we currently know about this specific specimen, how much of their life this dodo's life can I this individual's life can I understand or get to and that proved to be quite difficult. And also that story changed as new knowledge came into into focus there was this idea well they're running out that's where their value came in and like the hummingbirds and the um the Huya they were who were valued I think because they're beautiful or the parrots because their feathers were beautiful the the dodo was almost valued because it was special because it was running out and and yeah the the wasp the wasp episode I think speaks to that that you you do create and it's not to say that we shouldn't try to preserve things like I think it's hard because when we criticize preservation is that to say that we shouldn't preserve and maybe this is a legitimate question.

Aesthetics As Excuse To Objectify

Rosa Dyer 31:19

Like maybe this desire to hold on to things forever is problematic even if we like and I love archives I love looking at historical documents but what is this obsession with keeping right one of the things I really and like this is broader beyond kind of animal objects but I think it's something that I think about a lot and it kind of comes up in lots of different places is the idea of care as a concept I think comes up and in because in museums I think we're seeing a shift slightly from thinking about conservation as something that's stasis as something to is towards always you know keeping the object as it is towards a more complex idea which is one of care because care can care doesn't have to be about preservation behind glass. Care can also be burning an object if it's sacred to someone and they want it to be burned it can be about returning an object to a community. It can be about you know when we were thinking about bird skins care there is caring for the bodies in a way that will allow future scientists to make new discoveries and also care for those past lives of the birds by acknowledging them. Like I think it's I find that a really powerful concept and it you know it came up again in the parrots episode as well of you know the idea of violent care, that you can really love a bird and keep it in your community but also cause it pain by plucking its feathers that it's quite an ethically complex term, but I find it a lot more useful than the idea of conservation or preservation because I think it allows us to move away from the museum of stasis because that just isn't the case with objects and I think allows us to bring in a lot more different perspectives of how we look after objects. And you know like this is a slight sideline but I think it is relevant that also it affects how then communities who have produced those objects also interact with them. So like with the feather works I work on for example feathers are really interesting because they're keratinous materials and they're very delicate. So they tend to be some of the most vulnerable objects in the museum you know you have to handle them really carefully and in the past you know kind of past conservation practices have meant that they're now covered in mercury or awful kind of carcinogenic substances which means that my experience of handling them and also you know um I we bought over this amazing artist called Celia Tupanamba who came and looked at resilient objects and they were objects made by her community as she wasn't able to touch them, she had to wear gloves and a mask and that really affected her way of interacting with them and her connection to the birds that they were made from because these past practices of conservation had changed how the objects you know could be interacted with. So I think care is a really interesting one that allows us to move away from this idea of the museum as as space and instead think about it a lot more complexly and hopefully like move towards more interesting solutions like you know parasitic wasps to do your pest control rather than carcinogenic materials which not only suffer the objects but also mean that our interactions with them as you know people that care about them are limited in some ways. So I think yeah that that I think I I find a really powerful powerful idea and I think can be transferred into a lot of different contexts as a kind of ethical framework for understanding our interactions with both the animals and the objects themselves.

Decay, Dodos, And False Preservation

Claudia Hirtenfelder 34:23

All right so key themes that have emerged from your season so far are we're looking at ethics I think ethics and power and how they change with regards to how objects are collected and how they're observed. The connection between and I think this also speaks to relationships of indigenous relations with these objects and how they change we've also spoken about museums as spaces and what role and function they they do, whether that's as preservation, how they prime people to think or not to think about animals. So the the role of I guess museums and collections so that was a key theme the role of museums and collections the ethics of collecting and showing and keeping and preserving then I mean I I'm trying to think of other themes here.

Herre de Bondt 35:07

I think death is obviously a key theme for me that emerged throughout the season as well as time the relationship of time to time and meaning and how that's also tied to various economies fashion um fashion economies also museums at the time how they I guess the idea of beauty doesn't exist in isolation of the kind of economies and practices of the time I also found um yeah I found the the theme of which we talked about earlier in this um discussion as well the theme of like alternative epistemologies almost you know how we kind of see museums as a way to preserve scientific knowledge and like well we know everything we as humankind have are enlightened and we discovered everything. But you in your season you keep pointing out how indigenous communities do things so differently from which we can now learn as well. And I think you did a great job of questioning the the epistemology of a museum.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 36:07

