Wild Free and Happy Sample 27

[Note: This is the twenty-seventh sample from my rough draft of a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  I don’t plan on reviewing more books for a while.  My blog is home to reviews of 202 books, and you are very welcome to explore them.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews, if you are interested in specific authors, titles, or subjects.] 

Pigs

Pigs are also known as hogs or swine.  The U.K. and U.S. have slightly different definitions of these terms.  For simplicity’s sake I’ll use pigs, and pigs will refer to both piglets and adults of both genders.  In different regions, over a million years or more, the pig family evolved into a variety of different species, including boars, bearded pigs, peccary, warthogs, and so on.  Today, there are a billion pigs on Earth.  The ancestors of domesticated pigs were wild boars, which once inhabited regions of Africa and Eurasia, from Ireland and India to Japan and Siberia.  In North and South America, none of the pig family species have been domesticated.  They remain wild and free. 

Wolves were attracted to human encampments by the enticing aroma of garbage and (remarkably delicious) human feces.  Over time, a portion of the curious but incautious critters lost their freedom and got reduced to dogs, critters unable to survive in the wild beyond the human sphere.  Similarly, some ancestors of wild pigs were lured into the domestication trap by a treasure chest of garbage, feces, and lush gardens.  The moral here is to always avoid human settlements, at any cost, no matter how wonderfully shitty they smell.  Danger!

Peter Wohlleben reported that the super intelligent wild boars remain alive and well in portions of Europe, where they have been labelled destructive pests.  German hunters kill 650,000 each year.  When the shooting starts, boars disappear during daylight hours, and become night critters.  Hunters are forbidden to use night vision devices.  When hunting season begins in France, the boars swim across the Rhône River to Switzerland, where hunting is banned.  As Winston Churchill once said, “Dogs look up to us, cats look down on us, but pigs treat us as equals.”

Wohlleben says that many folks would never consider eating ape flesh and, if we fully understood how intelligent pigs are, the notion of eating them would gross out those who are confused about the sacred dance (in the family of life, we all feed each other).  Domestication did not reduce pigs to slobbering dimwits, and some types remain capable of surviving in the wild.  Mud-covered pigs are like rich humans at luxurious health spas.  When the mud dries, fleas, ticks, and other parasites are baked into it.  Then, pigs rub on trees to discard the cruddy mud, and the annoying pests trapped in it. 

Cattle, sheep, goats, and horses are grassland creatures.  Pigs are not.  They prefer to reside in moist and shady places — temperate and tropical forests, close to water sources.  Unlike the other four, nomadic grassland people don’t keep them.  Enslaved pigs are usually kept by sedentary communities.  They can grow up to 770 pounds (350 kg), and have seven litters per year.  Piglets can grow rapidly when food is abundant.

John Reader noted that pigs are remarkably efficient at turning food into flesh.  Because their diet is more nutrient rich than mere greenery, they could convert 35% of what they ate into meat (sheep 13%, cattle 6.5%).  In ten months, the offspring of a pair of pigs can produce 3,200 pounds (1,451 kg) of meat — ten times more than cattle.

While cattle, sheep, goats, and horses are herbivores, pigs are omnivores.  Like stoned potheads with the munchies, pigs are not fussy eaters.  They will chow down on kitchen wastes, slaughterhouse wastes, spoiled spuds, ugly spuds, peelings, excrement, nuts, grains, roots, insects, leaves, fruits, flowers, fish, human corpses, and other carrion.  They have been known to bite, and sometimes kill children.

In many settlements, pigs were proud members of the department of public sanitation, along with rats and dogs, cleaning up crud in the streets discarded by untidy humans and other critters.  In regions of India and China, many pigs enjoyed rewarding careers in the sewage treatment profession.  Outhouses were often built above pig sties.  When steaming turds fell from the sky, pigs would scramble to gobble up the precious gifts from heaven.

For some mysterious reason, folks in the Middle East considered pigs to be unclean.  Both Hebrews and Muslims forbade touching or eating pigs.  Marvin Harris added that pigs provided no milk or wool, and they were not at all interested in being herded.  Pigs were not grass eaters, they ate the same foods that humans did.  Consequently, farmers and gardeners were not fond of them.  Also, hot sunny, arid lands (like the Middle East) were a poor habitat for pigs.  When air temps rise above 98°F (36°C), adult pigs exposed to direct sunlight can drop dead. 

Richard Lillard wrote about the early American colonies.  Many regions were forested, unsuitable for cattle, but heaven for pigs, who could keep themselves fat and happy via rooting and foraging.  For most early settlers, pork seemed like an exotic food, because in the old country, boars were kept in hunting preserves, for the hunting pleasure of wealthy aristocrats.  Bacon was for billionaires, high class lords and ladies.

Back country colonists enjoyed a grand life for a while, when the woods of Virginia and Maryland were swarming with pigs.  The porkers could run free without supervision, because they were fairly safe.  They were not easy prey for wolves or bears, although the alligators of Alabama were connoisseurs of plump, juicy, free range organic ham.  As long as you provided a source of salt, and tossed out some corn every day, the pigs would remain in the vicinity.  Humans were careful to mark which pigs belonged to them.

Pigs, of course, were delighted to raid gardens and crops, which totally pissed off the tillers and planters.  The dirty sweaty lads jumped up and down, yowling and bleating for compulsory fencing laws, but their pleas were ignored.  The majority loved having pigs, because raising them was much easier than the tedious drudgery of agriculture.  Ordinary folks could enjoy a leisurely way of life that provided a decent standard of living.

Simon Fairlie noted that huge numbers of pigs were born and fattened in the frontier forests, and every year their keepers would drive them down hog trails to big cities on the east coast, where they were traded for gold.  Pork was America’s favorite meat until the 1950s, when beef moved into the top position.  The first McDonalds restaurant opened in 1948, and soon became a sprawling empire, serving haute cuisine to America’s hungry, burger-loving billionaire aristocrats.

As I’m writing this, the news had a story about feral pigs, of which six million now inhabit 30 U.S. states, especially Texas.  They are descendants of the pigs brought by Spanish explorers centuries ago.  Feral pigs can grow up to 400 pounds (180kg).  Humans who grow things that pigs love to eat are shocked and infuriated when pigs happily drop by to enjoy the delicious gifts that were so kindly left for them.  The hotheads buy assault rifles and shoot lots of pigs.  Pigs are champions at rapid reproduction, and those that are shot are quickly replaced. 

