Domesticated animals

by Nathaniel Southgate Shaler

Not only is the motive which has led our race to such extensive conquests over the wild nature in itself sympathetic, but the process of winning these creatures from the wilderness has served effectively to extend and amplify this same impulse. One of the best features of agricultural life consists in the great amount of care-taking which it imposes upon its followers. The ordinary farmer has to enter into more or less sympathetic relations with half a score of animal species and many kinds of plants. His life, indeed, is devoted to ceaseless friendly relations with these creatures which live or die at his will. In this task his ancient savage impulses are slowly worn away, and in their place comes the enduring kindliness of cultivated men. When we compare the state of mind of the hunter with that of the care-taking soil-tiller, we see the vast scope and influence which this work of domestication has effected in our kind. To it perhaps more than to any other cause we must attribute the civilizable and the civilized state of mind.

Although no discreet person will venture to determine the relative weight which should be given to the influences which have made for civilization, there can be no doubt that the care of domesticated animals has been one of the most potent of these agents. Not only has this employment served to develop the motives of care-taking that result in the postponement of the momentary satisfaction of indolence or of hunger for the prospect of security or wealth to come, but it has served to arouse and broaden the sympathies given men, that humane spirit without which the best of our higher culture cannot be attained. If this view be correct, we may find in it a good reason for regretting the increasing development of cities, a reason which is more definite than the most of those which have been urged against the growth of great towns. Statistics seem to indicate that people are as healthy, as long lived, and on the whole no more given to vice and crime in a well-ordered urban life than they are on the farms. It is certainly easier to give them the formal education of the schools in the dense than in the scattered condition. There can be no doubt, however, that the practically complete separation of the most of our cities from all educative contact with the ancient companions and helpers of men brings about an omission of an element in culture that may entail serious consequences.

The question arises as to what can be done to diminish the evils which come from the total separation of a large part of our people from the humanizing influences due to the care of animals. How general this separation is may be judged from the fact that so far as I have been able to find in the manufacturing towns of Massachusetts not one child in thirty ever knew what it is to care for any creature, save those of its kind. And even in a well-conditioned place like Cambridge, the proportion of those who have any educative contact with animals probably does not exceed one in fifteen. I do not reckon the mere chance playing with a dog or cat as serving the need; the real service is when the person has a sense of responsibility for the life of the animal. To bring about this relation in the ordinary conditions of a town is usually impossible. Something can, however, be accomplished by various expedients.

In the lowest state of townspeople it is out of the question to give the children any pets whatever. Even caged birds cannot or should not be accommodated in the cheaper grade of lodging-houses. Wherever the animals are in separate houses it is often possible for children to have some contact with sympathetic animal life. In these conditions, our cocks and hens are the best creatures to rear. They are the most attractive of all our domesticated birds; they do better than any other forms of economic value in narrow conditions, and, what is of importance for the end in view, they contribute a share of food, so that a boy may have from them some experience with the economic relation of animals to men.

Some persons who have observed the advancing process of destruction of the natural world may have been brought to consider the change as in the necessary and inevitable order which comes with the higher development of man. They may welcome—indeed, some evidently do welcome—the chance that the ancient system may utterly disappear, and all the earth become fields and garden places tenanted only by those forms that man may have chosen to be his companions. To many people who have a keen impression as to the importance of man in the great economy, and no clear sense of his relation to the natural order, this possibility is doubtless attractive. It is not so to those who have gained a clear idea of the place of man and the conditions of his ongoing.

There is reason to expect that the modern gains in the cheapness and speed of transportation may before long bring about a material change in the housing of the laboring classes of our cities, so that they may be able to dwell in somewhat rural conditions. In this way we may hope to see these people once again brought where they may receive a fuller share of the influences which have served so well to lift our race to its elevated moral station. Working to the same end is the spirit which is leading many manufacturers to place their establishments in the country, where they can control the mode of life of the employees and their families. Against the growth of the factory towns with their sordid conditions, we may with pleasure set these rural workshops where the capitalists are doing the best they can to better the mode of living of the people who are under their charge. In this good work it may well be possible to include a share of contact with the soil and with domesticated animals. In this system of isolated factories we may perhaps hope to find the way out of the perplexities which the present condition of our industries have imposed on our civilization.

