The Intimate Bond

by Brian Fagan

  The Cat That Urinated

  My cats walk over my computer keyboard with promiscuous impunity, usually when I’m editing an intricate sentence. They protest indignantly when I tactfully suggest they move off, but at least they don’t stroll through with inky paws. No such luck in medieval times, when monasteries kept cats around libraries to hunt the mice and rats that feasted off manuscripts. A monk working at the Deventer monastery in the Netherlands in about 1420 made the mistake of leaving his manuscript out overnight. A library feline decided this was an ideal place to urinate. Next morning, the scribe found his precious manuscript ruined by a urine stain. He cursed, drew hands pointing to the stain and a sketch of the beast, and then wrote (in Latin): “There is nothing missing, but a cat urinated on this during a certain night. Cursed be the pesky cat that urinated over this book during the night in Deventer and because of it many others [other cats], too. And beware well not to leave open books at night where cats can come.”15 The monk appears to have shrugged, drawn his arrows and cursed the cat, and then turned the page and continued writing, presumably inhaling the scent of cat urine for some hours.

  Mice were also pests, even when the scribes were at work. The twelfth-century Bohemian scribe and artist Hildebert found a mouse on his tabletop consuming his cheese. Apparently, this was not the first time. A picture in a manuscript shows the monk with a raised stone trying to kill the creature. He wrote in the book, “Most wretched mouse, often you provoke me to anger. May God destroy you!”16

  For all their paw marks and defiling of precious manuscripts, cats were apparently valued by monastic communities for their hunting prowess, as they had been by the Ancient Egyptians and others. A ninth-century Irish monk wrote a poem about his white cat Pangur Bán, which begins:

  I and my Pangur Bán my cat,

  ’Tis a like task we are at:

  Hunting mice is his delight,

  Hunting words I sit all night.17

  For all the brutality and hard work, the relationships between medieval owners and their beasts were much more intimate than those today. Closer relationships with animals were commonplace during centuries when herds were still small. Shepherds knew the faces of their sheep and those of their neighbors’, even the footprints of their charges. Almost invariably, cattle received names, and were often decorated with bells and ribbons, just as the Nuer adorned their beasts. A rich vocabulary of calls and words summoned animals, or encouraged them while plowing, a practice with deep roots in the remote past. Farm animals were really part of the human family. As the natural philosopher Sir Kenelm Digby wrote in 1658, “There’s not the meanest cottager but hath a cow to furnish his family with milk; ’tis the principal sustenance of the poorer sort of people . . .which makes them very careful of the good keeping and health of their cows.”18

  For centuries, too, humans and animals lived under the same roof, often in long houses that were combination dwellings and animal byres, accessible one from the other. One writer of 1682 described “every edifice” as a “Noah’s Ark,” where cows, pigs, chickens, and the human family all slept together under the same roof. Farmers finally began moving animals out of their homes during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but such cohabitation persisted in some parts of the Britain and Ireland, and in Europe, into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The affectionate naming of farm animals was commonplace in many rural European communities continuing into modern times, a custom known from Greece as early as Mycenaean times, some three thousand years ago. The Victorian poet Jane Ingelow waxed lyrical about cows in a medieval meadow as if they were familiar parts of a family linked by simple verbal bonds, using what she thought was spelling of the time:

  “Come uppe Whitefoot, come uppe Lightfoot,

  Come uppe Jetty, rise and follow

  Jerry to the milking shed.”19

  In cities and over much of the countryside, this was already changing.

  *In this chapter, also chapters 15–18, my narrative focuses mainly on Britain, seemingly at the expense of other parts of the world. This was a conscious decision on my part, based on the literature available to me, on space, and on my linguistic skills. There is, of course, an abundant literature on animals from other parts of the world, much, but not all, of which mirrors the developments described in these pages.