They also have strong razor sharp tusks, which make cougars think twice about attacking them.  Of course predator eradication programs have sharply reduced the number of pork-loving carnivores that used to roam the land.  The news story was about a 59 year old woman who was recently killed by multiple feral pigs as she stepped out of her car at dawn.  She bled to death.  Attacks like this are extremely rare.

Jared Diamond wrote about the Norse colonization of Iceland a thousand years ago.  It became the most ecologically damaged nation in Europe.  Wildlife took a heavy beating.  Within a few decades of settlement, about 80 percent of the trees were whacked down.  Sheep and pigs foraged amidst the stumps, and prevented forest recovery by repeatedly nipping off the new seedlings.  When the highly erodible volcanic topsoil became more exposed to wind and water, half of it moved from dry land to the ocean, and green countrysides were reduced to deserts.  Today, only one percent of the forest still exists.

Cattle

We’ve already met the huge, powerful, and fierce aurochs, the wild ancestors of cattle.  It’s hard to imagine how such mighty animals were reduced to cud chewing manure makers.  Obviously, the most aggressive bulls were put in the fast lane to the butcher’s chop shop, while those having milder manners were sent to bovine bordellos, where love starved cows eagerly enjoyed their deep affection.  Over the course of centuries, deliberately selecting the most passive bulls for breeding stock, generation after generation, gradually drove the aurochs spirit extinct.  Shamans call this soul loss (i.e., domestication).

Sandra Ingerman wrote that soul loss is a spiritual disease which, in advanced cases, can result in shadow beings who exhibit a “nobody is home” emptiness.  She says that most of us these days are not fully at home.  Jesus said, “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”  Indeed!

OK, back to cattle.  The quick and easy path to mild-mannered bulls was to fetch a sharp knife, relieve them of their testicles, and turn them into mellow, easygoing oxen.  In the early days, cattle were used for meat, milk, and hides.  Later, they became a source of muscle power — beasts of burden, and draft animals that pulled carts, chariots, plows, logs, and so on.

Folks eventually quit using oxen for muscle power when someone finally invented a contoured collar harness for horses that allowed them to pull serious loads without strangling themselves.  Horses required a richer diet, but they worked much faster than oxen.  So, farmers could plow larger fields, and fields that were farther from home.  Keith Thomas reported that it wasn’t until oxen were retired from muscle work that roast beef became the iconic centerpiece of English cuisine.  Until then, it wasn’t wise to eat your tractor.

Earlier, we looked at the prehistoric deforestation of Europe.  Actually deforestation was a global human enterprise.  In early times, we created manmade grasslands to attract large herbivores.  With the domestication of livestock, and the craziness of the agriculture fad, and the human population outburst, deforestation continued.  It’s happening right now, on a massive scale, as epidemic soul loss turns folks into weird critters obsessed with killing Big Mama Nature.  This is not a path with a future.

Years ago, I did some hiking in the hills above San Francisco Bay, where cattle were grazing.  Generally, the vegetation was kept neatly trimmed, and here and there were 100 year old oaks.  They dropped lots of acorns every fall, but there were few young oak trees, because their seedlings were routinely nipped off.  Originally, these hills were thriving oak savannahs, covered with a thick undergrowth of sagebrush and other shrubs, dotted with oaks of all ages.  [LOOK]

Especially in coastal regions, California Indians deliberately burned off the cover of dense sage scrub to create grasslands that attracted game.  Later, the Spanish and American colonists created more manmade grasslands for their livestock.  Once the brush was burned off, and cattle introduced, the oak savannah was doomed.  To add insult to injury, the exposed grassland became extremely vulnerable to troublesome immigrants, known as exotic invasive European weeds (more on these in a minute). 

Bison are also ruminants and, in the good old days, they were wild, free, and happy.  They were not the personal property of status seeking ranchers, consequently, for many thousands of years, they did not rubbish the western U.S. plains.  They did not fool around with fire, or create deserts.  Dan Flores mentioned that the bison herds were lovingly managed by family planning brigades called wolf packs.  They ate maybe four of every ten bison calves.  Wolves were dignified professional predators, not infantile status seekers, so they did not kill as many bison as possible, just enough to fill their growling tummies.  Enough is enough!  Status seeking is for dweebs and weenies. 

¶ Western United States

When European colonists migrated into the western plains of the U.S., they found millions of buffalo that had beautifully coevolved with the ecosystem over millions of years.  The alien white lads came from a culture that had a long tradition of owning and exploiting domesticated livestock, which were imagined to be valuable commodities.  The more you owned, the cooler you were, and the higher your social status.  The settlers soon discovered that the large wild herbivores of the plains were too proud and intelligent to be domesticated and enslaved.  Dang!

The European culture was based on private property — owning land, homes, livestock, and so on.  By the nineteenth century, most of the vast forests of Europe had become cropland and pasture, and almost all large wild animals had been eliminated long ago.  Some survived as characters in fairy tales, where the roles for devious demonic bloodthirsty monsters were often assigned to big bad wolves.

The colonists were incapable of imagining the possibility of transforming into nomadic hunter-gatherers, and enjoying an exciting life of wild freedom.  They were, after all, civilized people, and their religious stories originated in an ancient Middle Eastern culture of herders and conquerors.  Buffalo simply did not fit in their self-centered fantasies of wealth and excess.  You cannot own what you can’t control.  Their hearts were broken when they realized that the continent they had stolen was not home to many millions of passive domesticated livestock that belonged to no one.  Well, they had a good cry, and then put on their thinking caps.

Rather than doing something sensible, like turning around, sailing back to the old country, where countless generations of their ancestors were buried, and spending the rest of their days in filthy cities roaring with deadly epidemic diseases and bloody religious fanaticism, they decided to stay, and rubbish the indigenous people, wildlife, and ecosystems.

Their brilliant plan was to import domesticated shorthorn cattle from northern Europe — purebred passive dimwits, ideal slaves.  They could raise huge herds and become extremely rich cattle barons with ghastly pretentious mansions.  Richard Manning wrote an excellent description of the comedy of errors that occurred in this grassland soap opera.  The healthy, functional wild ecosystem was a serious problem that needed to be fixed, because it was an obstacle to progress and a growing economy.

