To uncover history that is not simply a history of the winners is one of the most difficult but also one of the most compelling tasks a scholar might undertake. Scholars who would study the history of nonhuman animals must contend with the challenge of a unique disconnectedness between their subjects and materials: nonhuman animals do not write texts, nor do they use language. The project of retrieving knowledge of historical animal experiences is complicated, to say the least, by the fact that this is ultimately an impossibility, even in the present when faced with a living animal subject. Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras: Essays on Animals and History by Harriet Ritvo collects together thirteen essays spanning three decades of the career of a remarkable scholar who has for so long engaged in the practice of pushing beyond the mystery of her subjects. As Ritvo points out in her introduction, the reputation of the study of animals in history has undergone profound change over the course of her career. While thirty years ago it was considered unusual to view nonhuman animals as serious potential subjects of historical investigation, it is now quite popular and even trendy for scholars to do so. Perhaps no field has been so affected by “the animal turn” as British historiography, most especially that of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ritvo's scholarship focuses largely (although not exclusively) on this period of British history, whose place and time was also veritably that of the birth of the modern animal welfare movement, as well as of watershed changes in the way that humans understood and classified the relationship between and among species, including their own.

Ritvo's collection contains a satisfying range of essays. These reflect both the overwhelming diversity of subjects classified as “animals,” as well as the different kinds of human/nonhuman animal relationships that exist and have existed throughout history. The range of these essays also demonstrates the significance of the study of animals in history to many fields of British history: from nineteenth-century breeding practices and experiments in hybridity to children's literature, antivivisection, the place of beef in the context of British identity, and the bovine spongiform encephalopathy outbreak of the early twenty-first century. There are arguably few aspects of the study of British history that these essays do not touch. The essays are united, however, by the theme of the construction of knowledge—the definition of the self (whether as human, British, or possibly in terms of gender identity) as well as of the “animal.” The animal becomes a means of thinking through self-definition but not in such a way that Ritvo excludes the possibility of interest (whether past or present) in animals for their own sake or for the sake of gleaning some kind of knowledge about animal perspectives and experiences. Instead, Ritvo's exploration of the way that animals function as channels for knowledge centers on the ways in which people have constructed a conveniently hazy borderland between the self and the nonself (animal). She studies the way that people have made use of this borderland in the construction and dissemination of knowledge, which is arguably the best that can be done with the best we have got: texts that have been left behind by people who had many different kinds of relationships with animals, whether studying them, caring for them, teaching children about them, eating them, defending them, or classifying them. Ritvo gets as close as is arguably possible to studying the way that people have really felt or thought about animals and in doing so uncovers some of the best examples of historical discontinuity that mere texts can provide. In this way, the thirteen essays provide a multidimensional kind of clarity that affords a reader with a better view than he or she could ever hope to obtain by looking to answer “the question of the animal” straight on.

In “Animal Consciousness: Some Historical Perspective,” Ritvo explains that “the main current problem with the term animal is taxonomic: does it include people, and if so, are people included in only their physical aspect, or in some more encompassing sense?” (65). Many of the essays in Noble Cows focus in some respect on taxonomy or the classificatory problems and solutions posed by scientific—as well as moral—innovations. Whether defining an “ancient” species of cattle by weeding out undesirable mutations (as with regard to the “noble cows” of the essay “Race, Breed, and Myths of Origin: Chillingham Cattle as Ancient Britons”) or showcasing the latest experiments in hybridity to an eager audience at an agricultural fair (as was done with the “hybrid zebras” of the essay “Understanding Audiences and Misunderstanding Audiences: Some Publics for Science”), Britons have engaged in a great diversity of exercises meant to establish and regulate species boundaries just as frequently as they test and upset them. Not surprisingly, Charles Darwin's works feature prominently in Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras. Ritvo's forward to Darwin's Variation of Plants and Animals under Domestication is included in the collection of essays and occupies an appropriately central location among them.

Another prominent focus within Ritvo's collection of essays is that of responses and reactions to urgent circumstances and crises regarding animals by scholars, activists, politicians, and members of the public. In particular, Ritvo represents the perspective of the historian in discussing antivivisection (“Toward a More Peaceable Kingdom” and “Plus Ça Change: Antivivisection Then and Now”) and twenty-first-century outbreaks of infection among British livestock (“Mad Cow Mysteries” and “Counting Sheep in the English Lake District: Rare Breeds, Local Knowledge, and Environmental History”). The essays gathered into this collection originally appeared in a variety of contexts, within both the sciences and humanities, and it is obvious that Ritvo's work has meant a great many things to a great many people. Everyone whose life or work includes contact with nonhuman animal life could benefit from reading the essays contained within Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras, and who among us would not count him- or herself as such?