What about some tensions that emerged between Rose's different episodes right so we we've got these kind of key themes that have come up in the season. And I think we've touched on some of these so I mean just to go over the episodes we had the Hawaii then the hummingbird then the parrots and frogs which I think there you spoke about multi-species assemblages which I think is also important. Very rarely are these objects a single animal or a single practice they're often an assemblage of sorts. The Oxford dodo I think how some animals become charismatic objects right um how they they become privileged objects as well the feather heist I think how stories and um I mean the feather heist has almost gathered its own kind of narrative and story and it's been covered in other podcasts become this kind of sensational story in love its own light. And then of course mooding kind of the thinking of contemporary collections. What for you were perhaps some things that were missing or that you would have liked to have seen more of in speaking about these kinds of uh yeah this kind of conversation about animals and museum collections or objects?

Rosa Dyer 37:11

I think um maybe slightly from a content perspective of I think I slightly stayed in my lane of focusing on birds because that was kind of where I was but I think it would have been interesting to maybe think more about the specific materiality of different objects and you know because one of the things I think about with feathers a lot is that they're slightly different from say bones or teeth. There's a kind of there's a slight almost distance from a body from feathers that I don't think I picked into as much as I could have done. And I think the very kind of materiality of the objects I think we could have spent a bit more time on. And yeah maybe you know doing a bit more of a different breadth of I mean I think the Pit Rivers was a nice kind of grounding factor but it might have been interesting to think about different museum spaces a bit more I would have liked to have explored.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 37:52

I mean God there's so much to do like you've I think you've probably inspired some theses and ideas I think with this season and many seasons to come.

From Conservation To Care

Herre de Bondt 38:01

I I what I just loved about this season is how it started so delineated and you kind of went with it. It was very obvious as you listen through the episodes that you're broadening and broadening your horizon of what what the season would be you know starting with bird feathers or whoya feathers and then ending with Mu Dang who is not in a museum and is not a bird. And so I was also very curious that I wrote that down as a question as well where you could take this um and I guess you could take it anywhere as as you've proven because like yeah we've gone from murder mysteries to zoo conservation to fashion um yeah not really a question just really impressed.

Rebecca Shen 38:42

Yeah um along Hair's point I um I guess I was surprised as the season progressed in the topics that you covered because we started with objects and then we expanded to oh here's um these moths in the museum that show that you know museums are not sterile just controlled environments it's actually an ecology that maybe sometimes out of human control and then going on to moodang, which who was definitely not a bird. It would have been interesting uh I guess pointing to the content you were talking about Rosa to have some in-between content where I guess yes you were focused on feather because it's your interest in its materialities and I um as an urban birder I've never really thought about um how birds appear in these spaces or I guess I'm maybe before have shied away from even putting myself in those spaces because I want to see birds alive and see them in their, you know, natural environments. But um I think yeah I think the tension I guess for me the whole time was the the tension between marveling and um extraction, you know, because that's you were also pointing to that through um the stories that you were telling through the birds. You know, there's extraction through colonialism and just science, you know, um yeah and in the fashion as well of course um so um I guess there was a tension or I guess a difficulty with trying to remain neutral in discussing all of this while also um acknowledging that yeah there's a tremendous amount of um wrong that was done to animals through throughout how they got to the museum the processes. So um yeah I think maybe if there was some more exploration about that topic, it would yeah that'd be interesting.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 40:41

Yeah I almost think the liveliness came as as both of you were speaking here like her your episodes got more lively as you moved on. I think there was a start with an object and I think as you focused on animals the the liveliness there was an active move to move away from objectification. Even though you were looking at object I feel as though this tension was also actively trying to see like how do I see beyond the object because objectification is really powerful right once you're told this is an object and this is what this object does I mean there were artists I don't know I don't know artist things but they they would put like a toilet seat on a wall and and by putting an object in a different space it changes its meaning right and I think resisting the kind of stories we've been told about specific objects is hard. And as Hera and Rebecca have said yeah your movement through the season was almost a subtle resistance to this objectification and a kind of exploration of liveliness that we can have conversations about liveliness um and we should have conversations about this liveliness and not kind of get um too blinkered by by the object itself, right?