Well, there were some annoying challenges.  You see, buffalo could remain fat and happy on a diet that majored in grass.  By a lucky coincidence, the western plains produced an abundance of delicious and nutritious grass.  For example, the excellent blue bunch wheat grass remained a nutritious food source throughout the winter.  Unfortunately, cattle gobbled it all up prior to winter, leaving nothing for later.  Oops!  When this primo grass is overgrazed, it can take ten years to recover.

The digestive tracts of buffalo had been fine-tuned by evolution to process the native grasses, so they were 18 percent more efficient than cattle.  The fussy foreign cattle preferred a diet of leafy forbs (broad leafed flowering plants like alfalfa), which were scarce in their weird new habitat.  The frustrated hungry cattle were not impressed, and wanted to go back home on the next boat.  Request denied.

Buffalo were well adapted to the dry climate, and they could comfortably go for several days without needing a drink of water.  Their herds roamed across the land at something like a walking pace.  It wasn’t necessary for them to stick close to water, so they were able to wander and graze over a wide region.  They might not return to a location for several years.  The result was healthy grassland, healthy riparian areas, healthy herds of buffalo, and healthy tribes of Indians and wolves.

The prissy imported cattle, on the other hand, had evolved in a much moister climate, where it was far easier to find a drink whenever they got a bit thirsty.  Consequently, they tended to concentrate their grazing on locations closer water, unload tons of manure, overgraze, and mutilate the banks of the streams (riparian areas).  When riparian lands are undamaged, they can produce far more forage than can surrounding uplands — they are top quality places for indigenous herbivores.  On the other hand, when the vegetation is damaged, the soil dries out, and floods are more likely to carry it away.  Overgrazed land speeds rain runoff, which sometimes leads to spectacular flooding. 

The buffalo were well adapted to surviving in a region where the climate majored in blast freezer winters and scorching summers.  The cattle were adapted to living in a dainty moist climate with moderate summers and mild winters — an ecosystem strikingly different from the plains.  During the super-cold winters of 1885-86 and 1906-07, maybe 50 to 75 percent of the cattle on the high plains died — while the snow-frosted bison remained warm, well-fed, and secretly amused at the misfortune of the hapless illegal immigrants.

Well, the ambitious colonists had still another brilliant idea.  They decided to introduce traditional pasture plants from Europe, so their cash cows could get fatter faster.  Unfortunately, most of these exotic plants promptly keeled over and died, because they were equally unsuited for the plains.  So, the next brilliant solution was to import pasture plants from arid regions of Asia — a disastrous mistake that has caused irreversible damage.

Manning described some of the bummers.  Crested wheatgrass thrived on the plains, and it outcompeted and displaced native plants.  In the winter, this wonder grass retained little nutritional value, and so the mule deer, elk, and antelope starved in endless fields of grass. 

Spotted knapweed suppresses native grasses, and has now spread to 7 million acres (2.8 million ha) in 48 states.  Because of root secretions, most other plants can’t live close to it.  Sheep can eat it, but cattle eat bunchgrass instead, which encourages the knapweed to spread. 

Leafy spurge is now found in 26 states, where it has spread across 2.5 million acres (1 million ha).  It excels at outcompeting most other species, achieving communities that are almost monocultures.  Plants have extensive root systems, and can live for 40 years.  Spurge has a toxic sap.  Cattle will not graze near it, only sheep and goats can eat it.  The plant transforms lands into biological deserts, and it is extremely expensive to eradicate. 

Cheatgrass can survive in low quality soils, and in regions having minimal precipitation.  Only in the early spring does this grass provide significant nutrients to grazing animals.  For the rest of the year, it doesn’t, so animals can starve in a thriving grassland.  Cheatgrass is especially flammable, and it burns hot enough to roast the seeds of native plants, which it has now displaced across large areas.  After a cheatgrass fire, exposed soil is vulnerable to erosion and gullying.  Following a rain, the runoff can be rapid, leading to sudden floods.  Dan Flores wrote that in the U.S. mountain west, cheatgrass had turned 100 million acres (40 million ha) into a biological wasteland.

Eliminating invasive exotic vegetation is prohibitively expensive, and often essentially impossible.  Invasives are here to stay, and their plan is to spread.  Human intelligence remains an unfinished masterpiece.

¶ Australia

Mark Brazil shared a story that was full of crap.  In Britain, cow manure was promptly and properly composted by patriotic royal dung beetles, which returned essential nutrients to the soil.  In Australia, none of the native dung beetles could get the least bit interested in cow shit.  It was too wet, and too out in the open.  Cow pies could patiently sit on the grass unmolested for four years, because nobody loved them.  This deeply hurt their feelings.  Adding insult to injury, Brook Jarvis noted that fussy cattle refused to graze in the vicinity of neglected pies, so the herd needed access to far more grazing land than normal.

Australian flies, on the other hand, discovered that cow pies made fabulous nurseries for their children.  Each pat could feed 3,000 maggots, which turned into flies — dense clouds of billions and billions of flies — which the hard working Christians did not in any way fancy.  Being outdoors was hellish.  In the 1960s, folks imported British dung beetles, which loved the taste and aroma of cow pies.  Oddly, this is one example where an introduced exotic species apparently didn’t create unintended consequences.  When they ran out of pies to eat, the beetles simply died.

Wild Free and Happy Sample 26

[Note: This is the twenty-sixth sample from my rough draft of a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  I don’t plan on reviewing more books for a while.  My blog is home to reviews of 202 books, and you are very welcome to explore them.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews, if you are interested in specific authors, titles, or subjects.] 

Animal Domestication

What is “domestication?”  With regard to animal domestication, there are two different meanings, and those who use the word don’t often reveal which one they mean.  James Scott distinguished between “domesticated,” meaning tamed (modified behavior), versus “fully domesticated,” meaning genetically different from their wild ancestors as a result of selective breeding (modified DNA), and dependent on humans for their survival.  Elephants in India have been tamed to do work for humans, but they remain genetically wild.  Poodles are obviously genetically different from their gray wolf ancestors.  The difference between wild humans and civilized ones seems to be far more cultural than genetic.

