| In the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, domestic animals were ubiquitous. City streets and rural pastures alike featured pigs, dairy cows, horses, dogs, and cats. Domestic animals functioned as sources of food, labor, transportation, companionship, and social status for American citizens. One subgroup of citizens, veterinarians, sought to become expert mediators of the human reliance upon domestic animals. This study asks two questions: (1) how did the sociocultural value that Americans placed on domestic animals transform over time, and (2) how did these changes in value influence the intellectual questions central to the veterinary sciences and the strategies of the veterinary profession?;To address these questions, the study uses economic sociologists' price/value theory, social and cultural historians' models of contextual analysis, and inquiries into the nature of scientific knowledge outlined by historians of science and medicine. Specific case studies explore the relationship between historical events and the sociocultural valuation of animals. For example, antivivisectionists forced debate about the status and meaning of animals as patients and laboratory subjects. Citizens, valuing healthfulness in the animals and animal products they consumed, pressed for food inspection legislation. Within the broader historical/cultural/social matrix, veterinarians struggled to define a proprietary system of scientific knowledge about animals.;Between 1890 and 1930, animals receded from the daily experience of many Americans as industrial and technological transformations concealed or diminished animals' roles in human society. The decreased visibility of animals, accompanied by corresponding changes in some animals' social value, disrupted the focus of veterinary knowledge and the trajectory of the veterinary profession. By necessity, veterinary scientists learned to transform themselves and their scientific inquiries in relation to the plastic substrate of animal value.;Early twentieth-century veterinarians' strategies illuminated the importance of cultural values to the development of the applied sciences. More fundamentally, they exposed Americans' uncertainty about the nature of the "proper" human-animal relationship. Animals were considered sub-human but often anthropomorphized; some animals were eaten while others were treated as family members. Of the market but not always in the market, domestic animals in the early twentieth-century United States occupied contested sociocultural space, a situation which continues today. |
