The Intimate Bond (2 page)

Caravans of pack animals have been one of the great threads of history for the past five thousand years. They carried commodities and people, rare objects, and diplomatic expeditions, and supported armies. Above all, they fostered interconnectedness between widely separated peoples and states—fostering trade or political interactions and awareness of distant lands and peoples, of cultural diversity. With goods and foodstuffs, ideas passed from Asia to the Mediterranean and from
Africa to the north. We shouldn't ignore the power of the pack animals that provisioned Roman armies and carried two-thirds of Europe's gold from West Africa in the fifteenth century
CE
. Thousands of people spent their entire lives on the move; great caravan crossroads such as medieval Cairo, Damascus, and Samarkand were nodes of interconnection. These storied trading points were made possible only by thousands of pack animals and the men and women who drove and understood them. With such a scale of interconnection, it was inevitable that animals became tools—I call them pickup trucks.

It's hard for us to imagine living in a world where oars, sails, human hands, and, above all, animals powered daily life. In this now largely vanished, animal-driven universe, millions of subsistence farmers still lived on intimate terms with their animals. For instance, many medieval farmers shared their houses with their stock, knew each animal individually, and valued it as a contributor to their daily lives. Theirs was a genuine partnership with their beasts, such as had sustained human life and determined the course of history for thousands of years. However, with the steady growth in urban populations and, eventually, with the Industrial Revolution, the intimate ties between human and beast evaporated into an intensified dichotomy between respect and pride of ownership and the animal as commodity.

The centuries leading up to the Industrial Revolution were when humans truly took control, going far beyond the primitive breeding practices of Roman and medieval farmers. By the eighteenth century, controlled breeding of farming animals such as cattle and pigs transformed human relationships with animals to one where people admired their breeding handiwork. The sedulous care with which proud owners cherished racehorses and prize livestock was widespread among the aristocracy by the early nineteenth century. Once again, however, the inexorable forces of expanding cities and urban population growth created insatiable demands for meat. Industrial-scale stock raising accelerated with a rising obsession with flesh per slaughtered beast, with calculated meat yields. Food needs aside, many people do not realize that the Industrial Revolution and its growing cities depended heavily on working animals for everything from grain milling to hauling loads,
for mining coal and moving canal barges. Hard work meant long hours and harsh treatment, so much so that cruelty to working animals became an emerging issue in Victorian times, coinciding with the growing popularity of domestic pets in middle-class households.

Animals for food, beasts for vivisection—these were emerging issues during the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. It is only in recent years, however, that a growing and aggressive concern over animal rights has extended into feedlots and laboratories. Today, there's a movement toward a broader view of the personhood of animals, which sets aside the power that people have to oppress and mistreat the domesticated animals that have helped shape our history. At present, most of them are our servants, to be eaten and otherwise exploited. Will we continue on this indefensible course, or is change afoot? History provides the background but, alas, no ready solutions.

 

Author's Note

Place names are spelled according to the most common usage.

Archaeological sites and historic places are spelled as they appear most commonly in the sources I used to write this book. Some obscure locations are omitted from the maps for clarity, as are familiar geographical labels including the Alps and the Caucasus Mountains; interested readers should consult the specialist literature. The terms
Middle East
,
Near East
, and
Southwest Asia
are used interchangeably, as all three are in common use.
Levant
refers to the eastern Mediterranean coastal region.

The references and notes tend to emphasize sources with extensive bibliographies, to allow the reader to enter the more specialized literature if desired.

All radiocarbon dates have been calibrated, and the
CE/BCE
convention is used.

Every reasonable effort has been made to contact copyright holders for the illustrations. Anyone with questions should contact the author.

 

These maps show most locations referred to in the text. Some places, mainly archaeological sites, are omitted for clarity, but their general locations are clear from the narrative. North America is not included, as the few references to people and sites there give geographical information that is sufficient.

Hunters and the Hunted

 

Chronological Table