The Animal Highlight

Herre de Bondt and Rebecca Shen are back on the show to discuss Rosa Dyer’s season “Animal Collections/’Objects”. We delve into some of the key themes and tensions to emerge in the season including questions of value, colonization, ethics, and practices of preservation. We revisit a season that follows birds, bodies, and objects across museums and beyond, asking how ethics, beauty, and decay shape what gets collected, displayed, and believed. The talk moves from drawers of parrots to a living...

Rosa questions whether zoos could be thought of as “living collections” that objectifying animals in ways that are similar to the animal objects one finds in a museum or archive. She considers the internet sensation Moo Deng and asks whether her fame as achieved much in the way of the conservation goals for pygmy hippos. Meet Moo Deng, the baby pygmy hippo taking the internet by storm by The Today Show. Credits: Recorded: 3 June 2025Claudia Hirtenfelder, executive producer,...

Rosa returns to feathers in this episode, this time to discuss the infamous 2009 “feather heist”, in which Edwin Rist stole an invaluable collection of bright-coloured feathers from tropical birds. She uses the heist to open a deeper consideration of the value of feather collections for science and the ethics of collecting and maintaining such collections. Pitt Rivers MuseumSmithsonianNatural history Museum in LondonThe Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson Credits: Recorded...

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 MuseumOxford University Natural History MuseumNational Trust launches pest-control trial combining wasps and moth pheromonesT...

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.&nbsp...