Human societies often come to know the natural world by examining animals, even as animals, frequently both willful and animate, elude human grasps and challenge human aims. Animals and their movements have underpinned many methodological, moral, and epistemic dilemmas. Featuring a range of geographies, species, languages, and cultures, the articles in this volume broaden the view of the roles animals play in knowledge production processes. Organized according to three scales of animal movement (individuals, groups, systems), the twelve richly illustrated inquiries are situated in different time periods, from the sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire to the recent globalized past, and introduce varied forms, capacities, and politics of movement. The analytic attention to mobility deepens comprehension of animal agency and human–animal interactions in unexpected spaces, including airports, entertainment venues, living rooms, dirt roads, and waterways. Taken together, the case studies in this volume reconsider how, where, and by whom science is done.

With their potential to move goods across the spaces of empire, camels were closely associated with Ottoman mobility. In the 1570s, the Ottoman Imperial Council ordered two groups of two-humped Bactrian camels to be sent from Crimea and southern Anatolia to the port city of Selanik to be hybridized with one-humped camels. This attempt to intervene in the bodies of animals can be seen in the context of an increasingly technological understanding of animals, one that was integral to the formation of the Ottoman state, and a new ability to mobilize environments, finances, and knowledge. In addition, this article connects the case of the camel-breeding program in Selanik to the rise of communities of rural experts and to the Ottoman understanding of the hybrid origins of the “Rumis,” the Ottoman elites.

When the United States dammed the Columbia River, the migratory natural history of the river’s oldest and largest fish, white sturgeon, was obstructed. Settler fisheries science did not account for sturgeon movement in regulatory configurations of the river’s ecosystem. This article examines how practices of counting and constructing the value of fish shape and are shaped by sturgeon in motion. The article uses ethnographic data, hatchery archives, scientific reports, and the published testimonies of Yakama and other Indigenous fishers to reveal the relationship between settler colonial cultural and empirical practices of measuring, monitoring, and monetizing sturgeon and their movements from the late 1800s to the present.

This article examines the global (im)mobilities of guide dogs beyond Europe and North America, and how they have been shaped by space, cultural norms, and legal vagaries. Tracing the histories of these unique working animals in Australia and Japan, I argue that while blind people, advocates, and charitable organizations across the world played a role in mobilizing the guide dog, war and empire dictated how, and in which direction, guide dogs moved—as puppies, as part of teams, and as animal technologies. At the same time, race, class, and location determined access to these animals.

This article analyzes both the symbolic and material impact of the move of two northern white rhinos, Paul and Chloe, who were flown from Anglo-Egyptian Sudan to Antwerp Zoo in 1950. As the first zoo-held northern white rhinos anywhere in the world, they quickly turned into celebrities. The transport by plane—dubbed a “flying ark”—spurred media attention and was used to create an image of the zoo as a modern institution of science and conservation. The article shows, however, that the physical movement of endangered animals not only was instrumental in creating new symbolic meanings, it also involved the loss of preexisting connotations and connections.

This article examines how bird movements take part in shaping both local airport operations and global air traffic infrastructure. Drawing on archival sources, observations, and visual materials, we examine different layers and regimes of knowledge production on avian migration in and around the global air traffic hub Frankfurt Airport, especially in bird strike prevention. By inquiring into the airspace and ground procedures of both birds and human infrastructure (where they overlap in avian habitats and migration routes), we make visible the mixed knowledges at work in emergent fields such as airport ecology, bird strike science, and multilayered surveillance. In doing so, we consider a plurality of mappings and orderings at the airport, as well as ways in which birds have managed to map their own procedures back onto airport operations.

Using a rare agricultural treatise published in 1776, Zhihuang chuanxilu (Record of the transmission of locust control), this article traces the origin and development of mobilizing ducks to control locusts in China, from the late sixteenth to the twentieth century. By focusing on movements, mutual generation and mutual overcoming, transformations, and cycles, as well as circulations of humans, locusts, sweet potatoes, ducks, and materials in the development of the duck method, the article helps illustrate animal mobility in a non-Western historical context.