At a Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Center in West Los Angeles, traumatised parrots and former soldiers participate in an experimental therapy programme aimed at overcoming the wounds of war and abandonment. Drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben and Peter Sloterdijk, this article uses the VA parrot therapy programme to develop an interspecies account of trauma in and beyond language that emphasises the dangers of isolation and denaturalisation. Looking after parrots, veterans reacclimate themselves to an alternative mode of existence centred around care for the other. This article reflects on the possibilities for therapeutic encounter-value in processes such as this, where humans and non-humans are ‘becoming-well-together’. At stake in these multispecies encounters is a form of care critical for a world filled with too many traumatised beings.

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Cold War curiosities about the dangers of radiation generated significant funding for an array of biomedical projects as enticing as they were unpredictable, introducing newly standardized experimental animals into laboratories and a novel merging of scientific disciplines. The desire to understand radiation's effects on human longevity spurred a multi-sited, multi-decade project that subjected beagle dogs to varying degrees of irradiation. One of those laboratories, located at the southern tip of the campus of the University of California, Davis, eventually hosted an elaborate experimental breeding kennel and a population of 'control' dogs that set new milestones for canine longevity. The present article examines this gerontological spin-off experiment, using the study of aging as a method and object in order to analyze the emergence and disappearance of the Davis Radiobiology Laboratory and explore how research using new canine model organisms mirrored the politics and anxieties faced by citizens and scientists of the era, here termed 'species projection'.

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This article offers a canine history of the "critical period" concept, situating its emergence within a growing, interdisciplinary network of canine behavior studies that connected eugenically minded American veterinarians, behavioral geneticists, and dog lovers with large institutional benefactors. These studies established both logistical and conceptual foundations for large-scale science with dogs while establishing a lingering interdependence between American dog science and eugenics. The article emphasizes the importance of dogs as subjects of ethological study, particularly in the United States, where some of the earliest organized efforts to analyze canine behavior began. Further, the article argues that the "critical period" is important not only for its lasting prominence in multiple fields of scientific inquiry, but also as a historiographical tool, one that invites reflection on the tendency of historians to emphasize a particular narrative structure of scientific advancement.