Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition by Antoine Traisnel is a thoughtful, poignant, and ethically driven study that characterizes a transformation in the cultural imagination of hunting, killing, and representing animals in the context of US expansion in the mid-late 19th century. Hunting practices shifted from subsistence hunting to spectacle sport to finally an environmental consciousness of preservation that Traisnel differentiates as “capture.” Traisnel examines this idea of capture as a hegemonic capitalist notion under a Foucauldian framework of biopolitics and White settler colonialism to eradicate indigenous peoples and animals because of land management programs that were given full life under the maxim Manifest Destiny. He argues that capturing animals to preserve them ultimately resulted in their exploitation and extinction. He states, “[It] worked to invisibilize and naturalize the violence visited on both animals and animalized human subjects—violence that contributed not only to the extinction of wildlife and the exploitation of animals on an industrial scale but also to the relentless expropriation of black lives under chattel slavery” (p. 4).Animal loss was “captured” in the various forms of self-effacement (in paint, taxidermy, novels, film, and science) by literary and visual artists. So too, early American painters of the Hudson River School such as Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand were sensitive to the idea of a vanishing landscape as progress moved westward. But Traisnel argues that “to capture something from nature is to sacrifice the very naturalness that one sets out to secure or preserve” (p. 14). Thus, capture endowed by and for American naturalists, taxonomists, and US museums, presumably all for the public good, is a semantic term for rationalizing control and captivity at best and seizing and killing at worst (p. 18).Two methods of support help the reader along the unveiling of White settler hegemony and biopower in the regime of capture. First, a table provides clarity of the language of “The Hunt Regime” versus “The Capture Regime” in the categorical divisions of five axioms (p. 13). And second, three sections of the text are divided by various images of birds, amphibians, and sea creatures, taken from the published artwork of 19th-century zoologist Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen. In Haeckel's Art Forms of Nature, 100 detailed multicolor illustrations of animals are more telling of his artistic license rather than taxonomical renderings. These organic yet heavily abstracted forms that would influence the arabesque of the Art Nouveau artistic movement support Traisnel's claim that the representative iconography of the new animal condition demonstrates only a lifelessness in farcical memorials promoted by biopolitical regimes. Central in the text are four color plates that are dedicated to the close reading of John James Audubon's portrait as a hunter and his painting Golden Eagle (1833). Both heroize as well as ostracize an artist caught up in the conflict of sustaining and exploiting the western frontier. In addition, 28 interesting black-and-white illustrations range from scientific experiments to cinematic film studies that support each chapter's arguments.Traisnel's claims are also supported by many references to economic theorists, yet they complicate the text in weighing down and stalling arguments from points already clearly made. However, an examination of the intentions or moral dictates of naturalists such as the Comte de Buffon's Histoire Naturelle, Georges Cuvier's epic classification Tableau, and Darwin's zoological expedition (1831) are richly explored for what they were: a continuation of the hunt transformed into the pretext of “capturing.”Part I, titled “Last Vestiges of the Hunt,” is a romantic nod that focuses on the waning days of the hunt paradigm through an examination of the illustrations and writings of John James Audubon and the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper. Both Audubon's The Birds of America and Cooper's The Prairie are fascinating evidence for the entanglements between human, animal, and land, as well as the duality of Audubon and Cooper. These conflicts brought both artists deeper into the debates of conservation while they both wrestled with a noxious nostalgia for a past nation understood only from their White, elitist perspective. While one may argue Audubon clearly struggled with taking an animal's life for his scientific and artistic mission, Traisnel's recount of his heartless and disturbing killing of an eagle quickly dispels Audubon's reverie: “I wished to possess all the productions of nature, but I wished life with them. This was impossible” (p. 43). Audubon kills, rather than extends, life for the “public good” as he sticks a sword through the unassuming eagle's heart to “capture” nothing but his dead body (p. 42).Cooper presents The Prairie as an empty territory to be tamed, and this lack of vision becomes central to Traisnel's arguments throughout the book that the west was home to many indigenous peoples, animals, and plants. Choosing not to “see” is deftly argued by Traisnel, who states this is exactly what “capture” is: “A way of seeing to show not only what capture makes visible but also what it obscures, and how the animal and the animalized appear and disappear under capture” (p. 61). The 1785 Land Ordinance of land “speculation” becomes instead a major blind spot resulting in a moral blunder in the annals of historical data.Part II, “New Genres of Capture,” is separated into three sections. Traisnel examines the work of Edgar Allan Poe in “The Fugitive Animal,” which focuses on what happens to animals when they surface in cityscapes