Animal Metropolis brings a Canadian perspective to the growing field of animal history, ranging across species and cities, from the beavers who engineered Stanley Park to the carthorses who shaped the city of Montreal. Some essays consider animals as spectacle: orca captivity in Vancouver, polar bear tourism in Churchill, Manitoba, fish on display in the Dominion Fisheries Museum, and the racialized memory of Jumbo the elephant in St. Thomas, Ontario. Others examine the bodily intimacies of shared urban spaces: the regulation of rabid dogs in Banff, the maternal politics of pure milk in Hamilton and the circulation of tetanus bacilli from horse to human in Toronto. Another considers the marginalization of women in Canada's animal welfare movement. The authors collectively push forward from a historiography that features nonhuman animals as objects within human-centered inquiries to a historiography that considers the eclectic contacts, exchanges, and cohabitation of human and nonhuman animals.

Despite the popular assumption that wildlife conservation is a recent phenomenon, it emerged over a century and a half ago in an era more closely associated with wildlife depletion than preservation. As Darcy Ingram shows in Wildlife, Conservation, and Conflict in Quebec, many of the wildlife conservation strategies currently in place today were inspired by a longstanding belief in progress, improvement, and social order. However, these early strategies were not as forward-focused as they appear. Ingram traces the emergence of a lease-based regulatory system that blended elite forms of sport and conservation. Applied first to British North America's prized salmon rivers, this system came to encompass the bulk of Quebec's hunting and fishing territories. The partnership between lessees, the province, and fish and game clubs effectively privatized Quebec's wildlife resources, often to the detriment of commercial and subsistence hunters and fishers.