On the following pages, “domesticated” will refer to animals that have been held in captivity for many generations, selectively bred to encourage specific traits, and genetically different from their wild ancestors — manmade critters that had never existed before.  They look and behave differently.  Animals that have merely been tamed, like a friendly peanut loving squirrel, are not a matter for concern.  But the control and exploitation of domesticated critters has really rocked the ecological boat over the centuries.  The enslavement of animals enabled the growth of most civilizations, increased their environmental impacts, and frequently stimulated bloody conflicts.

Why Do It?

As we’ve learned, the success of hominins has been substantially boosted by our success at hunting and feasting on large wild herbivores — animals weighing more than 100 pounds (43 kg).  Herbivores did not compete with humans for the same wild foods.  They converted the solar energy that was stored in grass into a highly nutritious form that we could digest.  This enabled hominins to develop big brains (but not necessarily wise).

As we’ve learned, “the perfection of hunting” eventually moved our ancestors over a line.  We began taking some game a bit faster than they could replace their losses.  For a very long time, large game remained abundant in many lands, enabling local hominin tribes to live well, and grow in numbers.  As long as food was abundant and easy, there wouldn’t be much motivation to contemplate family planning strategies and wise taboos.  But growing numbers of mouths needed growing amounts of food in order to remain strong, healthy, and alive. 

While large game was abundant for a very long time, the delicious critters were not infinite in number.  Big Mama Nature was simply not in the mood to magically accelerate herbivore reproduction in order to keep the tropical primates fat, happy, and annoying.  It was long past time for the half-clever primates to learn some important lessons about life.  Because they lacked immaculate wisdom, acute foresight, or PhDs in wildlife management, they were forced to learn these lessons the hard way.  Big Mama fetched a paddle named scarcity.  Smack!  Ouch!  Stop it!  Smack!

As we’ve learned, climate change reconfigured the ecological playing field.  The last glacial period spanned from about 80,000 to 12,900 years ago.  The peak of this ice age was the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), which spanned from 26,500 to 19,000 years ago.  Barry Cunliffe said that at this time, much of Europe was buried under ice sheets up to one mile (1.6 km) thick (as was North America).  So much water was held frozen in glaciers that global sea levels were 410 feet (125 m) lower than today.  During the frigid LGM, forest country was pushed far to the south.  Trees survived along the Mediterranean Sea, the Atlantic coast of Portugal and Spain, and the south shore of the Black Sea.

Following the LGM, a warming trend began, which spanned from 19,000 to 12,900 years ago.  Then, the Younger Dryas cold snap chilled things down again for another 1,300 years, until 11,600 years ago.  Then began the warm climate period that we still enjoy today, which enabled the possibility of large scale agriculture, civilization, skyrocketing population, and the fantastic craziness of modernity.  This warm era has lasted an unusually long time.  Normally, we’d be overdue for a shift back to cold.  Instead, we’re sliding sideways at high speed into a much hotter era, and it seems likely to blindside life as we know it.  Clive Finlayson warns that the end of farming is just one climate change away.

The warm era that we’ve been living in for the last 11,600 years led to a sequence of big changes.  Glaciers shifted into retreat mode, and a tundra ecosystem eventually emerged on the newly exposed soil.  A bit later, steppe grasslands appeared, displacing some tundra.  Still later, increasing warmth enabled the expansion of forests.  As forests migrated northward, they began displacing the open tundra and grasslands that provided optimal habitat for the herds of large herbivores that our ancestors so deeply loved.  So, hunters had to devote more attention to forest critters, which were less abundant: elk, aurochs, red deer, roe deer, wild pigs, and small animals.

For centuries, the human diaspora enjoyed some freedom to roam and expand.  There were still frontiers, beyond which humans had never before set foot.  Eventually, uninhabited ecosystems became more and more scarce, and red neon No Vacancy lights became common.  Continued expansion ceased being free and easy.  The intrepid pioneers kept smacking into <bleeping> limits, which got very annoying (and sometimes bloody).

As we’ve learned, the increasing scarcity of large herbivores required that the menus at the diner had to be rewritten.  Expanding forest cover inspired folks to relocate to wetlands, or to the shorelines of seas, lakes, and streams.  A number of foods that used to be second class became regular mainstays — birds, small game, fish, shellfish, plant foods.  They had been second class because they were far more labor intensive than hunting large game.  Tedious hard work sucks.  Second class stuff had also provided a life insurance safety net, a reserve of food set aside for droughts, famine times, and so on.

Mark Nathan Cohen, Diana Muir, Craig Dilworth, James Scott, and others noted that there was a clear pattern in the archaeological record at many locations.  The older evidence indicated a diet in which large herbivores were core.  Above the old layers, evidence revealed the shift to labor intensive second class foods.  Above that, evidence of herding and horticulture begins to appear — food production that was even more labor intensive.  These shifts were motivated by a gradual process of growing scarcity. 

Scott pointed out that our hungry ancestors were not merely domesticating plants and animals, they were also domesticating ecosystems to promote this new and laborious experiment in weird living.  Forests were being swept aside, and replaced by open cropland and pasture.  Wild animals that might harm crops or livestock were no longer welcome to exist in these new domesticated ecosystems.

Long ago, overspecialization contributed to the extinction of the saber-tooth cats, as hominin hunters competed more and more for their primary prey.  Our ancestors avoided a similar fate.  They were omnivores, so they could consume a huge variety of stuff that wasn’t meat.  Because they had fire, and knew how to cook, they had far more food options than species that were restricted to a raw food diet.  At the same time, successful efforts at eliminating man-eating predators sharply reduced the vital assistance they had provided for discouraging population growth.

Scott summed up the pluses and minuses of animal domestication.  Both a deer and a steer provided meat, bones, hides, and tendons, but the deer required zero human assistance to grow from doe to adult.  The steer could require corrals, winter feed and shelter, herd dogs, salt licks, and a source of water.  As long as deer and other game was plentiful, labor intensive herding and farming would have been moronic.

On the plus side, enslaved female livestock could be milked.  Milk could be made into cheese, yogurt, and butter, and stored for later.  Herders have milked cattle, zebu, water buffalo, yak, goat, sheep, reindeer, dromedary, camels, horse, and ass.  Dairy foods provide vitamin D, an essential nutrient.  In winter months, folks living in snow country often could not acquire sufficient vitamin D via exposure to direct sunlight, so dairy foods could provide a beneficial supplement.

