ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book traces the stories of animals and their human co-travelers in times past. It talks about texture and shape to the various ways that particularly located humans have relied on nonhumans for food, labor, transportation, companionship, prestige, moral uplift, and place-making. The book discusses living is only possible through constant entanglement with the more-than-human, even if some people have worked desperately to deny this inevitable connection. It also discusses human–animal dynamics and practices, de-extinction seeks to re-write the most injurious of those historical relations. The book examines separation is a fiction, and often a function of speciesism, but one that has been durable and pernicious. It also examines specificities of human–nonhuman relations so as to be clear, as Erica Fudge has recently noted, that "the past is made by all its inhabitants".