  CHAPTER 15

  “The Hell for Dumb Animals”

  In an era of luxury sedans and SUVs, of freeways, car parks, and airlines, it’s hard for us to imagine what it must have been like living in a world utterly dependent on animals for farm work, load carrying, and transportation. Our perspectives extend over thousands of kilometers, around the world. Automobile journeys of five hundred kilometers (about three hundred miles) are routine. The viewpoints of people dependent on donkeys, horses, and mules were far narrower, except for the privileged few, who traveled laboriously and regularly over long distances, usually on horseback. But by the late eighteenth century, what is commonly known as the Industrial Revolution was changing the relationship between animals and people profoundly. The growth of cities in particular worsened the plight of beasts of all kinds.

  In cities and towns, animals were everywhere, crowded into houses and small yards; cows were even being milked in the streets. London poulterers kept hundreds of chickens in cellars and attics. As late as the nineteenth century, some people still reared chickens in their bedrooms and kept horses inside urban residences. Pigs were a public nuisance, wandering the streets and starting fires by brushing straw into embers. They often bit, or even killed, young children. By the eighteenth century, England had a higher number of domesticated beasts per cultivated hectare than any other country except the Netherlands.1 Few people walked in the British countryside if they could avoid it. Horses were like servants: they served their masters and mistresses. They were also the preferred draft animals, while oxen became a dietary staple, especially in growing towns and cities.

  Turning Meat into Money

  By the time of the Industrial Revolution, the English had developed an insatiable appetite for beef. As early as 1624, the writer Henry Peacham declared that London “eateth more good beef and mutton in one month than all Spain, Italy, and a part of France in a whole year.”2 Just under a century later, in 1748, the Swedish-Finnish explorer Pehr Kalm visited England. He remarked that “I do not believe that any Englishman who is his own master has ever eaten dinner without meat.”3 Beef, mutton, and pork had become serious business. By 1726, London butchers alone slaughtered a hundred thousand beeves (fattened cattle), a hundred thousand calves, and six hundred thousand sheep annually. Roast beef became a national symbol in a country where sailors in the Royal Navy received 94 kilograms (208 pounds) of beef and 47 kilograms (104 pounds) of pork a year, even if only a quarter of the population could afford to eat meat once a week. The scientific establishment in the form of the Royal Society encouraged the study of animals, an exploration of their advantages to humanity “as food or physic.”

  The selective breeding of domestic animals had a long history, notably that of horses for farming, industry, and war. Now the scale of breeding experiments reached new levels. Some innovative farmers turned their attention to systematic breeding of cattle, dogs, and sheep, to the point that a kind of social hierarchy among beasts developed, with the equine thoroughbred at the pinnacle. Until the late seventeenth century, farmers kept cows in small numbers as part of a menagerie that supported the household. As the productivity of crops improved, and more fodder was available for animals, herds became larger, albeit inefficiently managed ones. Meat consumption was soaring in cities and towns, so larger farms now fattened beasts for sale to urban markets, and ways of moving them for sale improved. Subsistence animal husbandry was on the way out.

  The size of animals slowly increased, too, especially after the late 1700s, as attitudes toward cattle changed profoundly. Once like individual members of the household, they now became meat on the hoof, to the point that land was thought of in terms of
pounds per acre. One observer remarked of Leicester and Northampton that “from 128 to 160 lb. [58 to 72.5 kilograms] per acre, of beef or mutton, is as much as can be bred and fatted on good pasture land.” The cattle themselves were fattened for meat, especially when old and worn out. Then there were the by-products: “His skin and his suet sell for a good price. Even his horn and his gall fetch somewhat.”4 However, stockbreeding was still a haphazard business, where size was the primary interest, and strong legs for plowing—until Robert Bakewell came along.

