Abstract

Feeding Zoology. How Animals were Fed in Nineteenth‐Century Zoology. Although feeding is an essential and existential part of animal breeding and keeping, it is an entirely neglected practice in the history of (experimental) zoology. Following the metabolic relations of colonial consumerism, acclimatization, and animal fancying, this paper reconstructs the divers origins of this practice and thus the origin of experimental zoology. As feeding in this context was and still is considered to be essentially non‐epistemic, it is argued that this approach allows to reconstruct the ontologies of the respective field, i.e., the emergence of artificial environments and of a contingent set of animals from a hybrid space between animal fancying and zoology.