Wild Free and Happy Sample 28

[Note: This is the twenty-eighth 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.] 

Sheep

Mouflon are the wild ancestors of sheep, and they still survive because they are faster than Olympic athletes on steroids.  They excel at racing across steep, rocky landscapes.  They also have large curled horns, capable of rattling the brains of their bloodthirsty foes.  Long ago, folks sometimes discovered mouflon youngsters, brought them back to camp, and raised them.  Unlike rowdy aurochs, the young lambs were less challenging to raise in captivity.

Paul Shepard noted that wild animals have a stable genome.  Thus, the genes of today’s mouflon are likely much the same as their ancestors 800+ thousand years ago.  But during the process of domestication, breeders deliberately selected for characteristics more beneficial for milk production, wool quality, and ease of control.  Bye-bye stable genes.

After dogs, sheep were among the first critters to be domesticated, maybe 11,000 years ago.  During this tragic demotion, their brains eventually became 24 percent smaller than their wild ancestors.  They lost a lot of their survival skills.  I’ve seen several reports of wolves killing dozens of sheep, and only eating one or two.  When wolves ran into large prey that acted so abnormally helpless, it was surreal and mystifying.  The sacred kill is usually a more dignified ceremony. 

In the old days, sheep shed their winter wool when springtime brought warmer temperatures.  Over the centuries, clever humans have “improved” the sheep they own and exploit.  Because of selective breeding, modern sheep are more likely to retain their wool, rather than scatter it all over the countryside.  This makes it easier for herders to collect as much of their precious wool as possible. 

In Australia, folks discovered one domesticated sheep who had managed to escape six years earlier, and enjoy a life of freedom.  Unfortunately, the miserable critter had never been sheared, and was carrying around 93 pounds (42 kg) of filthy wool.  This beat the previous record of another sheep found in New Zealand that carried so much wool it could barely walk.  It was blind, crippled, and near death.  Unshorn sheep are vulnerable to dying from heat stroke in warm weather.

Domesticated sheep are also vulnerable to pests like scab mites, that thrive in herds of confined prisoners.  The mites multiply and cause skin lesions, which lead to wool loss and open bleeding wounds.  Complications include hypothermia, infections, and death.  Mites are spread via the herder’s clothing, sheering tools, fence posts, and bits of wool hanging from bushes.

Mouflon manage their own lives, and fully take care of themselves.  Enslaved sheep require a lot of human assistance.  Shepherds are needed to protect them from bloodthirsty predators — noxious pests that must be aggressively exterminated whenever possible.  Smart shepherds are careful to avoid overgrazing.  Sometimes sheep also need to be provided with hay, water, salt, and shelter.

Kassia St Clair noted that some types of sheep were selectively bred to produce white wool, which is easier to dye.  This would be a vulnerability for wild ones, because it would make them far more visible to predators.  I learned about St Clair’s book when I read Claire Eamer’s fascinating essay, No Wool, No Vikings. 

Viking Sheep

For the first 250,000 years, our ancestors ran around naked in the tropics.  With the colonization of snow country, folks were confronted with the new possibility of freezing to death.  In the early days, it was fashionable to wear clothing made of animal skins and pelts, ideally cut and sewn into stylish tailor made active wear.  This clothing kept folks fairly warm, until it got wet.  Much later, innovation provided colonists with wool clothing, which stayed fairly warm even when wet.  The adaptation of clothing was another radical transition in the human saga.  It opened up vast regions of uninhabited land for exploration and colonization.

St Clair wrote that Vikings used wool to make their clothing, mittens, blankets, and sails.  A blanket required the wool of 17 sheep.  It took two highly skilled women more than a year to make a typical square sail.  To outfit an average Viking cargo ship and crew, making the clothing, bedding, and sails would require 440 pounds (200 kg) of wool, and ten person years of labor for producing, shearing, carding, spinning, weaving, and finishing the products.  Some believe that, in the old days, folks in snow country might have spent more hours making cloth than acquiring food.

