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Why did the indigenous peoples of the Americas not farm much livestock before the arrival of the Spanish? Jared Diamond, in his landmark bestseller Guns, Germs and Steel, concluded it was because of a lack of options: North America especially didn’t have large mammals suitable for domestication. Once Europeans arrived with cows and pigs, livestock farming spread as it had in Europe and Asia.
Not so fast, says Marcy Norton in her new book, The Tame and the Wild. She argues that biology cannot be separated from culture — a stance that allows her to reconsider why animals were treated in a certain way in the past and how they could be treated in the future.
The indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica and Greater Amazonia viewed non-human animals differently to Europeans. Once animals were fed by humans, they became kin: to eat them was anathema. Norton, an associate history professor at the University of Pennsylvania, uses this to question the idea that livestock farming is the “natural” path of human development. Indeed, after the conquistadors’ arrival in the 15th century, many indigenous people rejected livestock farming — a 17th-century French missionary reported that the Kalinago, who lived on Dominica, “would die” rather than eat a hen’s egg.
Livestock farming won out because of the economic structures of colonialism, Norton argues. It was “the most wide-ranging and enduring of all extractive industries” — with cattle invading indigenous people’s land and eating their crops, leaving the populations vulnerable to famine and animal-borne diseases.
The Tame and the Wild is a fascinating book, relevant to how we see meat-eating and hunting, although it is likely to be too dense to attract general readers, as Diamond’s work did.
Norton starts by showing that hunting, often seen as brutal today, required a more progressive view of animals than farming did. Farming largely reduced animals to the status of objects; in contrast, hunters had to appreciate their prey as thinking, feeling beings, in order to predict their movements. This was particularly true for indigenous hunters, who did not rely on dogs, raptors and horses, but sought out prey directly.
The book presents plentiful evidence of indigenous people’s deep observation of animals. On Hispaniola, men caught geese by placing gourds on their heads, submerging themselves in a lake, and waiting patiently for geese to perch on top.
Indigenous people, mostly women, had a stunning ability to tame all kinds of animals — parrots, emus, even a manatee. Norton distinguishes this from European-style domestication: these animals were not bred or eaten; they were tamed for pleasure and love. She argues that indigenous love for animals helped to shape European attitudes and, together with the proliferation of exotic animals sent back to Europe, contributed to the rise of mass pet-keeping in the 19th century.
Indigenous world views saw humans and other animals as intertwined and mutually influential, where for early modern Europeans, such crossovers — animals showing humanlike abilities, for example — were assumed to be the work of the devil.
At points, I found Norton’s argument less convincing. In Mesoamerica, which included much of modern-day Mexico, turkeys and dogs were widely fed and eaten. Norton insists they still weren’t treated as objects like European livestock: they were categorised more like human slaves. That probably wasn’t much consolation to the dogs (or indeed the humans). More importantly, it suggested to me that indigenous societies were capable, as humans are today, of holding paradoxical ideas about animals when it was convenient.
Animist world views have not prevented humans from inflicting great suffering on animals. At Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, many wild animals were kept captive, in a way that doesn’t seem so different from European menageries. The Tame and the Wild doesn’t cover the Andean societies that did domesticate large animals (llamas and alpacas).
Since the 15th century, the livestock industry has taken over the Americas: Brazil is the world’s biggest beef exporter; Argentina has the world’s highest per capita beef consumption. The effects on the climate, nature and indigenous peoples have been devastating.
Norton ends with a call for us to counter the extractivism by caring for our animal companions, appreciating wild animals and taking heart from those peoples who resisted livestock husbandry. The world that she impressively conjures up has largely gone. Remembering it offers some of the answers about how to rebalance our relations with other species.
The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals After 1492 by Marcy Norton Harvard £31.95, 448 pages
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