Discussing her art practice recently, Myfanwy MacLeod spoke of a childhood fascination with two unlikely figures: Walt Disney and Marlin Perkins. For North American baby boomers (and those on their generational coattails like Generation X), Disney and Perkins were quietly influential personalities whose respective and long-running television series The Wonderful World of Disneyland Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, dominated the airwaves at a critical time — Sunday nights when families, for a relatively brief but historically potent moment —gathered to watch television together. Airing back-to-back on television during the supper hour, these two series introduced post-war children to an elaborate omnibus of images and stories about both real and fictional animals, and at least for North American audiences, helped shape our perceptions of the natural world.

Through the lenses of these two men — in a world populated by smiling cartoon and animatronic creatures and narrated with sonorous metaphors of herds and prides that were “just like us”— the natural world was anthropomorphized into a corollary and extension of human society. Beyond our domestic borders and our historically cultivated relationship with dogs, cats, and farm animals, they helped shape a radical view of wild animals. No longer a trophy or food staple, animals were something to be marveled at and, perhaps for the first time, protected. It was a new role for us, and we imagined they would be as eager to get to know us as we them. Into this mix, and perhaps with obvious purpose, Alfred Hitchcock’s infamous 1963 film The Birds came as a shocking repudiation, a movie in which the antagonism of the animal kingdom was both vehement and unexplained.