Viking long ships were yet another radical transition.  Sailing boats were not a new idea.  Folks used them in other regions, like the Mediterranean.  Coastal regions of Scandinavia were not home to many sheltered, deep water harbors, so Viking ships were built with a shallow draft, so they could be landed on beaches.  This made them great for surprise attacks and fast getaways.  The use of sail power was enabled by keels that could be lowered in deep water, and raised when beaching.

These new boats allowed Vikings to raid communities that had formerly been safe and secure for centuries.  In A.D. 98, Tacitus wrote about the Suiones, who lived along the Swedish coastline.  For them, the sea provided an invincible defensive barrier.  It was impossible for enemies to attack them by water.  But the new boats set the stage for the Viking era — several centuries of raiding, pillaging, bloodshed, and colonizing that rocked northern Europe. 

Remarkably, the design of longboats also made them capable of travelling on the open ocean.  Rugged woolen sails allowed them to cross the Atlantic and build an outpost at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, Canada.  In those days, most of humankind spent their entire lives fairly close to their place of birth.  Imagine gaining the ability to sail to unknown lands more than a thousand miles away.  This was a mind-blowing possibility.  It rubbished the traditional perception of space and limits.

Long distance sea travel flung open a ghastly Pandora’s Box.  Sailing ships enabled aggressive conquerors to colonize vast regions around the world.  Environmental history is loaded with horror stories of pathogens delivered by long distance sea travel — potato blight, anthrax, Dutch elm disease, chestnut blight, white-nose fungus, bubonic plague, smallpox, cholera, typhoid, yellow fever, influenza, and countless others.  Millions of unlucky indigenous people have been conquered, enslaved, and/or killed by alien invaders from distant lands.

Anyway, wool was big juju.  Prior to the nineteenth century, clothing was the product of extremely labor-intensive processes.  For hardworking common folks, clothing was precious, carefully mended and patched, and passed on to the next generation.  When someone died in a hospital, the clothing of the deceased had to be removed and given to the lawful inheritors.  Many folks owned little more than what they were wearing.  Like moon explorers, wool space suits enabled tropical primates to survive in frigid life-threatening environments.

White Gold

St Clair also discussed English wool.  The Normans were Vikings who colonized the north coast of France and smelled like sheep.  In 1066, they conquered England.  By the thirteenth century, England had become famous for its high quality wool.  Regions that produced the softest, richest wool could sell it for very high prices.  Most of the cloth makers that bought the wool were not English, many were Flemish or Florentine.  Ships that carried the wool to buyers were prime targets for pirates, eager to snatch the precious white gold, and get rich quick.

On the manors of wealthy aristocrats, the peasant tenants were given rights to use specific strips of cropland.  Assignments would change from year to year, because some cropland was regularly allowed to lie fallow and recharge.  Beside cropland, there were also common pastures, and common forests, which the whole community could use.  Tenants raised livestock, hunted, foraged, grew vegetables, and cut firewood and timber.  The survival of the peasant community was dependent on always having access to the commons.  Even with access, the lives of most were brutally harsh and marginal, compared to modern couch potatoes. 

By 1297, half of the total English economy was generated by the wool industry.  Before long, ambitious aristocrats realized that they could make far more money from raising sheep than by collecting rents from their dirt-poor tenant farmers.  This deep hunger for wealth slowly led to a process known as the enclosure movement.  Fences and hedgerows were created to prohibit tenants from entering the commons.  They were not amused, they were doomed.

Graham Harvey wrote that the enclosures began in England, during the fourteenth century.  They gradually spread over the passage of several centuries, and then surged from 1750 to 1860.  Simon Fairlie noted that between 1760 and 1870, about 7 million acres (2.8 million ha), about a sixth the area of England, was changed from common land to enclosed land.

One source estimated that, in Scotland alone, a half million peasants were driven off the land by the enclosures.  No food, no home, no future.  Across the U.K., the dispossessed were forced into filthy, disease ridden cities, where there were no social safety nets.  Rioting became popular, as did infant mortality.

