In this episode Rosa steps away from feathered objects to consider how museum collections and archives should be thought of as living ecosystems. She discusses how webbing clothes moths are understood as ‘pests’ and some of the strategies curators are trying to employ to manage them: including sexual confusion and the introduction of parasitoid wasps.

• Pitt Rivers Museum
• Oxford University Natural History Museum
• National Trust launches pest-control trial combining wasps and moth pheromones
• The Lion’s Historian by Sandra Swart

Credits:

• Recorded: 28 May 2025
• Claudia Hirtenfelder, executive producer, editor and co-host
• Rosa Dyer, script writer, narrator and co-host
• Rebecca Shen, episode artwork and logo
• Gordon Clarke, bed music
• Other sound effects from Bill Hayes - I Know an Old Lady (Archie Bleyer, Internet Archive)
• Learn more about the team here.

Support the podcast via:

• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/TheAnimalTurn
• Buy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/theanimalturn
• Buzzsprout: https://theanimalturn.buzzsprout.com/

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The Animal Highlight is a spinoff and sister podcast to the award winning show, the Animal Turn Podcast.

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In this episode Rosa focuses on the Oxford Dodo, attempting to trace the life history of a bird whose only trace is a fragile head and foot in the Oxford University of Natural History. She unpacks some of the competing routes the bird might have taken – from being hunted and shipped from Mauritius to being kept in an urban menagerie. She also follows the afterlife of the museum object itself once again raising questions about the interconnections between power, possession, and knowledge.

• Pitt Rivers Museum
• Oxford University Natural History Museum
• Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland
• The Tradescants
• Murder most fowl: Oxford dodo 'shot in the back of the head'

Credits:

• Recorded: 16 January 2024
• Claudia Hirtenfelder, executive producer, editor and co-host
• Rosa Dyer, script writer, narrator and co-host
• Rebecca Shen, episode artwork and logo
• Gordon Clarke, bed music
• Other sound effects from Alice in wonderland Soundtrack, Epidemic Sound, Pixabay
• Learn more about the team here.

Support the podcast via:

• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/TheAnimalTurn
• Buy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/theanimalturn
• Buzzsprout: https://theanimalturn.buzzsprout.com/

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

The Animal Highlight is a spinoff and sister podcast to the award winning show, the Animal Turn Podcast.

Connect with us on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

Rosa traces a Munduruku feather cap from Brazil to the museum case and discuss how tapirage was a process used to turned green parrots feathers a blazing yellow by using frog toxins, dyes and time. Beauty and pain sit side by side as we weigh Indigenous innovation, care and the cost to animals.

• Pitt Rivers Museum

Credits:

• Recorded: 9 November 2023 Claudia Hirtenfelder, executive producer, editor and co-host
• Rosa Dyer, script writer, narrator and co-host
• Rebecca Shen, episode artwork and logo
• Gordon Clarke, bed music
• Other sound effects from BBC Sound Effects, Pixabay, Epidemic Sound
• Learn more about the team here.

Support the podcast via:

• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/TheAnimalTurn
• Buy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/theanimalturn
• Buzzsprout: https://theanimalturn.buzzsprout.com/

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

The Animal Highlight is a spinoff and sister podcast to the award winning show, the Animal Turn Podcast.

Connect with us on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

Using a feather fan as her base, Rosa Dyer traces how Victorian fashion turned fierce hummingbirds into quiet ornaments. The object brings into focus the differences between indigenous mythologies and western ideas of hummingbirds and what the impacts of global trade were on how we understand them today.

• Pitt Rivers Museum
• How hummingbird and vulture mediate between life and death in Latin America by Nicole Sault
• The disguise of the hummingbird: on the natural history of Huitzilopochtli in the Florentine Codex Montero Sobrevilla
• The Hummingbird Warrior by Ze Frank
• Animals and Experience on The Animal Turn.
• Compassionate Conservation with Daniel Ramp on The Animal Turn
• Sonic Methods with Jonathan Prior on The Animal Turn

Credits:

• Recorded: 9 November 2023
• Claudia Hirtenfelder, executive producer, editor and co-host
• Rosa Dyer, script writer, narrator and co-host
• Rebecca Shen, episode artwork and logo
• Gordon Clarke, bed music
• Other sound effects from Freesound, Prelinger Archives, Internet Archive
• Learn more about the team here.

Support the podcast via:

• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/TheAnimalTurn
• Buy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/theanimalturn
• Buzzsprout: https://theanimalturn.buzzsprout.com/

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

The Animal Highlight is a spinoff and sister podcast to the award winning show, the Animal Turn Podcast.

Connect with us on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

We start Season 6 "Museum Collections/Objects" with Rosa Dyer looking at the Huia, a New Zealand songbird whose dimorphic beaks garnered the attention of science, fashion, and empire. Rosa uses the museum object to ask questions about how different knowledge systems value animals.

• Pitt Rivers Museum
• Sonic Specimen with Rachel Mundy on The Animal Turn.
• The 1848 lithograph by John Gould
• Birds of New Zealand by Walter Buller J.G. Keulemans
• Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene edited by Gregg Mitman, Marco Armiero, Robert S. Emmett
• 'Te Karanga a te Huia | The Call of the Huia', Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision by Sarah Johnston.
• Huia come Home by Jay Ruka.

Credits:

• Recorded: 7 November 2023
• Claudia Hirtenfelder, executive producer, editor and co-host
• Rosa Dyer, script writer, narrator and co-host
• Rebecca Shen, episode artwork and logo
• Gordon Clarke, bed music
• Other sound effects from BBC Sound Effects, Pixabay, and Epidemic Sound
• Learn more about the team here.

