Feathered Friends and Human Animals: General Biology and Comparative Description within the New Zealand Poultry Industry Press, c.1900-1960

Abstract

Within the New Zealand poultry industry press between 1900 and 1960, scientific approaches were promoted and ‘sentimentality’ discouraged, yet comparative and anthropomorphic description suggesting similarities between chickens and humans persisted. Feathered Friends and Human Animals explores this phenomenon within poultry journals, newspapers, advice books and official publications. Four key themes of comparison are identified: ideas about the chicken mind, the chicken-as-worker, poultry ‘eugenics’, and health and hygiene.

It is argued that humanitarian, theological, and philosophical ideas, the ‘natural’ empathetic and humoured identification that arises through everyday contact with animals within relatively small systems, and the rationalisation of industry, were all significant factors contributing to sustained comparison. However, the public articulation of fundamental biological ideas – encapsulated in the modern, overarching concept of ‘general biology’ – validated and integrated these discourses.

General biology influenced new trends in education and in the popular and public articulation of research into the life sciences of this period. It encouraged the integration of sympathetic naturalist persepectives, including evolutionary based ideas about ‘natural laws’, with emerging new science that continued to establish many fundamental biological principles through extrapolation from experimental animals to human animals. This study demonstrates that poultry experts’ attended to this same blend of older naturalist science and new scientific knowledge.

Historians’ focus on emerging specialist science in the early twentieth century has tended to obfuscate the realities of science education within the applied sciences and amongst lay audiences, and the continued interest in fundamental aspects of biology within professional science. The findings of this study reveal that farming ideas did not develop within a bubble, determined only by animal husbandry traditions and industry-specific applied research. They also suggest that practitioners’ conceptions of biology within applied fields of this era were not as distinct as has been supposed.

As a ‘bottom-up’ cultural history of science, this study illustrates the articulation of general biology within an agricultural context. This is the key contribution offered to local and international historiography. However, other elements of the study expand existing scholarship. In exploring ideas about race and eugenics, it offers a broader framework for social historians, who, while cognisant of the eugenic mind-set of this period, have granted little attention to general biology as a professional trend. It offers insight into the agendas and tensions within school nature study and elementary science. It is also the first comprehensive history of the New Zealand poultry industry. Poultry-keeping engaged up to around 60 percent of the nation’s households in this period, including thousands of farmers who kept sideline flocks, but as a predominantly domestic (as opposed to export) industry it has been overlooked by social and agricultural historians.

The field of human animal studies, which has tended to gloss over both this era of transition prior to modern agribusiness and scientific discourses, is also advanced by this study, and this is the first New Zealand agricultural history to engage with this field and examine animal husbandry ideologically. It reveals how fundamental science knowledge, entwined with moral perspectives, continued to shape ideas about animals’ needs and behaviour well beyond the Victorian period. Assumptions of similarity however, were not always beneficial for the animal, and human-bird comparison was used to both justify and deny kind treatment.