Chapter 4 uses chronicles, hagiographies, ekphraseis and polemical treatises to discuss clerical hunting in Romanía. Prohibitions against clerical hunting had existed for Western men since Late Antiquity, but there is not enough evidence to suggest that Romanía followed the same pattern. In the Eastern Roman context, narratives of clerical hunting did not put the emphasis on differences between secular and religious men, and non-participation did not entail the loss of masculine capital. Rather, the focus was on human/animal interactions and the need to avoid overindulgence, and the emphasis was the same whether the person involved was an emperor or a cleric. The animals themselves also had an important role to play: they were not simply seen as prey to be dominated by the manly man but could act as co-creators of the skills necessary for the hunt, leaving their traces on their co-hunters’ subjectivity. At the same time, the malleability of Eastern Roman ideas about which animal lives were worth preserving allowed authors to strategically unify all men against the animal Other or to distinguish between different types of men, creating in the process hierarchies of masculinities.

The introduction sets forth the theoretical framework of the book by defining the two main lenses through which the material is viewed: scholarly masculinity and clerical masculinity. In doing so, it clarifies their relationship to other types of masculinities and highlights the role of animals in gender formation. This chapter also situates the book in its broader historiographical context, within both Byzantine and Western medieval Studies.

We appraise Alexander’s court. We ask what constituted a ‘court’, as well as considering problems with assessing Alexander’s and those of the earlier Macedonian kings. A brief bibliographic survey follows, with salient literature about the court and institutions, Macedonian prosopography, and related topics. We then examine elite offices, specifically the Hetairoi or Companions, the Royal Pages or King’s Boys, the Royal Bodyguard, and specialized army units populated by the elite, such as the Royal Hypaspists. Finally, we consider two institutions exploited by the kings to engage with the Companions and read their mood: the royal symposium and the royal hunt.

The African buffalo has interacted with human societies for millennia across its vast African range. It is part of the bestiary of the few African imaginaries and mythologies that have managed to reach us. These representations of the species in African cultures seem to have percolated more recently into the imaginaries of European cultures, especially from the angle of hunting and photographic safaris. The buffalo is also at the centre of services and disservices to different actors, providing uses but also generating conflicts in African landscapes, the species being central in so-called Human–Wildlife Conflicts. For animal health services, the buffalo represents in some instances a public enemy, influencing meat trade policies, land uses and boundaries in many parts of the continent. The African buffalo is therefore an emblem of the coexistence between humans and nature in Africa.

Whether practiced legally or illegally, formally or informally, hunting buffalo for meat occurs broadly across African cultures. Nearly all buffalo parts are prized in addition to the meat. Buffalo are also hunted for traditional medicine, social positioning, mystical reasons and in retaliation for causing damage to people and crops. The buffalo is a major game for the hunting industry in every country, but the reasons vary from place to place. In South Africa, buffalo is the first income-generating game despite being the least hunted of all important game. In Tanzania, despite a trophy fee that is lower than that of other species, buffalo is the top tax-earning game because it is the most hunted among the important game. As duly gazetted protected areas, hunting areas are contributing internationally to the global network of conservation areas. They more than double the land area that is used for wildlife conservation in sub-Saharan Africa. Acting as buffer zones of national parks and as corridors between national parks, hunting areas are the last frontier of the African buffalo outside national parks. In South Africa, where all buffalo are fenced and buffalo hunting occurs behind fences, the buffalo is subject to genetic manipulation to enlarge trophy horns and produce disease-free herds. While ‘clean buffalo’ widely contributed to expanding the land dedicated to wildlife conservation in a beef-exporting country, ‘augmented buffalo’ remain a matter of concern for the long-term conservation of the taxon. Several non-African countries imposed bans on importing hunting trophies of CITES-listed species from Africa, leading to a drop in the hunting market. The bans are having two impacts on buffalo: (i) although not CITES-listed, the buffalo is a collateral victim of the bans because many abandoned hunting areas are exposed to poaching and habitat conversion; and (ii) unintentionally, the bans are lifting the value of buffalo as a leading flagship game in an attempt to compensate for the loss of CITES-listed game. Hence, once a commodity game, the buffalo is turning into a high-value game.

This chapter considers Puccini’s interest in technology of various types. It examines, first, his passion for speed, encapsulated in an early enthusiasm for motoring. The author discusses the models of car owned by Puccini as well as his various motorboats. Puccini’s enthusiasm for hunting is discussed from a technological perspective. The chapter considers how technology even had an impact upon Puccini’s compositional output, discussing various attempts the composer made to harness electricity for musical purposes, even attempting to invent new instruments to make particular sonic effects. The gramophone played a vital role in disseminating Puccini’s works, though his enthusiasm for the medium of recording was tempered by the difficulties he experienced in recouping royalties. Finally, embryonic radio technology was a source of fascination to the composer.

This essay examines the period between the publication of The Rings of Saturn (1995) and Austerlitz (2001). During this six-year time span, the concept of the ‘natural history of destruction’, Sebald’s negative philosophy of history, gains more and more prominence in his writings. This especially applies to the unfinished Corsica Project and in his Zurich Lectures on air war and German literature (resulting in: On the Natural History of Destruction). The Corsica Project examines various forms of human aggression: hunting, blood revenge, deforestation, and pyromania. The origin of these forms of aggression against nature are attributed to nature itself, thus forming part of an all-encompassing natural history of destruction. The destructive instinct of human beings is presented as an innate, natural characteristic and thus as beyond personal moral responsibility. In On the Natural History of Destruction, this pessimistic idea is applied to contemporary history, with the phenomenon of firestorms in the bombing raids of World War II becoming emblems of the natural history of destruction.

