MODERNIZATION AND THE CHANGING PERCEPTIONS OF ANIMALS IN BOGOTÁ COLOMBIA, 1960 TO THE PRESENT Jane M. Rausch University of Massachusetts Amherst Introduction In 1968 Glynis Anthony published Colombia: Land of Tomorrow, a book about her experiences in Colombia as the wife of a British diplomat who worked in Bogotá between 1965 and 1967. Her account provides a vivid description of life in the city and various regions of the country before the impact of increasingly rapid modernization. For example, she wrote: Like any capital, Bogotá is cosmopolitan and offers fantastic contrasts in people and ways of life. On its streets the elegant societywoman in chauffeured limousine, who claims to buy all her clothes in Paris, will pass by a withered old woman, who wears a long, stained pinafore over her tattered skirts, a battered trilby on her head and straw sandals on her sore-scarred fee, pulling a tired old donkey with a load of garbage on its back and perhaps a baby on top.1 Tourists to Bogotá today will still find a “cosmopolitan city” with “fantastic contrasts in people and ways of life,” but they probably will not see the “tired old donkey.” Instead they will find llamas in the Plaza de Bolivar (an animal only recently introduced in Colombia) complete with saddles and bridles whose owners for a small sum will offer to take their picture. Burros and work horses are no longer ubiquitous in the city for in 2013 the Consejo Distrital in Bogotá banned the use of animal-drawn vehicles, the last city on South America to do so.2 Only two years later, however, despite a determined effort by activists to abolish the sport, the Colombian Supreme Court lifted a two-year ban on bullfights in the city on the grounds that the prohibition violated the “right to artistic expression.”3 This somewhat contradictory policy regarding animals reflects their changing role in the life of Colombians. The object of this essay is to examine the impact of modernization on Colombian attitudes toward animals and their significance in the life of Bogotá and the country as a whole. After a brief discussion of the subdiscipline of historiography known as “Animal Studies,” I will consider social and economic changes in Colombia since 1960, the development of laws regarding animal welfare, the increasing adoption of cats and dogs as domestic pets, the emergence of animal shelters, and the movement to abolish bull fighting—one of several blood sports that involve the killing, torture and abuse of animals.4 C 2016 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. DOI: 10.1111/tla.12083 391 The Latin Americanist, September 2016 Animal Studies Animal Studies is a relatively new field of research that builds on scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and laboratory sciences to investigate past and present relations between human and non-human animals, the representation of those relations, their ethical implications and their social, political, and ecological effects in and on the world. As an interdisciplinary subject the field developed out of the animal liberation movement and is grounded in ethical questions about human co-existence with other species. Its practitioners engage questions about literal animals or about notions of “animality” or “brutality,’ employing various theoretical perspectives, including feminism, Marxism, and queer theory. Using these perspectives, they seek to understand both human-animal relations now and in the past, and to understand animals as beings-in-themselves, separate from our knowledge of them. Because the field is still developing, scholars and others have some freedom to define their own criteria about the issues that the field may encompass.5 Animal Studies has become a recognized subfield of the discipline of history, for as Professor Harriet Ritvo reports, the last several decades have seen significant changes in the attitude of historians toward the study of animals as animal-related causes—from saving the whales to abolishing factory farming—have gained increasing popular support in North America and Europe. The vigorous growth of environmental history has likewise alerted scholars to the need to acknowledge the historical significance of animals. Ritvo adds that the integration of animal-related topics into the disciplinary mainstream reflects two convergent tendencies...