Harriet Ritvo is very well known to scholars in animal studies and the history of biology. Her groundbreaking work has inspired innumerable books on animals in history, including her own Johns Hopkins series Animals, History, Culture and the Reaktion sequence which, at one volume per animal, now stretches to over fifty books. Ritvo's books The Animal Estate (1987) and The Platypus and the Mermaid (1997) were both classic studies of the cultural contingencies of animal taxonomy in particular, and of human–animal relations generally. More recently, The Dawn of Green (2009) has struck out into environmental history, relocating the relationships discussed in these earlier volumes beyond the confines of human culture, and placing them within the landscape itself. Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras fills in some of Ritvo's output in the decade-long gaps between these monographs (mostly the first two), being a collection of essays previously published in sundry journals and edited volumes.

Lord Morton's mare casts her stripy shadow over a good deal of the book. Her first foal, sired by a quagga (a now-extinct relative of the zebra), turned out somewhat stripy – so far so unsurprising – but so did her two subsequent offspring, born to a black Arabian stallion. This Victorian factoid (the results were first reported in 1821) was supposedly proof of telegony, the ongoing influence of a female's first mate. Lord Morton's tale loomed large over warnings to breeders of all sorts for the next century. They needed to guard the virginity of their animal charges every bit as carefully as that of their women; a stray mongrel could wreck the pedigree of a good bitch's descendants. Eighty years later, similar experiments were reprised by James Cossar Ewart and displayed at the Royal Agricultural Society of England; opinions were divided on the use and utility of his investigations, although the takings of his show (an additional sixpence on general admittance) were healthy.

This example highlights several key themes of Ritvo's collected scholarship: pedigree (both human and animal), provenance, gender, farming, commerce and display. The Victorians were both sceptical of this stand-alone anecdote, and unable to jettison it completely, so well did it fulfil certain cultural norms. Charles Darwin was by no means alone in his attempt to validate it through recourse to atavism, in his Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication. And speaking of this book, Ritvo's foreword to it, reprinted here, is probably the most succinct account of Darwin's changing, and non-neo-Darwinian, conceptions of evolution that I have read. Ritvo offers a similarly definitive account of human/animal différance in the paper ‘Our animal cousins’; together with Schiebinger's work in the early modern period, it is an authoritative summary of the multiple and often surprisingly tenuous animal mappings between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

In many ways the Variation is the key intertext for this collection. Ritvo's accounts of animals in human culture cumulatively reassert artificial breeding as synecdoche for evolution, not merely its metonym or analogy. Her volume constitutes a counternarrative to the traditional Darwinian history; she demonstrates that beliefs and practices of animal husbandry as craft have a long tale (/tail) of their own, ramifying into diverse areas of culture, of which ‘science’ is merely the tip of the iceberg. We cannot separate, Ritvo implies, the stories of humans and animals, whether those stories masquerade as ‘historical’ or ‘scientific’.

Ritvo comments that when she began her career ‘it was considered both unusual and eccentric’ to study animals (p. 1). Reassembling Ritvo's essays in chronological order, one sees how she has been able to grow increasingly specific and go deeper as time went by. In her later pieces Ritvo no longer has to scope out the ground, but can indulge in species-specificity – in detail, in complexity and in ambiguity. That some of this collection now appears to be common knowledge amongst historians of biology is testimony to the authority and influence of Ritvo's oeuvre thus far. Her newer work on environmental history gestures at a historical imbrication of humans and animals that comes to terms both with history and with science: neither naively biologized nor wilfully humanized as cultural history. Ritvo's is a rapprochement that is of great value in these days of environmental crisis.