Werner Fischel and the Emergence of Animal Psychology

The project studies the establishment of animal psychology as a scientific field at German universities. Of particular interest is the creation of a lectureship at the university of Leipzig in 1941. Focusing on Werner Fischel, who was the lectureship's first occupant, the project studies the entanglement of military and civilian dimensions of animal psychology. Fischel’s ideas on dog training, a topic on which he wrote numerous articles, and its impact on the use of dogs for military service in the Third Reich, provide the basis of this project. His experiments on improving the “experiential knowledge” of dogs and how to best employ such knowledge in the dogs' service at the front are researched in view of the general rise in the interest in animal behavior (and how to control it) during his times. Concurrently, the project questions the idea of an ideal animal type that was created through such research and that has remained rather unchallenged to this day. The results of this project will be published in an edited volume.