Handling Risks And Indigenous Access

Rosa Dyer 41:59

Definitely yeah I think yeah in my mind and I think it it kind of comes through I think possibly like in the introduction of each episode I think I kind of almost justify myself against the previous episode of saying well in the previous episode we did this but now I want to do this. I think it was really fun to have that kind of organic progression which as you say I think really did move towards getting back to living animals because you know as we can start the discussion with like looking at a drawer full of dead birds is actually really quite a difficult experience when you know the living thing. And certainly I think playing with this idea of biography because I think in the museum world we have this idea of object biography which is tracing the life of an object that moves from its, you know, where it's made into the museum and it's kind of afterlife. But then you also have the individual animal biography that is intertwined with that and it's afterlife once it's died and kind of become an animal object that I think was a real kind of tension point throughout of trying to untangle all of that and also then think about the individual versus the species in that way as well which I think was also quite a central theme of you know particularly in Mo Dang, I think that came out the strongest was that you are talking about individual animals and individual lives that they have to experience in their own way. And it's not just an animal representative or a pygmy hippo it is a single animal that has that experience. And even if the animal is dead I think the individual body still remains important and I think yeah that really kind of came back to me a lot more as I moved through moved through the season.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 43:26

Yeah that's such an important point. And again when you open up that draw of African Greys each of those African grays had a life right like it's easy to kind of objectify them as a collection and to think that they had a life and a series of experiences that brought them to being in this draw and they experienced those experiences right. I think so often with history we tend to just kind of say and then they were killed and then but no what does it mean to be killed or to be transported or to be collected for some this entailed being killed in their homelands for others it involved long torments of being shipped Uh and then kept alive and then killed or dying in and you know, and and pulling apart these threads is perhaps beyond your role as someone who's looking at museum collections, but it's certainly uh a button that I think people interested in animal histories and animal uh economies um should be asking and animal representation, right? Like these are not just objects. And that for me would be, I think, the key takeaway is it's not when you see something in a museum, particularly something that involves uh a life, it's really important to remember that it's not just an object. There is a story there, and it's a story worth telling because it was a story that was experienced, right?

Herre de Bondt 44:42

I mean, it it's a great season. It's it's made me worried about conservation a lot, I think, um, which is so funny. Going into it, I didn't expect that to be my main concern. Um, especially the moodang episode, actually, like the the conclusion that zoos present themselves as conservation places, but that even those are limited, even when they have a moo dang, and if even alive collections or living collections, sorry, aren't really great at doing conservation, then you know that begs the question what are what role do museums play in there? And especially if you know the moths episode kind of did make me anxious about the inevitable passing of time and decay of everything in the end.

Mapping The Season’s Themes

Claudia Hirtenfelder 45:22

Oh, you've tied a bow back to your season on waste because there is there is waste. Uh we can't avoid waste, um, but we can think more about how waste is created. Um actually, just for I mean, this won't be today when this is released, but I just released a blog post on the Anleton's website today because just um recently uh in a zoo in Germany, 12 baboons were killed. And it was precisely for this, you know, they're part of conservation efforts, but and they're part of baboons that are on the red list in in West Africa, but they're still being killed in zoos because zoos can't manage the size of the populations. And again, like it's there's a lot of politics that comes into play in these different spaces, but it comes into play in different ways, right? Zoos, there's contemporary politics and economics at play. And museums, I mean, museums are also telling a story. Anything that has a historical angle is often trying to tell a historical story through the lens of today's politics and today's economics, right? And I think the fact that we're having this conversation about animals and animals' lives is is partly testament to the fact that animal studies scholars and activists have made animals' lives more present in these spaces, right? Okay, folks. I'm gonna start wrapping up. Um why don't we first hear a little bit about Hera and Rebecca, which you're currently working on? Um, and then Rosa will finish with you and you can give us a kind of final status update on what your project looks like and where you're hoping to take things from here. Uh so Hera, why don't we start with you?

Herre de Bondt 47:02

Uh yeah, I'm currently well, I am doing some work for the Animal Turn actually, and trying to produce some content and forms of blogs and some videos. So you'll be hearing from me there still. And apart from that, I have finished my PhD. Yay, Dr.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 47:15

Hera!

Herre de Bondt 47:17

Um, and I'm now going to start in September, by which this will probably be out. Uh, I will be starting as a postdoc in Amsterdam on the Anamapolis uh project, trying to look at police dogs.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 47:30

Police dogs.

Herre de Bondt 47:31

Very big indeed.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 47:32

This project's looking at both dogs and rats, but you're focusing on dogs in particular?

Herre de Bondt 47:38

Exactly. Yeah, and how they relate to urban safety, basically. So, like, how do police dogs uh ensure or endanger uh urban populations and especially like how that differs per population and area?

