From Powers to Commodities

Domestic animal husbandry brought economic advantages, but it also brought about an unsettling of very old and deeply held ways of seeing animals, human beings, and the natural world. The unsettling process took centuries, of course, but it eventually destroyed the older, primal view of the living world that held animals and natural forces in awe.

The primal worldview saw people in partnership with, and having respectful views of, animals and nature. Animals were admired for their cunning, power, speed, ferocity and elusiveness. They were seen as ancestors, as kinsfolk, as having souls like people. Animal life animated and ensouled the world, gave meaning to its mystery and order to its chaos.

After centuries of manipulative animal husbandry, however, men gained conscious control over animals and their life processes. In reducing them to physical submission, people reduced animals psychically as well. Castrated, yoked, harnessed, hobbled, penned, and shackled, domestic animals were thoroughly subdued. They had none of that wild, mysterious power that their ancestors had when they were stalked by hunter-foragers. Domestic animals were disempowered - made docile - by confinement, selective breeding, and familiarity with humans. They gradually came to be seen more with contempt than awe.

In reducing domestic animals, farmers reduced animals in general, and with them the living world that animals had symbolized. Farming in general helped reduce the animal/natural powers because crop-conscious farmers saw more and more species as pests, more and more natural elements as threats. But it was animal husbandry in particular that nudged people form seeing animals as powers to seeing them as commodities and tools. It was husbandry that dratically upset the ancient human-animal relationship, changing it from partnership to master and slave, from being kin with animal-nature to being lord over animal-nature.

This reduction of animals - the soul and the essence of the living world to the primal mind - reduced all of nature, creating, in the agriculturalist's mind, a view of the world where people were over and distinctly apart from nature. Animal reduction was key to the radically different world-view that came with the transition from foraging to farming, for more than any other agricultural development, it broke up the old ideas of kinship and continuity with the living world. This, more than any other factor, accelerated and accentuated human alienation from nature. It originated in the West's first agricultural center, it found its legs there, and then it spread to the other centers of civilization. Husbandry was, I think, the more influencial side of farming that led, ultimately, to the agrarian world-view that we still hold today. As that worldview began to emerge thousands of years ago, wrote University of California historian Roderick Nash, "for the first time humans saw themselves as distinct from the rest of nature."

From the book: An Unnatural Order: The roots of our destruction of Nature by Jim Mason, p.145-146, Lantern Books, 2005, New York.