rather than on the frontier. He differentiates between a sense of space and place describing land and milieu. Land, he states, “supervises laboring bodies and subjects them to disciplinary mechanisms, while the milieu exercises protocols of security over a population” (p. 92). It is to this end that a security breech takes place in Traisnel's close reading of Poe's “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841). Criminality and animality are further entanglements that ensue in the streets of Paris between racism, animal, and animality because of land expansion that exerts similar controls of western hegemony over people and animal bodies in cities. Traisnel argues these controls require a new kind of “hunter” and frames the lead character in Poe's work (C. Auguste Dupin) as an example of the detective who will dominate and then criminalize an orangutan who was smuggled into France. Dupin has surmised the orangutan is the murderer in a heinous crime for which the animal is imprisoned and held “captive” in the Jardin des Plantes (p. 120). While a fascinating read of Poe and animality, Traisnel takes a long time through sometimes redundant claims to get to the issue of the regime of capture under the premise of the new detective.In Chapter 4, “Fabulous Taxonomy,” Traisnel contrasts American author Nathaniel Hawthorne's reluctance to answer to public scrutiny about animality in his gothic novel The Marble Faun (1860) with leading scientists of the day. Reflective of the uncertainty inherent in studies by Darwin and Cuvier on whether a common ancestry existed between human and nonhuman, the lead character Donatello resembles the marble faun of Praxiteles (who has pointy, hairy ears). This is an intriguing feature that predated a study of the human ear in Darwin's 1871 Descent of Man (p. 141). Traisnel frames his argument between creation theories and evolution demonstrating that these views impacted the “hunt” versus “capture” regime. It is the exceptionalism of “man” that drives the ambitions and routine violence of White settler biopower that would be questioned by an ethical and moral framework. Solidarity then can be viewed as a possible segue into the ethics of care and is an interesting remove from biopolitical arguments that could be expanded upon by Traisnel but is only slightly affirmed in the conclusion of his text.The capturing of animals in Chapter 5, “The Stock Image,” is more explicit in describing the captivity, death, and mass extermination of animals because of the reproducibility of imagery in cinematic progress in the late 19th to early 20th century. Unlike the static representations of animals and literature in earlier chapters, Trainsel turns to the stop action photography of capturing animals in motion, where he seamlessly weaves the field of science and animation in the regime of capture. Traisnel examines the work and the intention of cinematic artist Eadweard Muybridge through the lens of biopolitics. While a wide leap of genre jumping from Melville to Muybridge into temporal forms of art is curious, Traisnel's evidence is best remembered as representative and not exhaustive. Thus, he affirms that preserving (or capturing) animals by 20th-century moguls demonstrates Muybridge's less altruistic nature in the same purview as Audubon's White colonialism, with technology and capitalism at the helm.Moreover, in describing Muybridge's infamous study of galloping horses, Traisnel maps out his anthropometric grids in his chronophotography, which he applies to the trip wire lines on racetracks that become “the parallel lines in the background, which resemble nothing more than prison bars” (p. 165). The repetition and reproducibility of various frames of stop action photography become mere data, quantified and reproducible and repeated in multiple technologies and various renderings. As statistical findings, there is no concern for the horses’ individuality, and they are removed from any basis. In a compelling hypothesis, Traisnel states the reproducibility that created the deluge of images in the 20th century “is the principle that underlies the animal condition in the age of its capture” (p. 190). Due to overconsumption, animals appear and disappear as Traisnel frames his argument in the example of the “breeding and reproducibility” of animal confinement in factory farms (p. 175).Finally, in a positive reading of biopolitics, Traisnel suggests a new ethics of capture where our experience with animals “is not based on shared experience or proximity but predicated on the recognition of an unbridgeable distance between living beings” (p. 195). He ties this notion into the work of ethologist Jakob von Uexküll, who states that “every living subject is enclosed in a milieu fully meaningful only to it” (p. 195). In “The Stock Image,” Traisnel also touches upon Kantian philosophy, stating that we become aware of “the finitude of our sensorial faculties”—thus we cannot bridge any distance by “capturing” really anything (p. 157). In a heartbreaking finale, Traisnel makes this point frightenedly clear in that the capture regime leads to extinction. He recounts the heartbreaking fate of passenger pigeons in the sole survivor of Martha as the tragic result of biopower. Seen only through the lens of reproducibility, Martha remained infertile unto her death despite the best practices by conservationists. Understanding that we saw Martha as an object rather than as a subject who “sees” means that we, too, can only see her from our “milieu” as well. As a result, we can never really understand her infertility. Traisnel's point to acknowledge animals at a distance is integral to a new ethics of care, and he is clear about what it should not look like. What it could like is left to the reader to ponder.