The Mongol military centered on armies of decimally organized mobile horse archers. This system provided the Mongols with both a rationally organized military and a means of incorporating defeated enemies, as soldiers now belonged to units of a thousand rather than retaining old tribal identities. As the Mongol Empire expanded, new groups joined their ranks and the Mongols found new ways of accommodating them into their war machine without fundamentally disrupting their own ways of war. The Mongols also realized that regional needs sometimes dictated the use of other forces. Siege engineers, infantry, heavy cavalry, and naval forces all found use within the Mongol military. The Mongols showed flexibility not only in using personnel and military units, but also in adopting technologies, including gunpowder. After the dissolution of the United Mongol Empire, Mongol armies primarily fought each other in internecine wars. It became increasingly difficult to share training, technology, and personnel.

Mountain areas have faced a rapid increase in human activities over recent decades, often leading to habitat loss or degradation. The impacts of these activities can affect bird species both directly (e.g., by altering habitat characteristics, impacting migration or disturbing breeding or wintering grounds), and indirectly by inducing physiological responses. We summarize the human activities that take place at high elevation and provide examples of species that are known to be impacted. Hiking and winter sports in particular are common in many mountain regions and there is growing evidence of a range of impacts on year-round resident mountain birds and their food resources. Increasing evidence also suggests that use of, and dependence on, human-derived foods around human settlements affects the trophic ecology of high-altitude birds. Hunting mountain birds is common place in many areas, and we review the evidence that hunting activity, including illegal persecution, has had impacts at the population level. Finally, we assess how direct disturbance and habitat alteration due to renewable energy developments (i.e. wind turbines and hydropower) are affecting mountain bird communities. There are many unknown impacts of human disturbance and we highlight missing information on specific topics that should be investigated in future research.

Plutarch is often seen nowadays as a champion of the animal cause, and virtually as a precursor of the modern pro-animal argument. It is important, however, to recognize that the prominence of animals in Plutarch’s work is symptomatic of the widespread and vibrant textual experimentation with animals in imperial Greco-Roman literature. The trend peaks in the second century AD, but animals were relevant within imperial philosophical thought too. Like many authors (and their ancient readers), Plutarch draws upon and responds to (a) the rich and abiding literary tradition of mobilizing animal imagery and themes and (b) the long-established philosophical debate on animal psychology and rationality, with far-reaching ethical implications about how animals should be treated. The chapter surveys the attitudes toward animals across the Plutarchan corpus and offers in-depth contextualization of the dialogues De sollertia animalium and the notoriously ironic Gryllus.

To claim Russia as an Arctic empire requires some consideration of both the concepts of Arctic and empire. First, despite the fact that little of Russia’s imperial territory lies above the Arctic Circle, its rulers have nonetheless long governed predominantly cold lands and seas – colder, in fact, than many places north of the circle.1 Therefore, this chapter will discuss Russian activities that sometimes occurred far outside a strict geographical understanding of the Arctic. These include the area known as the ‘Russian North’ (Russkii Sever) around the White Sea basin and to the south along the Northern Dvina River and its tributaries. It also includes the northern Urals and large portions of northern Siberia. Very little of Siberia lies above the Arctic Circle, but much of this part of Eurasia experiences Arctic conditions. Treeless permafrost predominates north of 60°.

Conservation strategies for pileated gibbons (Hylobates pileatus) in Thailand have included protection, community-based initiatives and reintroductions. Besides conservation interventions, we also believe that topographic characters (i.e. elevation, slope and distance from forest border) should be considered when reducing hunting pressures on gibbons in Ta-riu Tributary, Khao Soi Dao Wildlife Sanctuary (KSD). However, limited access of poachers to the area occupied by pileated gibbons also limits rangers’ ability to patrol at the same time. In this case, community-based conservation strategies should be considered. However, for areas close to the forest border without gibbon populations, reintroduction strategies should be considered. Therefore, in order to select the most suitable conservation strategy for each area, correlation and linear regression between the number of pileated gibbon groups and topographic characters were analysed. Distance from the forest border significantly affects the number of pileated gibbon groups. Thus, this factor was used to select the suitable conservation strategy in both Ta-riu Tributary and the wildlife sanctuary. Community-based conservation strategies should benefit 6 per cent of the wildlife sanctuary forested area, whilst protection and reintroduction strategies would benefit 58 and 36 per cent, respectively. We recommend that Ta-riu Tributary should be the priority area for pileated gibbon conservation in KSD.

Close examination of Etruscan and Anatolian depictions of dogs from the sixth century BCE reveals curious connections and a common artistic language. In fact, the context, medium, and style of dogs are so strikingly similar that these depictions merit review not just for their shared artistic styles but also customs and values. Dogs at banquets, chariot races, and hunting scenes speak to analogous aristocratic practices in two distinctly different regions. The premise for this study is not necessarily to discover who did what first, because our evidence from the ancient world is so fragmentary, but to explore how these two regions, separated by quite a distance, practiced artistic exchange. One exceptional example of a very unique dog-lead shows that technology was also shared vis-à-vis dogs. Since poetry and monuments have dominated the discourse in ancient Mediterranean studies for centuries, such topics as comparing detailed depictions of dogs can further enhance our understanding of exchange in the ancient Mediterranean.