Support the podcast via:

• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/TheAnimalTurn
• Buy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/theanimalturn
• Buzzsprout: https://theanimalturn.buzzsprout.com/

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

The Animal Highlight is a spinoff and sister podcast to the award winning show, the Animal Turn Podcast.

Connect with us on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

Fierce, controversial, and caught between worlds—Heck cattle embody the complex intersection of dark history and modern conservation. This final episode of Season 5 of the Animal Highlight explores how these bovines were deliberately bred by Nazi zoologists in the 1920s and now find themselves at the center of rewilding debates across Europe.

Recorded: 14 December 2023

Featured:

• Season 6 Grad Review on The Animal Turn
• The Cow with Ear Tag #1389 by Kathryn Gillespie
• From “Nazi Cows” to Cosmopolitan “Ecological Engineers” by Jamie Lorimer and Clemens Driessen
• Conceptualizing the multispecies triadby Andrea Petitt
• American Cows in Antarctica by Elizabeth Leane and Hanne Nielsen

Virginia Thomas is an environmental social scientist with a PhD in Sociology. She is interested in people’s interactions with their environment and with other animals. Virginia’s work explores the social and ethical questions in human-animal relationships. She is currently a research fellow on the Wellcome Trust funded project ‘From Feed the Birds to Do Not Feed the Animals’ which examines the drivers and consequences of animal feeding. This leads on from her previous research which examined human-animal relations in the media (as part of zoonotic disease framing) and in rewilding projects (in relation to biopolitics and human-animal coexistence). You can connect with Virginia via Twitter (@ArbitrioHumano).

Credits:

• Claudia Hirtenfelder, executive producer, editor and co-host
• Virginia Thomas, script write, narrator and co-host
• Rebecca Shen, content producer and designer (logo and episode artwork)
• Gordon Clarke, bed music composer
• Sound clips taken from: BBC Sound Effects, xeno canto: https://xeno-canto.org/species/milvus-milvus
• Learn more about the team here.

Support the podcast via:

• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/TheAnimalTurn
• Buy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/theanimalturn
• Buzzsprout: https://theanimalturn.buzzsprout.com/

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

The Animal Highlight is a spinoff and sister podcast to the award winning show, the Animal Turn Podcast.

Connect with us on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

Virginia explores how the recovery of red kites in Britain has been shaped by international efforts and cross-border collaborations between governments and NGOs. Thinking about these birds, Virginia raises questions and concerns about translocation, culture, and species conservation.

Recorded: 14 December 2023

Featured:

• International Relations with Andrea Schapper on The Animal Turn
• Natural England
• Royal Society for Protection of Birds
• Animal Culture with Carl Safinaon The Animal Turn
• Bears on Displayat Queen’s University

Virginia Thomas is an environmental social scientist with a PhD in Sociology. She is interested in people’s interactions with their environment and with other animals. Virginia’s work explores the social and ethical questions in human-animal relationships. She is currently a research fellow on the Wellcome Trust funded project ‘From Feed the Birds to Do Not Feed the Animals’ which examines the drivers and consequences of animal feeding. This leads on from her previous research which examined human-animal relations in the media (as part of zoonotic disease framing) and in rewilding projects (in relation to biopolitics and human-animal coexistence). You can connect with Virginia via Twitter (@ArbitrioHumano).

Credits:

• Claudia Hirtenfelder, executive producer, editor and co-host
• Virginia Thomas, script write, narrator and co-host
• Rebecca Shen, content producer and designer (logo and episode artwork)
• Gordon Clarke, bed music composer
• Sound clips taken from: BBC Sound Effects, xeno canto: https://xeno-canto.org/species/milvus-milvus
• Learn more about the team here.

Support the podcast via:

• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/TheAnimalTurn
• Buy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/theanimalturn
• Buzzsprout: https://theanimalturn.buzzsprout.com/

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

The Animal Highlight is a spinoff and sister podcast to the award winning show, the Animal Turn Podcast.

Connect with us on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

Virginia tells us how grey wolves are reclaiming territories across Europe and North America through a process known as auto-rewilding—autonomously returning to lands from which humans once drove them out. This powerful expression of nonhuman agency challenges our conventional approach to wildlife management and invites us to reconsider what coexistence means in the Anthropocene.

Recorded: 22 November 2023

Featured:

• S6E8: Re-Animalization with Krithika Srinivasan on The Animal Turn
• Re-animalising wellbeing: Multispecies justice after development by Krithika Srinivasan
• Respecting Nature’s Autonomy in Relationship with Humanity by Ned Hettinger

Virginia Thomas is an environmental social scientist with a PhD in Sociology. She is interested in people’s interactions with their environment and with other animals. Virginia’s work explores the social and ethical questions in human-animal relationships. She is currently a research fellow on the Wellcome Trust funded project ‘From Feed the Birds to Do Not Feed the Animals’ which examines the drivers and consequences of animal feeding. This leads on from her previous research which examined human-animal relations in the media (as part of zoonotic disease framing) and in rewilding projects (in relation to biopolitics and human-animal coexistence). You can connect with Virginia via Twitter (@ArbitrioHumano).

Credits:

• Claudia Hirtenfelder, executive producer, editor and co-host
• Virginia Thomas, script write, narrator and co-host
• Rebecca Shen, content producer and designer (logo and episode artwork)
• Gordon Clarke, bed music composer
• Sound clips taken from: BBC Sound Effects, We Animals Media, NBC News Story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PbsuGGWUrM
• Learn more about the team here.

Support the podcast via:

• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/TheAnimalTurn
• Buy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/theanimalturn
• Buzzsprout: https://theanimalturn.buzzsprout.com/

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

The Animal Highlight is a spinoff and sister podcast to the award winning show, the Animal Turn Podcast.

Connect with us on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook.