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...

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