Mad cows (and livid lambs)

[Guest guest]

>One of the world's leading ethologists (specialists in

>animal behaviour) believes that a critical point has been crossed and

>animals are beginning to snap back. After centuries of being eaten,

>evicted, subjected to vivisection, killed for fun, worn as hats and

>made to ride bicycles in circuses, something is causing them to turn

>on us.

 

 

This is not really a new conjecture at all. A playwright

named Aristophanes advanced a similar notion more than 2,300 years

ago, in a play called The Birds. He set the action in Cloud Cuckoo

Land.

 

Another gent named Alfred Hitchcock made a film of similar

theme, also called The Birds, in 1962. I was in it, as a child

extra, playing crow bait.

 

In between, enough other people produced " animals strike

back " literature to have informed a Piled-Higher- & -Deeper thesis

several times over -- and for all I know, someone has written it.

 

Someone also produced a Tin Pan Alley song hypothesizing that

Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicked over a lantern during milking on October 9,

1871 to incinerate half of Chicago as an act of vengeance.

 

However, if animals had not always responded to abuse with

whatever resistance they could marshal, the ancient Cretans could

never have invented bullfighting, for the continuing entertainment

of their cretinous descendants around the world.

 

In truth, there is nothing even slightly new about any

aspect of human/animal conflict. Long before humans were

recognizable as our ancestors, they were frequent meals for large

predators, with enduring evolutionary and cultural influence.

 

Two very good books have explored this in recent years.

 

Monster of God, by David Quammen, is actually a book mostly

about faith, exploring the influence of the human evolutionary role

as prey upon concepts of religion, and of the more recent human

ascendance as a top predator on our ideas about conservation.

 

Quammen presents a strong circumstantial case that the

protohuman concept of God evolved as a psychological response to

swift and seemingly random predator strikes. Sacrifice, Quammen

suggests, began as appeasement of predators, and in some remote places

continues as such.

 

Quammen explores the role of the earliest monarchs in

recorded history as lion-slayers, pointing out that the dawn of

civilization coincided with the emergence of humans as quasi-apex

predators, able at last to do with weapons what natural predators do

with tooth and claw.

 

Man The Hunted, by Donna Hart & Robert W. Sussman,

demonstrates how the sustained challenge of being a prey species has

driven the evolution of human thought.

 

The experience of predation, Hart & Sussman argue, actually

shaped human culture. Among the enduring consequences are societal

attitudes toward meat, hunting, choices of mates and leaders,

choices of pets, which animals become the icons of athletic teams,

which attract donor support as subjects of appeal mailings, and even

what humans most often choose to watch on television and read about

in newspapers.

 

After humans became sufficiently numerous and well-armed to

keep wild predators away, and while enough wilderness remained to

sustain predator populations beyond proximity to humans and

livestock, the incidence of predation against humans dropped for a

couple of centuries -- but is rising again now, partly because more

humans are invading the last wild refuges of large predators, partly

because we are actually encouraging some large predators to

proliferate, as protected species.

 

Meanwhile, so-called domesticated animals have always been

extremely dangerous, and never less so than now, when most pigs,

poultry, sheep, and cattle are raised with a minimum of direct

human contact.

 

Artificial insemination replaced natural insemination of

dairy cattle at exactly the same time that big Holstein cattle took

over most of the dairy industry from small Jerseys, brown Swiss,

and other little breeds. Why? Because a Holstein bull is an

exceptionally dangerous animal to handle, and to this day, though

just a few dozen bulls now inseminate most of the dairy cattle in the

U.S., Holstein bulls still manage to kill a couple of farmers or

farm hands each and every year.

 

The major introductory selling point for artificial

insemination was not the promise of greater milk yield from using

someone else's bull; it was enabling farmers to escape the necessity

of keeping a bull.

 

Many of the agricultural practices that today are animal

welfare issues originated centuries or millennia ago for similar

reasons.

 

Why are piglets and bullocks commonly castrated without

anesthesia, for example?

 

Because castrating them made them much safer to handle, &

until relatively recently no one had any idea how to anesthetize

anything safely, let along a pig or a bull.

 

Dehorning, debeaking, and " boar-bashing " to break tusks are

parallel cases, all originally undertaken primarily to protect the

people who worked with the animals.

 

Because working with horses required particular proximity to

them, and often to the kicking end of a horse, horse-related

injuries were especially frequent.

 

Occupational safety statistics older than the introduction of

mechanized farming barely exist, yet even 20 years after trucks and

tractors began to replace the use of workhorses, the most common

workplace accident involved being kicked or dragged by a horse,

falling off a horse, or injuring one's back trying to restrain a

horse.

 

Excavating ancient graveyards reveals even more skeletons

showing injuries inflicted by working with animals than skeletons

showing wounds inflicted in battle.

 

But there is one type of injury to humans by animals that has

markedly increased in recent decades: fatal and disfiguring dog

bites, other than by rabid dogs. These have markedly increased

because in place of street dogs who are used to being among people

and know enough to avoid trouble, we now have millions of pet dogs

who have been conditioned by confinement to develop an exaggerated

sense of territoriality, and have learned to regard their human

families as their pack, to be " defended " against any perceived

intruder.

 

At the same time, we have bred dogs to be much larger than

nature intended, and in the case of pit bull terriers and other

fighting breeds, to attack without the elaborate warning rituals

that most dogs use to avoid actually getting into a real fight with

anyone.

 

Fatal and disfiguring dog attacks were so scarce just a

generation ago that I recently found record of only two dog attack

fatalities occurring in the entire state of Ohio during the first 85

years of the 20th century, and one of those might better have been

classed as a motorcycle accident. Then pit bull terriers came into

vogue, and pit bulls killed four Ohioans in the next three years.

 

This sort of thing is not occurring because " something is

causing them to turn on us " ; it is occurring because some humans

have selectively bred those particular dogs to behave very

differently from all others.

 

Left to their own choice of mates, pit bulls have a noted

tendency to lose their pit bull traits in favor of ordinary dogginess

within two or three generations. Thus " dogmen " have always practiced

strict line-breeding, in distinct contrast to the normal breeding

habits of both humans & dogs, from whom we learned most of our rules

of civilization.

 

 

 

--

Merritt Clifton

Editor, ANIMAL PEOPLE

P.O. Box 960

Clinton, WA 98236

 

Telephone: 360-579-2505

Fax: 360-579-2575

E-mail: anmlpepl

Web: www.animalpeoplenews.org

 

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