Jules Skotnes-Brown joins Claudia on the show to discuss how segregating logics were used to govern humans and animals in South Africa’s history. This includes everything from Addo’s elephants being driven, enclosed, and “tamed”, to Kalahari San people being policed inside a national park and managed through rations and confinement.
Topics Covered:
- The difference between environmental history and animal history
- Defining segregation as a ideological and material connections rather than direct comparisons
- Addo elephants labelled vermin then reclassified as a rare “race” worth preserving
- Kalahari San people policed through park rules, hunting bans, arrests, and rationing
- The spectrum from pest to protected as a tool of governance and population control
- Plague, sanitation, and health departments as engines for forced removal and spatial separation
- How metaphors of infestation travel from animals to humans and back again
- Animal highlight: pigs in Kingston, waste policy, hog cholera, and urban bylaw change
Date Recorded: 16 October 2025
Jules Skotnes-Brown is a historian of animals, disease, and knowledge production in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is the author of Segregated Species: Pests, Knowledge, and Boundaries in South Africa, 1910-1948, which won the Royal Historical Society’s First Book Prize in 2025. He is currently writing a second book on the global history of rats, plague, and capitalist infrastructure in the twentieth century. Jules completed his PhD at University of Cambridge History and Philosophy Science in 2020. Jules is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at University of Liverpool and PI of the Wellcome Trust funded research project 'Conserving Global Health: Biodiversity Protection and the Prehistory of Planetary Health' (2026-2031). The project will explore the historical engagements, collaborations and frictions between conservation theories and practices and international, global, and planetary health in the long twentieth century. In so doing, it will provide a prehistory of Planetary Health.
Featured:
Other episodes of The Animal Turn
Animal Highlight: “Eat Like a Pig”: Separating pigs from humans
Quote: “The elephant problem, a term which I use as one uses the unsatisfactory phrase ‘the native problem,’ because it means to me much the same thing – the rectification of our past mistakes and the attempt to bring an old, indigenous and very different form of life into harmony with our own life and aims” from Frank Melland, Elephants in Africa (1938), p 145.
The Animal Turn is part of the iROAR, an Animals Podcasting Network and can also be found on A.P.P.L.E, LinkedIn,Blue Sky, and Instagram
Credits:
- Sponsor: Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics (A.P.P.L.E)
- Guests: Jules Skotnes-Brown
- Host: Claudia Hirtenfelder
- Editing and Production: Claudia Hirtenfelder
- Episode Artwork: Rebecca Shen
- Content Creation and Support: Herre de Bondt and Carlo Salzani
- Animal Highlight: Stones Walking Tour
- Sound Effects: Epidemic Sound
- Bed Music: Gordon Clarke
- Logo: Jeremy John
A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.
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The Animal Turn is hosted and produced by Claudia Hirtenfelder and is part of the iROAR Network. Learn more on our website.
