Introduction

This introductory essay surveys connections and lacunae in scholarship that has focused on non-human, interspecies, and multispecies histories within the history of natural historical, biological, and environmental sciences from the early modern period through the present era of climate crisis, highlighting the omnipresent influence of Harriet Ritvo’s foundational work. Beginning with a reflection on Charles Darwin’s predilection for dogs as opposed to cats, the essay points to chronological and thematic commonalities among the five other contributions to this special issue on the role of animals in shaping scientific knowledge-making. In doing so, it situates the interventions in this collection in relation to the ways in which animal historians have both engaged with and underestimated the importance of changes over time in scientific knowledge about animals and their environments; and how animals (as individuals and as cultural, social, and political collectives) have informed science, medicine, technology, and other domains of mainly human activity.