John Reader noted that the enclosure movement led to the breakdown of a long standing culture of land-based subsistence living for many.  Tenant communities had benefitted from the mutual support of extended families.  They were replaced by a small number of shepherds.  With the tenants gone, there were fewer horses and oxen on the manor, so more grass was available for sheep.  Tennant cottages and outbuildings were demolished.  Several hundred villages disappeared, except for their churches.  Aristocrats enjoyed getting higher income from their manors, and raising sheep was more dependable than agriculture.  From year to year, grain harvests were quite vulnerable to the mood swings of weather and luck.

Harvey wrote that in the Black Death era (1340s), Britain was a backwater.  Three centuries later, it was Europe’s most advanced country.  Wool flooded the U.K. with cash, and for 200 years it was the world’s richest country.  Millions of hungry dirty people in cities were willing to work insane hours, in miserable conditions, for peanuts.  This nourished the emergence of a powerful industrial state.  By 1832, the medieval peasant community had been completely destroyed.  Like I said, wool was big juju.  The gentle sheep had eaten many lives and villages.

My Ancestors

My great-great-grandmother was Sarah Cleaton, who married Edward Rees in 1838.  They were born and raised in the village of Cwmbelan, Wales, where a small stream passing through the village powered a waterwheel at the flannel factory.  Sheep grazed on the surrounding hillsides (formerly lush forest).  Cwmbelan was in the parish of Llangurig.  In 1836, the 49,600 acre (20,000 ha) parish had 37,000 acres of commons.  By 1875, “large quantities of the common land have been enclosed.”

Edward and Sarah had three sons before he died at 23 from “decline.”  Sarah was a handloom weaver, as was her mother Mary, and her sister Catherine.  So were her sister-in-laws, Mary, Elizabeth, Margaret, and Jane Rees.  Handloom weaving was a skilled profession.  It apparently provided something like a respectable middle class income for that era. 

With the arrival of the Industrial Revolution and its power mills, 500,000 weavers lost their source of income, according to Clive Ponting.  Many were forced to move to filthy cities.  By 1861, Sarah and her three sons had moved south to Merthyr Tydfil, home to an iron mining district, Dowlais.  She was a barkeep at the Green Dragon pub, and her two older sons mined iron.

Merthyr Tydfil had four ironworks, and a slum known as Little Hell, where a super-poor population of “unhappy and lawless” folks were piled together in conditions of squalor that were at least as bad as Liverpool or Nottingham.  The district had no toilets.  Open sewers encouraged the spread of cholera and typhoid.  Millions of friendly lice thrived on folks who rarely if ever bathed.

Unfortunately, for Sarah and sons, by 1861, the ironworks industry in Merthyr Tydfil got blindsided by new technology, the Bessemer process, and local prosperity was fading fast.  In 1863 they moved to Pennsylvania.

In 1919, her son Richard E. Rees, celebrated his fiftieth anniversary in Columbus, Ohio.  To commemorate the event, he sent a story to a Welsh newspaper.  In it he wrote, “I have worked underground for 65 years; ten in the Old Country, two in Pennsylvania, and 53 in Ohio.”  He was 75 years old, and lived another ten years.

Australian Sheep

Elinore Melville wrote about the introduction of sheep in Australia, where the firestick farming by Aborigines maintained expansive regions of grassland.  Unfortunately, this excellent grassland was supporting the existence of useless vermin called kangaroos.  Britain wasn’t interested in buying kangaroo meat, but they would pay good money for wool.  So, colonists worked hard to exterminate as many kangaroos as possible, as they rapidly expanded the sheep ranching industry.  By 1845 there were 9 million sheep, and in 1854 there were 12 million. 

The British colonists came from a moist land that had reliable rainfall.  Australia was different.  When a herd had stripped the vegetation from an area, shepherds moved the herd to a greener pasture.  The vegetation they devoured had been storing moisture, which slowed evaporation.  The land dried out, and groundwater was not replenished.  Drought followed drought.  Overgrazing often rubbished grassland regions within 7 to 20 years. 

Bill Gammage noted that the native kangaroo grass was excellent (“caviar for grazers”).  It was a deep-rooted, drought tolerant perennial that held the soil in place, retained soil moisture, survived fire, and was highly nutritious.  It remained green after four months without rain, a great asset for wildlife in drought times.  The colonists’ sheep grazed it down to bare clay, killing the precious grass.

