with Earl Hess
FORCED MARCH
TO
CAMELS EARL HESS has added the study of human-animal
relationships and their roles in the Civil War to his long list of scholarship. In his new Animal Histories of the Civil-War Era, he gathers essays on subjects ranging from insects and bees to hogs, dogs, camels, and horses. The war not only exposed the need for an Army veterinarian service, but the scope of suffering and slaughter of millions of animals possibly contributed to the movement toward humane treatment of animals that was gaining ground in the mid-1800s. CWT: How did you come to the topic of animal histories? EH: In 2018, historian Joan Cashin hosted a panel on animals and the Civil War at the Southern Historical Association conference. I attended that and had the idea of doing a book length anthology. One of the things I wanted to do was look at what animal studies tell us about the relationship between animals and people. The other thing I wanted to do was understand animals within warfare, as opposed to peacetime connections with humans. CWT: You contributed chapters on wildlife, vegetarians, and artillery horses. EH: Animal literature tends to be mostly about horses and dogs, because they had the most widespread contact with humans. But I read soldiers’ accounts and they 24
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talk about insects, lightning bugs, and chiggers. Wildlife is part of the animal world, and the soldiers had a lot of contact with animals of a wild nature. The vegetarian issue is because my wife and I are vegetarians, so we are sensitive to that issue for many different reasons. We don’t think it is a high thing to do for humans to kill sentient creatures just to consume them, and for other reasons too. It struck me that there is a vegetarian perspective of the Civil War. The Army ration was heavily oriented toward meat-eating. Well, a lot of soldiers didn’t like it. They couldn’t eat it without getting sick. There were very few vegetarians in the Union or Confederate Army. But there were a lot of soldiers who could have benefited from such a diet. Some may wonder what this has to do with animal studies. The field does deal with vegetarianism and with the philosophical and other aspects of the huge industry created to nurture and then kill and eat animals. It’s part of that story of animal history. The essay I wrote on artillery horses as warriors talks about the bond between artillery horses and men. We have to under-
NORTH WIND PICTURE ARCHIVES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Jubal Early’s cavalry steal livestock from a Maryland farm in 1864. Foraging filled empty stomachs and deprived the enemy of food and comfort.
