Pillar · Human–Animal Interaction

Faunalore

This is the cultural half of the project: animals studied not as organisms but as subjects of human meaning. The same species a biologist places on a family tree, people also raise, show, keep as pets, and mythologize — and how they do it says as much about the people as about the animals. That is the lens I bring here.

My central fieldwork is on 4-H animal projects at county and community fairs in Pennsylvania and Ohio. To a child, raising an animal for the fair is a year of feeding, grooming, record-keeping, and worry that ends in a show ring and often a sale. To a folklorist, it is cultural transmission in its most concrete form: foodways, material culture, husbandry skill, and community aesthetics passed hand to hand, generation to generation, through everyday practice with a living creature. My study of those projects, Love, Loss and Blue Ribbons, followed that arc — including the hard lesson of parting with an animal you have loved — and received the American Folklore Society's W. W. Newell Prize.

The pillar reaches beyond the fairgrounds. In herpetoculture — the keeping and breeding of reptiles and amphibians as pets — I study how a hobby becomes a culture: how keepers learn, trade, name color morphs, and pass their craft to children. And in cryptozoology and contemporary legend I follow the animals people can't quite see: the "car-sized" catfish said to lurk at the base of dams, the snakes of rumor and warning. These legends are folklore about fauna — stories that reveal how we imagine the hidden lives of animals.

None of this is separate from the biology. The reptile in a legend, a terrarium, or a show ring is the same reptile a systematist describes; the culture around an animal and the science of the animal are two views of one curiosity. That is what faunalore names, and it is why this pillar sits beside the research. For the complete, citable record across both halves, see all publications.