Join us online or in person for a seminar with Dr Robert Chase.

Arresting Cows and Impounding Dogs: Erasing Animals in Santa Rosa, California

In 1901, Santa Rosa, CA was beset by a plague of stray dogs. At least, that is how the Press Democrat portrayed the issue in its coverage of city council discussions on the immediate need for an official dog pound and animal control officer. Despite statements that the city had eradicated “hundreds” the prior year, those efforts were deemed insufficient to stop this scourge from threatening Santa Rosa in the future. However, dogs were not the only perceived four-legged threat to Santa Rosa in the early Twentieth Century. For a city that saw itself as modernizing, and on the rise, city leaders tasked themselves with the objective of removing all animals from the cityscape. This included stray dogs, cats, horse-drawn trolleys, and livestock; as well as associated services like stables. How these changes were implemented, and public opinion to them, are important, yet overlooked, pieces of Sonoma County history.

My analysis is grounded in county archive records, in particular the dog and livestock impound books, as well as newspaper accounts, city records, and local photographic collections. While inspired by recent studies in Animal History, like The City is More Than Human: An Animal History of Seattle by Frederick L. Brown and works focused on major metropolitan centers of the early Twentieth Century, I argue that Santa Rosa offers a compelling counterpoint to studying animals in, and their disappearance from, larger cities. A smaller, suburban city with dreams of modernization and growth, Santa Rosa and its more intimate connection with regional agriculture and livestock than places like Seattle or New York offers a unique window to the place and erasure of animal residents of American urban spaces.

11am, 4th September 2024.

Burwood: C2.05.01
Waurn Ponds: IC2.108
Zoom: Click here

Robert Chase holds degrees from Sonoma State University and University of California, Irvine.  He teaches courses in American and World history.  His research focuses on the development of political and cultural connections amongst the United States, New Zealand and Australia during the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century.  His dissertation, Imagining an Anglo Ocean: The Great White Fleet in the Pacific, examines such ties through the celebrations held for the US Atlantic Fleet’s 1908 world tour.  He has also begun studying the history of World’s Fairs in the Pacific as they served as valuable hubs of transnational information dissemination during this period.  He is currently working to revise his dissertation for publication.