China alone, for example, has an estimated seven hundred million pigs—nearly seven times as many as the United States. India has nearly three hundred million cattle. And if the human population grows by two to three billion in the next fifty years, as expected, we’re likely to add billions more domesticated animals to today’s totals, causing further habitat loss and declines in populations of wild mammals. The domestic-to-wild ratio has generally been a zero-sum game, with increases in domesticated animals resulting in greater loss of the wild ones. There still exists an amazing diversity of life on the planet, and major efforts are under way to preserve what remains. But the most abundant animals are a relative handful of domesticated breeds. If you count chickens and rabbits, there may be close to a hundred billion domesticated mammals and birds in the world. The Mesozoic era was the age of dinosaurs; the Cenozoic era was the age of mammals; and today, we live in the age of domesticated animals.
Among large animals, most are here because we encourage or allow their presence. With domesticated animals, we create them, kill most of them for food, and then create more of them. Our involvement in their lives is direct, complete, and intimate, as we typically control everything from the location and timing of reproduction, to their diet, to the means of death. Although that’s not the case for wild animals—unless they are captive—even they survive largely because of a conscious decision on our part to protect them, or at least to not eradicate them. Every other year, for example, representatives from more than 150 nations gather to set rules on the commercial exploitation and trade in wild animal populations, with life-and-death debates and votes on the fate of elephants, whales, turtles, and hundreds of other species.
Domestication may seem like a historical inevitability, perhaps because cattle, sheep, and others are so central to our way of life. Christian tradition places the newborn Jesus in a manger with domesticated animals gathered round. What could better demonstrate the rootedness of these animals in Western culture than their presence at the Savior’s birth? But it’s important to remember that for most of history, humans killed animals without ever assuming complete control over them, except at the point of taking their lives. The animals were free—reproducing naturally, using their wits and physical skills to find food, and living day to day without any human influence. Domestication is among the most far-reaching innovations of humankind, as significant as the development of human language, the control of fire, or the harnessing of steam and fossil fuels for energy.
Early hominids could not possibly have foreseen how domestication would play out. It may have been driven by raw need, but much came of what they started, and the human-animal bond traces back to them—including one of the most enduring friendships on earth. Our special regard for dogs likely began when prehistoric people scavenged the remains of wolf kills, or wolves scavenged the remains of human kills, instilling a sense of familiarity. With wolves acting as sentries, and benefiting by feeding on meat scraps, humans may have slept more soundly, providing what must have been a very prized benefit. Maybe humans studied the way wolves hunted in groups and learned from it. Quite possibly our ancestors also took in the orphaned young of wolves and raised the pups among humans. Women and children may have played with wolf pups, and nursing mothers may have even allowed them to suckle. With the barriers broken down, humans and juvenile wolves may have kept each other warm by sleeping side by side. However it all happened, it is indisputable that Paleolithic wolves not uncommonly came under human control, and an everlasting bond was formed.
Over the millennia, dogs have become remarkably specialized, with widely different sizes and functions, through countless generations of selective breeding. Some dogs have been bred to protect people and their property, whereas others have been bred to herd farm animals. There are a variety of breeds with specialized hunting abilities. Some chase and corner prey; others point or flush upland game birds such as pheasants or grouse; and still others retrieve waterfowl. In the Arctic, huskies pull sleds, allowing people to cover vast terrain; though snowmobiles have diminished the need for such work, today’s mushing events are competitive celebrations of this legacy. Dogs also work for us in other ways, helping police to chase down criminals and the military to detect explosives. They serve as rescuers, sniffing out people trapped in the rubble of buildings brought down by earthquakes or other calamities. They guide the blind, and they act as therapy animals. If you have a dog and think of him or her as part of the family, you are in good company with people everywhere on earth.
Sheep, goats, pigs, and cattle (probably in that order) came after the domestication of the dog—all about ten thousand to thirteen thousand years ago. Humans enlisted them to produce meat, milk products, and clothing, and, in the case of cattle, labor. Humans domesticated plants about the same time, allowing them to reduce their dependence on hunting. Domestication allowed humans to live in fixed settlements, which grew as people accumulated food. These expanded communities required more complex social, political, and economic organization. And this affected human health, religious practices, literature, art, science, culture, and just about everything else. Take any ancient civilization, in China, Egypt, or the Indus Valley, and progress began with the domestication of plants and animals.
Since that defining point cattle have been present in almost every culture. Today, the U.S. cattle industry is worth $76 billion annually, while the Brazilian and European industries generate billions in commerce too. Along with goats and sheep, cattle are kept by the thirty million to forty million nomadic pastoralists in Asia and Africa, and these communities still have a wide range of rituals associated with the care of the animals. In India, which has more cows than any other nation, the animals are venerated in Vedic scriptures and are treated like “one’s mother” because they give milk. They are generally not killed for food. There are cow shelters throughout India, which were some of the first animal shelters anywhere in the world. The followers of Jainism, an ancient religion in India, were the first to set up animal hospitals.