  Bakewell’s Beasts

  If one person can be said to have transformed stock husbandry, it was the Leicestershire farmer Robert Bakewell (1726–1795), who lived at Dishley, near Loughborough, in central England.5 A visitor described him as “a tall, broad-shouldered, stout man of brown-red complexion, clad in a loose brown coat, scarlet waistcoat, leather breeches, and top-boots.”6 Bakewell was a professional farmer, not landed gentry, who inherited his farm from his father. His hands-on approach to animals led him to breeding experiments, first with carthorses, which he sought to improve for better load hauling. He developed a thick, short-bodied animal with short legs. Such beasts looked like medieval warhorses. They were highly prized for plowing light soils and by urban draymen.

  Bakewell treated his animals kindly and guarded his secrets jealously, so much so that he is said to have infected the sheep he sold to market with the rot (a wasting disease), so they couldn’t be used for breeding. He also bred cattle for the butcher—heaviest in the joints that yielded the most meat. “Small in size and great in value” was the motto of this eccentric gentleman, who displayed the skeletons of his most famous animals on his walls, and joints that showed off their best features. His hospitality was so lavish to one and all that he is said to have died bankrupt.

  With ruthless intensity, Bakewell dismissed as irrelevant all such traditional points of admiration as head shape, legs, horns, or color. He raised animals of the same form and family. He bred what he considered the finest specimens of the breed, selected for quality of flesh and fatness. Bakewell’s cattle were machines for turning meat into money. They produced meat and fat, not milk. Others focused on milk to make cheese. Leicestershire, for example, became famous for its cheese, including the famous Stilton, still the prince of blue cheeses, first produced by a Mrs. Paulet of that county in the 1760s.

  Bakewell’s greatest success was with sheep; he bred long-wool animals from Leicestershire and Worcestershire and created the “new Leicester,” a hardy, small-boned sheep that matured so rapidly that he was able to bring new sheep to market in two years. New Leicesters were a highly profitable sheep for those who raised them. Bakewell made more than three thousand guineas (about five thousand dollars today) by renting out his prize rams. The success of the New Leicester led to experiments with other breeds, such as the Lincolnshire beasts, with their heavier fleeces. In time, focused breeding led to native sheep dying out in the face of improved animals, adapted to a variety of different environments. Bakewell’s objective was always meat and wool yield, to make money in the marketplace.

  Figure 15.1 A New Leicester (Dishley) sheep, created by Robert Bakewell. Superstock.

  Cattle breeding became quite fashionable, especially among wealthy landowners. Hubback, a prize shorthorn bull owned by Charles Collet of Lincolnshire, who had learned from Bakewell, traveled throughout England between 1801 and 1810 in a specially constructed carriage. Thousands of farmers admired Hubback as an example of an ideal ox. As Bakewell’s standards of excellence became widely recognized, the size and weight of animals sold at market rose dramatically, with the weight of sheep alone rising from 13 to 36 kilograms (28.6 to 79.0 pounds) between 1710 and 1795. Careful breeding had much to do with this increase. So did the policy of enclosing land and reducing open fields and the commons, at the time a highly controversial move. However, it had the effect of allowing the cultivation of such crops as turnips and clover, which doubled the carrying capacity of the land. At the same time, earlier maturation meant that animals could be fattened much faster, although the quality of the lighter wool from free-ranging sheep that matured more slowly was much better. This would eventually trigger a lengthy dispute between clothing manufacturers and farmers.

  Population Growth Depersonalizes Animals

  Old subsistence-farming practices that basically fed families for minimal outlay gradually yielded to new strategies that involved the much-larger-scale use of fertilizers such as cattle manure and a curious clay-and-phosphate-rich shell mixture from the Norfolk coast known as crag. Farmers grew not only cereals, but also animal feed: clover, beans, barley meal, and hay. Instead of cattle and sheep becoming mere bags of skin and bones by the end of winter, the herds survived the winter comfortably. The owner doubled his return on his money, bringing his beasts to market in half the time. The feed and fertilizer became meat; the manure supply improved in both quantity and quality, with the aid of advances in chemical research.

