**POSTPONED** – Chinchillas: From Wilderness to Breeding Farms, from the Andes to Southern California

At the turn of the twentieth century, the chinchilla was on the verge of extinction. As international prices and demand soared, the Chilean-German scientist Federico Albert wrote in 1901, hunters and the fur industry had declared “a war to death against the chinchillas.” The imminent extinction of the chinchilla and the destruction of their habitat worried people like Albert. Part of the conservationist generation of the early twentieth century, Albert and his contemporaries advocated for rational exploitation of nature, strong and modern public institutions, and laws to regulate logging, hunting, and fishing. They also believed hunters were primitive and barbaric, whose methods and greed wiped out wildlife. Angela Vergara will discuss how Latin American experts responded to the chinchilla extinction in the 1910s, and how their failure led to domestication, breeding, and ranching. By the 1920s, a new landscape emerged: cages replaced natural burrows, and family farms and laborers replaced hunters. Moreover, this landscape would be replicated in different parts of the world, from Chile to the West of the United States to South Africa.

Speaker:

Angela Vergara
Department of History, California State University Los Angeles

Cost: Free and Open to the Public

Hybrid event – REGISTER FOR ZOOM OPTION HERE