All infants can digest lactose, the sugar in milk.  Before animal domestication, kids would normally become lactose intolerant a few years down the road.  They could no longer digest milk.  Lactose intolerant people are able to digest cheese, yogurt, and butter.  In cultures with a tradition of dairy consumption, evolution eventually modified the gene pool for lactose tolerance in adults.  This shift was not universal in all humans.  In cultures where milk is not consumed, most folks become lactose intolerant after infancy.

Poultry and waterfowl produced meat and eggs.  Folks rode on the backs of horses, donkeys, yaks, reindeer, and camels.  Mounted cavalry radically redefined the rules for warfare and raiding.  Beasts of burden were used to pull plows, carts, and sleds, and to haul loads of cargo on their backs.  Animal manure could be used for fertilizer or burned as fuel.  Hairy critters, especially sheep, provided fibers that could be spun and woven into many useful products.  An animal can give up its hide just once, but a sheep can provide wool every year. 

Herders could also tap some nutritious blood from living animals from time to time.  Up to 80 percent of a wild human’s diet was plant based food, but animal products provided nutrients that were beneficial for a strenuous outdoor way of life.  I have found no evidence of wild cultures that were vegetarian.

From Aurochs to Cattle

On many fine days in years past, I have taken walks in grasslands where cattle were grazing.  I always felt safe, because the animals were not the slightest bit anxious or aggressive.  I walked, they grazed, all was good.  Let’s take a peek at the cattle family tree.

Aurochs were the wild ancestors of today’s herd of 1.3 billion domesticated cattle.  They were huge, strong, and fierce — the opposite of the passive cud-chewing manure makers of today.  In regions having ideal conditions, bulls could grow up to 6 feet (180 cm) tall at the shoulder, and weigh up to 3,300 pounds (1,500 kg).  Their horns were much longer than cattle, and pointed forward, aggressively.

Some believe that the species originally emerged in India between 1.5 and 2 million years ago.  They survived in a world along with similarly large, strong, and fierce predators.  Eventually their range spanned from England to China.  Aurochs’ preferred habitat was dense ancient forests with lakes, rivers, bogs, and fens.  They didn’t hang out in frigid tundra regions with woolly mammoths and horses.

In 51 B.C., Caesar wrote that aurochs were animals “a little smaller than elephants, having the appearance, color, and shape of bulls.  They are very strong and swift, and attack every man and beast they catch sight of.  The natives sedulously trap them in pits and kill them.  Young men engage in the sport, hardening their muscles by the exercise; and those who kill the largest head of game exhibit the horns as a trophy, and thereby earn high honor.  These animals, even when caught young, cannot be domesticated and tamed.”

Charles the Great, also known as Charlemagne (A.D. 747 – 814), once had a painful encounter while on a hunting trip.  When an aurochs appeared in the forest, his hunting buddies fled in terror.  Charlemagne was less intelligent.  He rode up to one, drew his sword, and pissed off the monster, who gored his leg.  From that day forward, the humbled king walked with a limp.

The famous explorer Marco Polo (1254 – 1324) also described them.  “There are wild cattle in that country as big as elephants, splendid creatures, covered everywhere but on the back with shaggy hair a good four palms long.  They are partly black, partly white, and really wonderfully fine creatures.”

Anton Schneeberger (1530 – 1581) was a Swiss botanist and doctor based in Poland.  He wrote that aurochs had no fear of humans, and did not flee from their approach.  When they were teased or hunted, they got very hot-tempered and dangerous, sometimes hurling idiots high into the air.

Cis van Vuure wrote the book on aurochs.  He thought that domestication began about 9,000 years ago, in the Middle East and Pakistan.  Over time, the mighty aurochs was reduced to countless variations of dimwitted cattle, fine-tuned for specific climates and uses (meat, hides, milk, draft).

As agriculture expanded, Europe’s ancient forests and wetlands shrank.  Grain farmers detested aurochs molesting their crops, and herders resented them dining on prime forage.  Aurochs stood in the path of progress.  The last aurochs died in 1627, in the Jaktoróv forest, in Warsaw province of Poland.

It’s hard to imagine such notoriously fierce animals being forced into slavery.  Alasdair Wilkins wrote about recent DNA research on cattle.  The ancestors of every domesticated cow in the world trace back to a tiny herd in the Middle East, a herd as small as 80 animals.  The process of domestication may have taken a thousand years, and it was likely done by sedentary people.  It would have been impossible for nomadic herders to confine huge powerful animals with a tremendous love of wildness and freedom.

Nobody ever hitched a wagon or plow to an aurochs.  Nobody put a saddle on one.  Nobody milked them, and made aurochs cheese.  They were wild, free, strong, and extremely dangerous.  And so, they no longer belonged in the heavily managed manmade societies we were creating.  Today, thanks to centuries of selective breeding, we can now dine on hamburgers made from the bovine equivalent of a dimwitted yappy poodle.

The Unlucky Losers

The vast majority of living plant and animal species have luckily remained wild and free.  Jared Diamond wrote a lot about domestication.  Of the world’s 148 species of large land-dwelling herbivores and omnivores, only 14 had been domesticated prior to the twentieth century.  Nine of the 14 only had regional significance, but five species soared to become multinational superstars — the cow, sheep, pig, goat, and horse.  All five were domesticated in Eurasia, before 4000 B.C.

Most of the unlucky 14 were native to Eurasia.  In the Americas, only the llama and alpaca were domesticated, and they lived in small herds.  People didn’t drink their milk.  They never spread to cultures beyond the Andes, so the Indian civilizations of Central and North America did not have pack animals beyond dogs.  In North and South America, the heavy toll of megafauna extinctions may have eliminated a number of potential domesticates.  In Australia, zero large animals were enslaved.  In Africa, no large mammals were domesticated south of the Sahara — in this region only the turkey-like guinea fowl was domesticated.

Diamond wrote that the large herbivores most vulnerable to enslavement were species that were easy to feed, rapid growing, disease resistant, and could be bred in captivity.  They did not panic in confinement, nor were they dangerously violent.  These unlucky species were herd animals that had follow-the-leader dominance hierarchies.