  These developments changed attitudes toward farm animals profoundly. Inevitably, farm animals became statistics rather than individuals, which took into account their marketability, the level of meat production, and the density of customer populations. By the end of the eighteenth century, farm animals were mathematized. The bodies of animals gradually became entities translated into abstract numbers, prices, and pounds per acre grazed. One can hardly blame those who raised farm animals. They faced an insatiable demand for meat from exploding urban populations. Six hundred fifty thousand people lived in London’s inner precincts in 1750. At least 74,000 cattle and 570,000 sheep passed through the city’s Smithfield meat market alone that year.7 A century later, the population was about 2.6 million, 2.3 million in Inner London. Two hundred twenty thousand head of cattle and 1.5 million sheep now perished at Smithfield annually. To give some perspective, the population of the entire Roman Empire was between 4 and 5 million people in the first century CE. Similar population growth affected European cities: Paris, 556,000 in 1750, 1.3 million in 1850; Berlin, 90,000 in 1750, 419,000 a century later. (In 2014, London’s population is 8.2 million, Birmingham’s 1 million.) The skyrocketing demand for meat in growing cities large and small helped turn animals into packaged commodities, measured in pounds raised per hectare. This was, in a sense, both a calculating form of Cartesianism and a reflection of an inconspicuous but desperate need for society to feed more mouths than ever before. Even as recently as 1914, millions of poor Europeans almost never ate meat, subsisting on a predominantly carbohydrate diet based heavily on bread.

  The population-growth curve accelerated throughout the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Market economies replaced subsistence agriculture as industrial societies became more urbanized, less close to the land. In the past, animals had played a major role in determining how people lived. Now the reverse became true, at some still-undetermined moment when human society achieved a critical mass where animals had to become a commodity if industrial civilization were to thrive. At the individual level, one could always find people who enjoyed deep personal relationships with a specific animal—for example, a sheepdog, or two or three dairy cows. By no means were all animals thought of as commodities, but many were depersonalized in ways that marked a profound change in our relationship with beasts.

  Figure 15.2 Smithfield Market in 1855. Superstock.

  The Plight of Working Animals

  As the Industrial Revolution took hold, horse-powered agricultural machinery such as plows and threshers gradually improved agricultural productivity. Some horse-drawn plows were said to decrease plowing time by as much as a third. Most farm and city horses toiled for long hours and were often worked to death. The market for working horseflesh was enormous. Horse fairs flourished throughout Britain, coinciding with a growing demand for driving horses to haul traps and heavier conveyances, and for large animals for heavy agriculture. In time, breeders crossed heavy farm horses with lighter mares, producing fast, agile animals that had both strength and stam
ina. As early as 1669, the combination of the two forms produced the animals that pulled fast horse-drawn coaches. By the end of Charles II’s reign, in 1685, three express coaches a week ran from London to all major towns, capable of covering eighty kilometers (fifty miles) a day, when conditions were favorable. When the mail coach service began toward the end of the eighteenth century, the network relied on regularly spaced coaching inns, which kept large numbers of horses for coaches that carried both goods and passengers.

  Working horses suffered from often-brutal treatment. Overburdened draft animals died in harness, cast into ditches to serve as dog meat when they collapsed from exhaustion. Drivers carried enormous whips to lash their beasts. Even horses used by the aristocracy often suffered harsh treatment. Worn-out animals were slaughtered indiscriminately, their hides worth more than their flesh. A life of overwork awaited almost all horses, except those that contributed to their owner’s self-esteem or social prestige. The courage and nobility of such animals were much praised, especially when more humane training methods came into common use during the seventeenth century. But everywhere, horses died by the thousand each year. They might have been grand beasts with graceful motions, but no one was in any doubt that they were subservient to humans, for as eighteenth-century zoologist Thomas Pennant put it, the horse “was endowed with every quality that can make it subservient to the uses of mankind.”8