Colonists drained wetlands to expand pastures.  Livestock proceeded to compact the soil, which dried out, and cracked.  Springs, ponds, and creeks evaporated, eliminating the critters that lived in them.  When rains returned, rapid runoff encouraged erosion, landslides, deep gullies, floods, silt chokes, and the spread of salts.  An observer in 1853 commented on the growing soil destruction: “Ruts, seven, eight, and ten feet deep (2 to 3 m), and as wide, are found for miles, where two years ago it was covered with a tussocky grass like a land marsh.”

Navajo Sheep

Between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, the Navajo moved from Alaska and western Canada down into the U.S. southwest, home of the Hopi, Zuñi, and Pueblo.  In the early days, the Navajo lived as hunter-gatherers.  In 1598 Spanish colonists arrived, bringing with them domesticated sheep, cattle, horses, and goats.  The Navajo became sedentary, and learned sheep herding, weaving, and gardening.  They planted fruit orchards.  When forage was still adequate, livestock provided more reliable access to food, so famine times were reduced.  This new mode of living led to population growth.

The Spanish did not allow the Navajo to own or ride horses, but eventually they acquired them.  Horses made it much easier to hunt, and to raid neighbors.  Stealing sheep was much easier than raising them.  Raiding was about making unannounced visits to neighboring tribes and stealing sheep, horses, women, and children.  Sometimes the defenders were killed and scalped.  Naturally, other tribes responded by raiding the Navajo.  Raiding was an extremely common practice among pastoral societies around the world. 

Peter Iverson noted that by 1846, the Navajo had 500,000 sheep, 30,000 cattle, and 10,000 horses, mules, and asses.  As white settlers moved in, they complained about the Indians.  So, the government ordered the Navajo to relocate to a reservation, where they could become farmers and get rich quick.  The Indians preferred to remain on their land, and continue living in their traditional manner.  This was not the proper response.

So, the government sent Lieutenant Colonel Kit Carson to make the whites happy.  In 1863 his troops brutally attacked the Navajos and destroyed homes, gardens, orchards, livestock, and people.  The 8,000 surviving natives were forced to march 300 miles (480 km) to the luxurious Fort Summer facility.  In 1868, they were allowed to return to a portion of their homeland.  Each family was given two sheep, one male, one female.

The railroad arrived in 1881, and trading posts appeared along its route.  This encouraged the Navajo to weave rugs and make jewelry to be used as trade goods.  They raised large herds of Churro sheep, which produced long, smooth, and less greasy wool that was ideal for hand spinning. 

By the time the Depression began in 1929, the Navajo population had swelled.  Kendall Bailes wrote that by 1933, two million acres (809,000 ha) of Navajo land was severely overgrazed, some of it reduced to desert.  There were huge erosion gullies, and large amounts of silt were moving into Lake Mead, the reservoir at Hoover Dam.  Their herding practices, developed 200 years earlier, when grass was abundant, didn’t work as well in a dryer climate, when there was far less grass.  Animals were starving.  In the western states, the Dust Bowl had begun.

In 1935, the Bureau of Indian Affairs conducted a survey on grazing land.  They found that the Navajo sheep flocks contained more than a million animals, and they were kept on land that could only support 560,000.

The government perceived this to be a very serious problem, for which the obvious solution was a sharp reduction in herd size.  The Navajo, on the other hand, believed that this was the opposite of a problem, it was a sacred gift.  Their livestock were tokens of wealth, status, and cultural identify.  They loved their goats and sheep almost as much as their own children.

The white authorities moved in, without permission, and by the 1940’s, the herds were reduced by half.  According to Iverson, at first the sheep were shipped urban centers to feed poor people.  Eventually, the animals were just taken over the hill, shot, piled up, and left to rot.  The government paid the Navajo for every animal eliminated, but the tribal economy was blindsided.  Navajo resentment over this action remains fierce.  The tribe now has a quota system for herd sizes in grazing ranges.

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.