Of the one hundred fifty or so species of large, herbivorous wild terrestrial mammals in the world above seventy-five pounds, only fourteen have been successfully domesticated. Zebras, wisents (European buffalo), and Cape buffalo are just a few of the species that did not submit to the demand to live and breed in close quarters with people. Candidates for domestication needed the right temperament and behavioral traits to be tamed. Humans have had more luck with smaller species, from the fox to the mink, in the last two centuries. But for those larger animals who were trusting and malleable enough, the new relationship changed everything.
Horses were among the most difficult of animals to domesticate. They are high-strung, fright-and-flight animals, and early humans were their unyielding predators. Horses were probably headed toward extinction as a result of human overhunting in the Pleistocene era before domestication changed their fortunes. It’s a sharp turn to go from prey to partner, but horses managed to make it.
Once it happened, first about six thousand years ago, the domestication of horses had an enormous impact. Originally used for meat and milk, and then for labor, their greatest utility came in transport and battle, aiding the ascendancy of empires throughout the world. Horses enabled the extension of Roman power, tilling fields and transporting cargoes to the far corners of the empire. Genghis Khan and his army galloped on horseback from the steppes of eastern Asia to establish the largest contiguous empire in history in the thirteenth century. With the aid of horses, Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro vanquished the much larger force of the Incan empire in the Andes Mountains in the sixteenth century. Without horses, these and many other momentous turns in history would never have come to pass, and of course the same is true in American history. Manifest Destiny advanced across the continent with the gallop of a horse.
Yet despite their service to humanity, many horses were overworked, whipped, and exposed to extreme weather—abuses so common that they gave rise to the humane movement
in the nineteenth century. By the twentieth century, railroads and later the internal combustion engine diminished the need for horses, who assumed a largely recreational role in America and other advanced countries. In much of the developing world, though, horses and mules are still widely used for labor. Historian David Anthony summarizes, “Horses changed the way people hunted and made war, altered concepts of distance, extended interregional trade, brought previously isolated cultures into contact, provided new standards of wealth, opened the world’s grasslands to efficient human exploitation, and redefined the cultural identities of those societies that became equestrian.” Even today, “horsepower” is the measure of engine might in high-speed transportation.
We can hardly begin to measure the extent to which domestication changed the way humans lived, and it necessarily altered the terms of the human-animal bond. “From being independent coequals or even superiors,” as James Serpell notes, “animals became servants and subordinates, increasingly dependent on people for care and protection.” Instead of simple dependence, the human-animal relationship became one of dominance.
More broadly, agriculture changed not only communities’ means of gathering food, but also their basic economic order. Now people could accumulate goods and exchange them. Bartering turned into trade, and money became the medium of exchange. Where hunting-and-gathering cultures practiced communal living and egalitarianism, agricultural peoples established social hierarchy and class. Property owners brought in laborers to work the land, and before long feudalism and serfdom took hold in some places, and slavery in others.
But it’s simplistic to view domestication as a new form of hierarchy, with animals at the bottom and all people above them. The mere act of raising and tending plants and animals promoted a new intimate connection with other beings. Historian Lewis Mumford argues that pastoralism, by involving humans in the process of producing and maintaining animals, created a new interdependence between living organisms.
This was especially true for domesticated animals. Although people ultimately killed the animals, they first helped give them life, and then nourished and cared for them. The term animal husbandry, literally meaning “bonded to the house,” nicely expresses a sense of kinship and responsibility that once characterized this relationship. There was some level of mutuality, even more so than among nonagricultural people who killed animals but gave nothing back to the animals in return—no nourishment, shelter, or protection. Like Mumford, the contemporary social commentator Jeremy Rifkin believes the practice of nurturing other creatures spilled out and had broader implications for the functioning of these societies. The garden civilizations in the early days of domestication, according to Rifkin, were some of the most peaceful, stable, and self-contained societies.
From the beginning of domestication, to be sure, the human-animal bond was conflicted—with exploitation and compassion living in close quarters. But just as the killing of wild animals posed a moral conflict to the hunter, it was perhaps a greater dilemma for the farmer. This was an era of agrarian living, when by far most people lived on farms tending animals. Farming was modest and personal, with the shepherd and his family knowing the flock and nourishing them—a bond beautifully captured in the biblical story of the poor man and his cherished ewe lamb, who “drank of his own cup, and lay in his bosom, and was unto him as a daughter.”
Animal Sacrifice: “The Perfect Gift”
EVEN THE ANIMAL SACRIFICES we read of from ancient times signify a highly personal moral tension—a recognition that living creatures belong to God and not to man, and that killing animals is a shedding of innocent blood. Animal sacrifice—which today seems needlessly cruel—was humanity’s way of showing respect, to the creature and the Creator alike, and of washing away the taint of violence.
For thousands of years, animal sacrifice was common to agricultural societies. It was practiced in the ancient civilizations in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Assyria, the Indus Valley, and Greece. And for a time it was a ritual in the major monotheistic religions.
