ABSTRACT
The simplest kind of history records animals' enlistment in great human historical phenomena, because documents are aplenty and it is possible to understand the way animals experienced these phenomena in their mind and in their flesh. The importance of individual factors must encourage to build a second type of history, centred on individuals, through the composition of animal biographies. Aware of the danger, the few professional or amateur historians who have recently attempted to deal with the life of famous animals have preferred to tackle the subject from the human angle, by focusing on the intellectual, political, social or artistic upheaval these animals caused. That is why animal histories must be subsumed within an ethological history, centred on animals and on their transformations and working on the fundamental assumption that species, groups and individuals experience a continual process of adaptation to their ecological and human conditions, and so that there is a fluctuation in animals' behaviour, collective life and culture.
