BARON Nicolas

During the twentieth century, the Dordogne River (southwest of France) has recorded in its middle reach, several morphological changes, due to different human pressures (dams gravel minings and bank protections). To evaluate and quantify the unit and cumulative effects of these pressures, historical data (old maps, aerial photographs, longitudinal bed profiles, cross-sections, LiDAR survey, flow series) and in situ measurements (grain size analysis, fine sedimentation and bedload transport monitoring) were collected and analysed. Historical data show a decrease of potentially critical discharge frequency, a general trend towards riverbed incision and active channel narrowing. Field data (bedload transport, sediment input and storage) provide additional information to establish a sediment budget, to assess transport capacity and to separate and hierarch the role of each factor. The sediment budget assessment emphasizes an upstream deficit due to dams and a second, more generalized induced by mining, and whose effects persist due to the hydrological regulation of the dams By assuming ? the animal point of view ? developed by Eric Baratay and by crossing history with ethology and veterinary, this thesis aims at retracing the experience of the animals in front of rabies in France from the end of the eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth century. Unequally affected by the rabies virus, the different animal species (wolf, fox, dog, cat, farm animals, laboratory animals...) show impressive troubles, like abnormal aggressiveness, and undergo measures decided by the humans (mutilations, vaccination, extermination...). In front of the illness and of the humans actions, the animals react and resist, which are evidences of the animal agency.