James Scott wrote that over the passage of generations, selective breeding produces slaves that are more passive, less alert, less intelligent, and more dependent on human care.  They reach reproductive age sooner, preserve some juvenile aspects, and produce more offspring.  The brains of domesticated sheep are 24 percent smaller than their wild ancestors, and pig brains are one third smaller.  Because they were dullards, Paul Shepard referred to domesticated livestock as “goofies.”

Domesticated animals are born in captivity, and many never experience wildness and freedom during their entire lives.  One perk of their enslavement is that their lives are, in some ways, luxurious.  They are provided with food, water, and salt licks.  Many are provided with shelter from the hot sun, and frigid weather.  They enjoy an unnatural level of personal security because predator eradication programs ensure they will usually be safe from deadly attacks, month after month, until their luck runs out, and their masters send them for a visit to the butcher.  Enjoying such an easy life, they don’t need energy guzzling big brains.  (As previously noted, human brains have shrunk about 10 percent in the last 20,000 years.)

American Serengeti





Once upon a time, the Great Plains of the western U.S. resembled the Serengeti of Africa, a vast prairie inhabited by abundant wildlife.  Each year, during the wet season, grasslands produce far more new biomass than forests do, per unit of land.  The greenery converts sunlight into carbohydrates, nutrients necessary for the existence of animal life in the ecosystem.  Thus, the usually sunny plains are a vast array of solar collectors that generate food for the vast array of animal life.  Bison meat is highly concentrated solar energy.

Dan Flores is an environmental historian, and he specializes in Big History, which focuses on entire ecosystems, and regards humans as just one group of the many actors on the stage.  Each species of plant and animal plays a role in the living drama.  In this book, American Serengeti, Flores described the drama of the Great Plains from a perspective that spanned millions of years, going back long before humans.  It highlights the sagas of six species. 

The notion of “climax state” asserts that ecosystems can achieve enduring balance and stability.  Flores doesn’t believe in climax states.  Our hunter-gatherer ancestors succeeded in existing for a very long time in a low impact manner.  The fact that agriculture emerged independently in multiple locations indicates that the process could sometimes wobble out of balance, and whirl into ecological hurricanes.  We gradually expanded into new ecosystems, improved hunting methods, grew in numbers, and began bumping into limits.

Before Siberian hunters discovered America, the Great Plains were home to many species of large mammals, none of which had evolved adaptations for living near packs of aggressive primates with spears, dogs, and fire.  Between 8,000 and 13,000 years ago, 32 genera and at least 50 species went extinct.  Losers included camels, mammoths, giant ground sloths, horses, steppe lions, dire wolves, long-toothed cats, long-legged hyenas, giant long-horned bison, and many others.  In addition to overhunting, it’s likely that intense climate change also played a role in the surge of megafauna extinctions. 

Eventually, the species that escaped extinction managed to adapt to the humans, and share the plains for several thousand years.  Then, two centuries ago, powerful primate hurricanes whirled in from Europe and launched a devastating war on the Great Plains ecosystem.  Flores says that today, “you feel as if you’re standing at the end of an immense line of dominos…” 

Pronghorn antelopes evolved from ancestors that emerged 25 million years ago.  They are the fastest mammals on the plains.  Males can zoom along at 55 mph (88 km/h), and females at 65 to 70 mph (104 to 112 km/h).  Pronghorns can run at 90 percent of their top speed for two miles (3.2 km).  They can easily outrun today’s wolves and coyotes, only their fawns are vulnerable to predation.

Pronghorns evolved traits to evade a number of speedy predators, all of which blinked out at least 10,000 years ago.  They are very well adapted to a reality that no longer exists.  Unfortunately, they are unable to leap fences, a fact that has benefitted their exterminators.  By 1900, they had declined from at least 15 million to 13,000.  Today, there are 700,000.

The coyote story is fascinating.  Indians had great respect for them.  Coyotes were often tricksters in their folktales — exceptionally clever, but their cleverness often backfired.  Along with wolves and jackals, coyotes evolved in America five million years ago.  By one million years ago, some wolves and jackals migrated west into Eurasia.  Gray wolves returned to America 20,000 years ago, and began bumping into coyotes, leading to friction.  Evolution solved this problem by making wolves larger, and coyotes smaller, adjusting them for different niches.

American settlers hated coyotes, leading to decades of extermination campaigns.  By inserting strychnine pellets into rotting carcasses, one lad could kill 350 coyotes in ten days — far easier than shooting them.  Many millions have been killed, and the U.S. continues to kill 500,000 every year.  Efforts at extermination almost always backfire.  Apparently it’s impossible to permanently eliminate them.

Coyotes, like humans, have fission-fusion families — they sometimes work in packs, and other times as individuals.  This versatility promoted their survival.  Wolves are solely pack hunters, an unfortunate limitation.  Coyotes are fertile at one year old, and their average litters have 5.7 pups.  But when food is abundant, or their numbers are dwindling, they have larger litters.  Persecution also inspires them to migrate and colonize new lands.  They now range from Alaska to Panama, in all Canadian provinces, and all U.S. states except Hawaii.  They’ve learned how to thrive in cities.

Horses, pronghorns, wolves, and coyotes originated in America.  The ancestors of horses emerged 57 million years ago.  At some point, the horse family discovered Asia, and spread to Europe and Africa.  In North America, they were extinct by 10,000 years ago.  Spanish settlers later brought them to New Mexico, where many escaped in 1680.  They fled into an ecosystem for which evolution had already fine-tuned them, and where extinction had eliminated their primary predators.  Paradise!

Given these conditions, they were tremendously successful.  One observer noted, “As far as the eye could extend, nothing over the dead level prairie was visible except a dense mass of horses, and the trampling of their hooves sounded like the road of the surf on a rocky coast.”

For Indians, horses provided huge benefits — with hunting, hauling, raiding, and rustling.  They gained wealth by capturing wild horses and selling them at white trading centers.  A number of tribes abandoned agriculture, moved to the plains, and became bison hunters.  Comanches were the dominant tribe.  They were eager to trade horses for cool stuff, fully intending to steal their horses back from the palefaces at the first opportunity.