Claudia Hirtenfelder 47:53

I will say, I just finished reading this book, The Lions Historian by Sandra Swart. Um, I'm gonna have her on the shore hopefully before the end of the year, but um, she's got a chapter in there about police dogs and the making of police dogs in apartheid South Africa, which I think would be um very interesting for your purposes. Congratulations on the PhD and on the postdoc era. Uh Rebecca, how about you?

Rebecca Shen 48:16

I am also still working on, or with you, Claudia, on animal turn and animal highlight episodes. So um my season, Animals in Design, will be forthcoming, you know, with some of the things I've been working on with the rest of the animal turn and animal highlights that kind of got, you know, put moved around, but it will be coming, I promise, everyone. Um we're working on so much behind the scenes.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 48:43

Maker is working on like a bazillion things behind the scenes.

Assemblages, Charisma, And Hype

Rebecca Shen 48:46

Um, and then another thing that um you mentioned as well was the paper we're working on on speculation. So um, you know, it's kind of interesting how it also relates to Rosa's season in some way, but you know, you're bringing um the archival and past side of cows, and then I'm speculating on um the future of cows. So we're kind of bringing that together, trying to synthesize and tease out the tensions.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 49:13

I will say we were talking about the before I clicked record, so the listeners might not know what we're talking about. But Rebecca and I are um we're writing a book chapter together about speculation. Yeah, and as Rebecca said, I'm looking at the history of cows and she's looking at the potential future of cows in in North America. And it's been really fun to develop, right?

Rebecca Shen 49:33

Yes, thank you for clarifying that. I forgot we discussed before we clicked record. Um, and other than that, I'm just still practicing as a landscape architect.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 49:43

And um, you also, I mean, the the animals uh and media season will be coming out soon. And I know you worked together with them on the Mars test, which is a a test uh designed at looking at media and animals. Um, and you you helped with some of the artwork there, which is really uh, I mean, I've seen some of it and it's it's beautiful. So that'll be all coming out. And once it does, we'll we'll let the listeners know. Um so congrats, Rebecca, on all you're doing and your incredible art and ideas and designs. Um, we're happy and delighted to have you on the team. Um, you are busy finishing up your PhD, right? I am, yeah.

Rosa Dyer 50:20

Yeah, slowly but surely it'll get there. Um yeah, I first want to say that thank you so much, all of you, for engaging so nicely with the with this season, because yeah, it has taken a while to get there. And yeah, Claudia, you've been so it's been such a nice experience of working on this. And yeah, as I said, like the lens of doing the podcast has been really helpful. And um, well, I think be part of my thesis, which is a really nice thing because it's a practice-based thesis. Any of this should hopefully be able to be included. So that's really exciting. But yeah, no, thank you.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 50:47

You're very welcome. It's been great working with you. And yes, it has taken, I think something I've learned from working with all three of you is when I originally started the fellows program, I was like, oh, six months should be enough time to kind of get a you know, a season of animal highlights um out. But that doesn't really account for life. One, and two, how I think difficult it is to actually write these highlights. For people listening, you might think, oh, it's just five to ten minutes of you know, listening to interesting content, but it actually requires a great deal of thought and positioning animals as the subjects has for working with several fellows now has been the most difficult thing that everyone has done is how to write in a way that actually takes animals seriously is is hard. It's it's not an easy task. Um, but you've all done really well. And I know Rebecca's got several at uh seasons that I've also seen behind the scenes, and and it's yeah, it's just so enjoyable for me to work with uh people like you and learn from folks like you. So thank you so much for joining me as fellows, for giving of your time and your ideas, and um, hopefully we'll develop more in the future together. So thank you, thank you, thank you.

Rebecca Shen 51:56

Thank you, Claudia, and Rosa.

What Was Missing And Why

Claudia Hirtenfelder 52:04

Thank you so much, Rosa Dye, for joining us again uh on the Animal Highlight to discuss some of your ideas. Thank you to Harry DeBont and Rebecca Shen for also joining us and helping us to flesh out those ideas a bit more. It was a really wonderful conversation. And Rosa, I enjoyed working with you over the course of the season. So thank you, thank you, thank you. Uh, the logo was designed by Rebecca Shen and all episode artwork has been done by her as well. And the bad music, which should be familiar to you both here on the Animal Highlights and the Animal Tone, is done by Gordon Clark. This episode was produced by myself. This is The Animal Highlight with me, Claudia Hurtenfelder.

Siobhan O'Sullivan 52:59

For more great iRoll podcasts, visit irallpod.com. That's I R O A R P O D.com.