There were rules that guided much animal sacrifice, including biblical codes. Often the killing was done just before eating the meat, to ensure that the animal’s carcass was not wasted. Religious scholar Laura Hobgood-Oster says that animal sacrifice “may have also been a way to distribute food,” allowing not just the wealthy to consume meat. Sacrificial rituals mirrored absolution rituals in hunting communities, where shaman conducted rites of atonement after the killing of wild animals. Indeed, priests typically conducted animal sacrifice, with laypersons forbidden from killing domesticated animals.
Only unblemished animals could be sacrificed, and that meant they had to be cared for before slaughter. Jonathan Klawans writes of sacrifice in ancient Israel: “Before any animal can be sacrificed, it must first be protected when born, fed, and then finally guided to its place of slaughter.” The whole practice is predicated on a decent treatment of animals to ensure that they are fit offerings for sacrifice to the Almighty. If they were not well treated, Klawans adds, “there would be nothing left to offer.”
A well-established order prevailed, with the Creator above all things, the people below Him, and the animals below them. The people of Israel begged God for mercy and understood that they had to be merciful to their flock as well—Moses himself, we are told, was chosen because of an act of mercy to a stray lamb. Death was the inevitable result for the sacrificial animal, but there was much more to the exercise before the killing. The general idea was to demonstrate devotion, care for animals, and a humble spirit—virtues today entirely missing from the world of industrialized agriculture.
In the Book of Leviticus, killing maimed animals is strictly forbidden. Leviticus also prohibits killing an animal and her offspring on the same day, partly in recognition of the bond between the animals. Historian Kimberly Patton notes that the animal is a “perfect gift or offering to God…expressing through its own form God’s perfection.”
Patton also argues that ritual slaughter elevates the place of the animal among the flock, though it could hardly have felt that way to the chosen creature: “The sacrificial animal is special, even unique; it is perfect; it is ritually adorned and beautified for its death. It has a special relationship to God and in sacrifice is given back to Him.”
As with the killing of wild animals in many primitive communities, a sense of sorrow is expressed in animal sacrifice, reflecting an understanding of the moral implications of the action. The feeling was also observed by the famed ethnographer Bronislaw Malinowski, who examined animal sacrifice among Trobriand Islanders in the Pacific islands near New Guinea in the early 1900s:
For the act they were about to commit elaborate excuses were offered; they shuddered at the prospect of the sheep’s death, they wept over it as though they were its parents. Before the blow was struck, they implored the beast’s forgiveness. They then addressed themselves to the species to which the beast belonged, as if addressing a large family clan, beseeching it not to seek vengeance for the act that was about to be inflicted on one of its members.
Typically, there is a tradition that sacrificial animals voluntarily submit to their fate. Similarly, hunting-and-gathering people prefer to think that animals offer themselves to the hunter and will not do so again if the pact is violated.
Of course, in the Christian tradition, ages of animal sacrifice ultimately gave way to the willing sacrifice of the Lord, who went to the cross as a lamb to the slaughter. With Jesus having taken upon Himself the sins of man, the rationale for animal sacrifice had vanished. It faded away in Christian practice, even while surviving elsewhere.
Some readers may be surprised to learn that animal sacrifice continues even in our time, though whatever air of piety it might once have conveyed has long since given way to mindless, wholesale butchery. Humanity has learned a few things in two thousand years, and one of those lessons is that real respect is shown in sparing animals from death instead of meting it out. We don’t have the excuse of ignorance
anymore, and we don’t operate under the same harsh necessities of earlier times. Without those justifications, all that’s left are violent and self-serving spectacles with the hollow pretext of religious devotion.
In November 2009, at the Gadhimai Festival in southern Nepal, followers of a Hindu sect killed a staggering five hundred thousand animals in an orgy of animal sacrifice—doubling the number of animals killed at the previous festival five years earlier. The “panch-bali,” or five offerings, involves slicing the throats of five kinds of animals (buffalo, goats, pigs, roosters, and rats). One participant in the slaughter commented, “The more animals I kill, the more satisfied I feel. I am helping an ancient tradition to survive.” A priest declared, “The goddess needs blood. Then that person can make his wishes come true.” In reality, the exercise has no point but to excuse and even encourage bloodlust, and religious and secular leaders in Nepal and India have called for an end to this frenzy of killing. In many Indian states bordering Nepal, it’s seen for what it is and is strictly forbidden.
In the United States, the city of Hialeah, Florida, outlawed animal sacrifice in the 1980s, and authorities arrested a follower of the Afro-Caribbean religion of Santeria for practicing animal sacrifice within city limits. The defendants cast the case as a test of religious freedom, and eventually it was heard in the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices ruled in favor of the defendants on grounds of religious freedom, deciding the legal question but leaving the moral ones unresolved. Animal advocates, including the Humane Society of the United States, sided with the city of Hialeah and against the practitioners of ritual killing, arguing that it is unnecessary and wrong. Although animal sacrifice is still practiced throughout much of the world, and in particular the Islamic world, it does not find much favor in Western societies and is no longer a part of rituals for Buddhists, Christians, Jews, or other major religions. And no one who takes those great religions seriously feels that anything has been lost.
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