Today, wild horses baffle Americans.  They compete for forage with livestock that have market value.  Americans are unwilling to consume organic, grass fed, high protein, low fat horse meat — ordinary food in countries including Mexico, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, Germany, Indonesia, Poland, and China.  In the 1800s, pompous Anglo-Americans sneered at the disgusting meat that only low class immigrants would eat.  Thus, a cultural taboo evolved.  Countless horses ended up in dog food cans.  Today, instead of raising native animals fine-tuned for the Great Plains, like horses and bison, we continue to raise animals fine-turned for Europe — a region having a mild, moist climate, and a blend of vegetation optimal for raising cattle and sheep.

Grizzly bears were hammered in the last two centuries.  Settlers detested big strong animals that loved having lunch dates with settlers.  Five hundred years ago, the entire western half of the U.S. was grizzly country, home to 100,000 bears.  Travelers sometimes saw 30 or 40 in a day.  By 1900, only a few hundred remained, hiding in the mountains.  Today, there are zero bears on the plains, and maybe 1,000 close to national parks.

Giant long-horned bison from Eurasia discovered America about 800,000 years ago (today’s bison are dwarfed).  Both bison and pronghorns survived the megafauna extinctions.  Since then, both have coevolved.  Bison prefer to eat grasses, which encourages the growth of plants that pronghorns like.  Pronghorns prefer flowering plants and shrubs, shifting the advantage back to grasses.  They don’t compete for the same grub.

Following the megafauna extinctions, bison had few grazing competitors or predators, so their numbers swelled to maybe 20 to 30 million (others say 60).  Once upon a time, bison ranged from northwest Canada to Florida.  Sometimes a single herd took more than a week to pass.  “The buffalo was the essence of ecological adaptation to North America, perfectly suited to the grasslands.”  They survived drastic climate changes, and 100 centuries of human hunters.  Sadly, it took less than 100 years to reduce them to 1,073 animals by 1886.  They stood in the path of progress and civilization.

Before Indians got horses, hunting was far more difficult.  Fewer bison were taken, so scarcity was not often experienced.  Hunting did not seem to diminish their numbers, and many believed that the animals magically regenerated, the dead were renewed.  “The horse cast a dark shadow over the bison herds… no Indian could see that shadow.”  Then came the crazy Americans, for whom bison were walking gold pieces, which the magic of the marketplace deposited into the piggy bank.

The ancestors of wolves, coyotes, and dogs originated in America five million years ago.  Some wolves migrated into Asia, and spread to Europe and Africa.  Following the extinction spasm, a number of large predators left the stage, leaving a huge niche for both bison and wolves.  Wolves almost acted like shepherds to herds of bison and other large grazers.  They ate maybe four of every ten bison calves.  When horses were reintroduced, yummy colts were added to the menu.

As settlers, market hunters, and sportsmen moved west, they killed lots of game.  Wolves feasted on the banquet of leftovers.  The bison extermination campaign raged from the 1860s to 1880s.  As bison were depleted, market hunters turned to elk, pronghorns, bighorn sheep, and deer.  Countless millions of animals were slaughtered.  Then, the generous settlers began raising delicious wolf chow, dimwitted critters called cattle and sheep.  Enjoying 10,000 years of fine dining, wolves may have expanded up to 1.5 million animals.  Around 1850, America declared war on wild predators.  Wolves were shot, roped, gassed, stomped, strangled, poisoned, and trapped.  By 1923, wolves had been erased from the Great Plains.

The book closes with a discussion of recent efforts to rewild the west — remove the fences, and let bison, wolves, and others return to wild freedom.  A few projects are underway, and others are being considered.  For decades, Americans have been migrating out of the plains.  The Dust Bowl of the 1930s, nuked many farms.  Then came irrigation, extracting fossil water from the Ogallala Aquifer — an adventure in water mining that’s beginning to sing its death song.  Dust is returning.  Climate change may be the settlers’ last stand.  It’s expected to make the plains hotter and drier, maybe a desert.

“Before it was de-buffaloed, de-wolved, and de-grassed, the nineteenth-century Great Plains was one of the marvels of the world,” writes Flores.  “It took 13,000 years but the one, singular charismatic megafauna that walked upright did finally succeed in vanquishing, indeed nearly obliterating, all the others and bending the plains to its will.”  His book is fascinating, easy to read, short, and sad — an illuminating and uncomfortable look in the mirror.

Flores, Dan, American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains, University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 2016.

See my review of Flores’ earlier book, The Natural West, HERE.  YouTube has some Flores videos.  In 2010, National Geographic released a gorgeous and informative video titled American Serengeti.

The Forgiveness of Nature



I grew up in the battered remains of a once vast hardwood forest in Michigan.  I was lucky to spend my childhood wandering in a small surviving remnant.  My forest was a sacred place.  To me, the western plains felt dry, empty, bleak.  But my oldest ancestors evolved on the arid savannahs of Mother Africa — grassland with scattered brush and trees.  Grassland was where the big game hung out, and they were good to eat.  Recently, I studied horse history, and learned a lot about the vast steppe grasslands of Eurasia.  They were also home to big game and nomadic hunters.

I began to get curious about grass.  There are maybe 12,000 species of grass, and they inhabit climates between the arctic and equator.  More than half of the calories consumed by humankind come from three grasses: rice, wheat, and corn (maize).  Others include oats, barley, millet, sorghum, sugar cane, and bamboo.

Clive Ponting noted that in the last 300 years, the world’s grassland has increased 680 percent.  The forests of the U.S. Midwest were destroyed to grow corn, wheat, and livestock.  The Amazon rainforest is being destroyed to create cattle pasture.  So were the rainforests of Britain and Ireland.  The list is incredibly long.  I discovered that a British grass worshipper, Graham Harvey, had written a passionate book, The Forgiveness of Nature: The Story of Grass. 

Nature “forgives” humankind’s tireless vandalism — deserted roads, villages, and battlefields are eventually covered with a healthy carpet of greenery.  “Like the horse and hyena, Homo sapiens is first and foremost a creature of the grass,” wrote Harvey.  The Bible says “All flesh is grass,” because all flesh is mortal: green today, brown tomorrow; but God is eternal.  In 1872, John James Ingalls of Kansas offered a different interpretation.  “The primary form of food is grass.  Grass feeds the ox: the ox nourishes man: man dies and goes to grass again; and so the tide of life with everlasting repetition, in continuous circles, moves endlessly on and upward, and in more senses than one, all flesh is grass.”

