Éric Baratay – författare

What would we learn if animals could tell their own stories? Éric Baratay, a pioneering researcher in animal histories in France, applies his knowledge of historical methodologies to give voice to some of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ most interesting animals. He offers brief yet innovative accounts of these animals’ lives in a way that challenges the reader’s thinking about animals. Baratay illustrates the need to develop a nonanthropocentric means of viewing the lives of animals and including animals themselves in the narrative of their lives. Animal Biographies launches an all-new investigation into the lives of animals and is a major contribution to the field of animal studies.This English translation of Éric Baratay’s Biographies animales: Des Vies retrouvées, originally published in France in 2017 (Éditions du Seuil), uses firsthand accounts starting from the nineteenth century about specific animals who lived in Europe and the United States to reconstruct, as best as possible, their stories as they would have experienced them. History is, after all, not just the domain of humans. Animals have their own. Baratay breaks the model of human exceptionalism to give us the biographies of some of history and literature’s most famous animals. The reader will catch a glimpse of storied lives as told by Modestine, the donkey who carried Robert Louis Stevenson through the Alps; Warrior, the World War I horse made famous in Steven Spielberg’s War Horse; Islero, the bull who gored Spain’s greatest bullfighter; and others. Through these stories we discover their histories, their personalities, and their shared experiences with others of their species.

Using testimonies written between the middle of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, nourished by ethology and the human and social sciences, Feline Cultures extends the unique track of animal studies that Éric Baratay pursues from book to book. As with his Animal Biographies: Toward a History of Individuals, Baratay breaks the model of human exceptionalism to create innovative accounts of these animals’ lives in a way that challenges the reader’s thinking about animals. Baratay is not interested in seeing how humans think about or treat these animals. Instead, he chooses to observe the animal’s perspective to document how individual cats have carried out their lives. He writes from the point of view of these animals to understand what they felt and experienced and how they reacted. Whether they be street cats, farm cats, pet cats, companion cats, or "catdogs,” cats show a great plasticity of behavior. This book establishes that cats have their own cultures and adaptations and, therefore, their own history. Through tight portraits, the dynamic construction of what we can call cultures is revealed. Here we are far from the eternal portrait of the cat—independent, unpredictable, and mysterious—that has become commonplace. For each of the domestic cats whose existence can be reconstructed from his sources, Baratay pays attention to their perceptions of the world, their sensations and their emotions, their sensitivity and character, their bodily expressiveness, and their interactions with the environment, other animals, and humans. Ethology becomes, under the alert pen of Éric Baratay, an ethnology.

Il y a eu la vache " folle " tremblante et flageolante. Et les gigantesques tas de carcasses, embrasés pour éradiquer la fièvre aphteuse. Il y a désormais les bêtes clonées, bientôt produites à la chaîne comme des boîtes de conserve. Ces faits ont frappé l’opinion. Par leurs conséquences humaines, mais aussi parce qu’ils révèlent combien les animaux sont devenus dépendants des hommes. Comment en est-on arrivé là ? Comment est-on passé de la domestication des premières espèces sauvages au dressage des pitt-bulls, devenus les meilleurs amis des délinquants pour attaquer ou combattre ? Que faut-il faire des ours des Pyrénées, des loups des Alpes, des palombes du Sud-Ouest pour lesquels s’affrontent chasseurs et écologistes ? Bref, faut-il avoir peur de cette mainmise croissante de l’homme sur l’animal ?Historien, spécialiste de l’animal, Éric Baratay est professeur à l’université Jean-Moulin de Lyon.