Up to our present half-century the process of winning animals and plants to domestication, and of improving them after they had been thus won, has been in its nature a matter of haphazard. Here and there, as men have seen creatures which promised in captivity to afford either pleasure or profit, they have endeavored to convert them to use. In some cases the effort has been made with some patience and steadfastness of purpose. If the creature yielded quickly to the needs of a new life which it was sought to impose upon him, he became a member of man's family. If its wilderness motives were strong, the effort to domesticate was soon abandoned. The greater part of these efforts to win animals and plants into alliance with our race have been made with the creatures which were native in the wildernesses about our ancestral dwelling-places. Occasionally from distant lands important gains have been made, especially among the food-giving plants; but all the animals of any importance which have been adopted by the Aryan people were originally natives of the lands in which that race has dwelt.

It is a remarkable fact that no sooner does a wild animal or plant become intimately associated with man, than it at once departs more or less widely from its ancient type. Our conquests from the vegetable world have to a great extent so far lost their original character that we can no longer determine the species from which they sprang. Botanists cannot find the wild forms which have given us the cabbage, wheat, and most other small grains, and a host of other important varieties. So, too, the origin of our dogs is as yet unsolved and bids fair ever to remain a mystery. In addition to this changed character which we observe in the forms of domesticated animals and plants alike, we note that the mental characteristics of the former undergo vast alterations. The creatures, in a way, take the tone of civilization, and to a great extent abandon those ancient habits of fear and rage which were essential to their life in the wilderness. The intellectual condition of our dogs shows us that the creatures may be progressively educated—in a word, that man may put into them something of his human quality. In the case of the dog, the longest possessed and most familiar to our households of all our captives, the mental change which has come, partly by selection, from association with man has gone so far that the species may be fairly said to have replaced its pristine motives with those which it has derived from ourselves. In many cases it has become, so far as its ways are concerned, even more man than dog.

Although the physical and mental educability of animals when brought into companionship with man is an old subject of remark, and one of the most interesting features which they exhibit, it was not until the doctrine of descent by variation of species from other related forms became established, that we had a chance to see the vast possibilities of accomplishment which are presented to us by our domesticated creatures. It is true that the breeder's art is old and that men have felt the subjugated animals to be almost like clay in the potter's hands, but except in a small and rather careless way with the dogs, little attention has been given to the development of the intelligence of these captives. The success which we have obtained with this animal has been accomplished by a selective process, but one which has been almost as blind in its operation as the choice which acts in the natural world. For thousands of years men have preferred the dogs which manifested a sympathy with them, and the result is a creature which, though derived from a very brutal ancestry, has in its way as intense affections as human beings. Now and then they have chosen deliberately to develop some mental peculiarity of the animal which would be of service in hunting, and the effect of this care is to be noted in the considerable variety and perfection of mental development which the sporting dogs exhibit. In the main, however, the interest of our dog fanciers has been limited to the physical features of the species; nothing like a deliberate effort to ascertain how far the development of their mental parts could be carried has ever been essayed. In no other field of human endeavor of anything like equal importance has there been so little understanding applied to the tasks.

Now that we are beginning to know something of the laws of inheritance, it is high time for us deliberately to consider what our relations to the organic world are hereafter to be, and how we can guide ourselves in these relations by the light of modern learning. It is in the first place clear that the subjugation of the earth which necessarily accompanies the development of civilization, inevitably tends to sweep away a large part of the organic life which is not adopted and protected by man. Already, with the mere beginnings of this culture, we find that several of the large beasts and birds and a number of plants have been destroyed. New as civilization is on this continent, it has already brought the moose and the buffalo to a point where they are on the verge of extinction, and in the Old World the wild ancestors of the horse and the bull have quite disappeared from the wildernesses. Within a few centuries the greater birds, the Dinornis and Epiornis, as well as the interesting Dodo, have vanished from the southern isles which they inhabited. In the century to come we can foresee that this process of effacement of the ancient life will go on with accelerated velocity.