Harvey described the heartbreaking story of the American prairies.  Farmers first arrived during an unusually rainy period.  They plowed under lots of turf, tapped the fantastic fertility of the rich black soil, and had fantastic harvests for a while, until drought returned, and the Dust Bowl blew away millions of tons of degraded soil.  Within 50 years, the party was over.  Farming continues today, with significant yields, but the heavily diminished soil is kept on life support by fertilizer, pesticides, irrigation, and fossil fuel.

Native Americans enjoyed the abundance of the prairie for free, hunting herds of 50 million bison.  Observers described one herd that was 50 miles (80 km) long and 25 miles (40 km) wide, maybe 480,000 animals.  American colonists now use the prairie to raise 45 million cattle, in a capital intensive, fossil fuel powered enterprise that degrades the grassland.  Bison evolved on the plains; they grazed and then moved on, allowing the grass to recover.  Cattle moved too little, and they were heavily overstocked.  Regions of the once-rich ancient turf were “grazed practically to dirt.”

Montana writer Richard Manning summed it up.  “Seventy per cent of the grain crop of American agriculture goes to the livestock that replaced the bison that ate no grain, and one wonders, what is agriculture for?”  Cattle don’t need grain, but farmers are subsidized to grow enormous surpluses.  Harvey lamented the rape of the prairie, “It was a biological powerhouse, rich in wildlife and with a productivity no modern farming system could match.  Yet Americans waged a ceaseless war on this priceless asset, and now it has all but disappeared, its life snatched by the quick cut of steel or slowly sapped by overgrazing.” 

Harvey carefully described the many ways in which evolution ingeniously created grasslands that could survive almost any challenge — except civilization.  They created soil-building humus, which retained moisture and accumulated nutrients.  Many plants have very deep roots, up to 32 feet (10 m), which bring up nutrients.  They can tolerate fire, drought, and grazing.  In fact, they need grazing, to nip off the first shoots of woody shrubs and trees that would compete for sunlight.

Back in the good old days, on the steppe and prairies, the bison and other grazers manicured the turf, and the wooly mammoths controlled the woody plants.  With the mammoths and mastodons gone, and elephants fading, humans in many regions around the world have adapted “firestick farming” to expand grassland area, control woody vegetation, improve the vitality of the forage, and attract game.  Burning off the dry grasses eliminates hiding places for game, and provides a banquet of roasted grasshoppers and other delicacies.

Grasslands are arid, receiving just 10 to 30 inches (25-76 cm) of rain per year.  In wetter prairies, grass can grow tall enough to hide a horse.  Lands getting less than 10 inches are desert.  More than 30 enables forest.  Britain is wet, not arid.  Its grasslands are manmade.  The land was once largely a rainforest.  Over the centuries, nomadic pastoralists gradually cleared trees to expand meadows for their cattle, sheep, and pigs.

In Harvey’s mind, this was the golden age, an era of wonderful freedom and easy living — before the arrival of farming, drudgery, serfdom, and oppressive nobility.  It doesn’t occur to him that wild Britain was even freer, when the ancient forest thrived, home to red deer, wild boar, wolves, and aurochs, and the Thames was loaded with salmon.  Tragically, agriculture displaced the nomadic herders, “setting Britain on its momentous path to ownership and exclusion, enclosure and dispossession, industrialization and urban living, to factory farming and genetically modified foods.”  Harvey screams “Why?” 

Sheep sped the Brits down the road to ruin, a sheepwreck.  The climate was ideal for producing wool of exceptional quality, which became a major industry, and made many people very rich.  This led to the enclosure movement, during which peasant farmers were evicted from the land, so their fields could be converted into valuable sheep pasture.  The wool gold rush generated much of the capital needed to launch the industrial revolution. 

Many of the evicted farmers migrated into rapidly growing urban slums that were crowded, filthy, and disease ridden.  They were joined by hordes of desperate refugees from the Irish Famine.  This generated widespread discontent that could not by soothed in gin palaces.  The fat cats got nervous, fearing unrest and revolution.  Grass came to the rescue.  Liverpool, New York, and other cities began building parks, providing islands of green sanity amidst the industrial nightmare world.

Delirious from perpetual growth fever, Brits joined the Americans in racing down the dead-end road of industrial agriculture — synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, big machines, fossil fuel, monocultures, feedlots, mega-farms.  Maximum yields were the goal, <bleep> the topsoil, the ecosystem, the grandchildren.  This explosion of pure idiocy drove poor Harvey bonkers.  He goes to great lengths to enthusiastically educate readers on the magnificence of healthy topsoil, and the many ways that spectacularly stupid people foolishly destroy it.

His grand vision is a wise transition to organic mixed farming, a three-year rotation of winter grain, spring grain, and a fallow of grasses and red clover — combined with regular application of all available manure.  While this is better than the current norm, there are some important drawbacks.  Every trainload of wheat shipped away to London includes essential nonrenewable nutrients that will never be returned to the farm.  The soil nutrients sent to London stay in London, where they are mixed into toxic sludge.  Anything less than 100 percent nutrient recycling is an enterprise with an expiration date.

Britain usually has gentle rains, so less soil is washed away than in the U.S., where torrential downpours are common, and soil erosion is a huge problem.  Harvey asserts that mixed farming can heal the wrecked soil, rebuild the humus, and restore the millions of tiny creatures that thrive in healthy soil.  If people did this everywhere, enough carbon could be sequestered in the soil to snuff climate change.  Listen to this: “A return to sound husbandry in agriculture would end global warming without the need for motoring cuts.”  Oy!

 When my Norwegian ancestors settled in Iowa in 1879, folks were astonished by the coal black topsoil that could be up to 12 feet (3.6 m) deep.  This super-fertile soil was created by thousands of years of healthy tall grass prairie.  Today, this treasure is nearly gone.  Plows are turning up yellow patches of subsoil.  A wise elder once concluded that the plow has caused more harm to future generations than the sword.

Harvey explores many other subjects.  His book is easy to read, and out of print.  It will inspire you to psychoanalyze the suburbanites who spend thousands of dollars obsessively maintaining spooky freakshow lawns that look as natural as Astroturf.  They must spend their nights having sweet dreams of chasing antelopes across the endless prairies.

Harvey, Graham, The Forgiveness of Nature: The Story of Grass, Random House, London, 2001.