The Intimate Bond (12 page)

Cattle handling probably reached its greatest skill level during the nineteenth century
CE
, when cowboys drove thousands of head of cattle over enormous distances of the American West between 1866 and 1886. Twenty million cattle traveled from Texas to railheads in Kansas such as Abilene, for shipment to stockyards in Chicago and points farther east. The cowboys moved the cattle slowly and quietly, for they knew that stress from rough handling would kill hundreds of animals along the way. On average, a Texas-to-Kansas drive numbered about three thousand head, with at least ten cowboys driving and watching the cattle day and night, moving them about twenty-four kilometers (fifteen miles) a day. It could take as long as two months to complete a drive. Not that such drives were unique to the American West. In medieval Europe, Hungarian Grey cattle traveled across the Danube to the beef markets of western Europe. The Swiss drove cattle across the Alps and into Italy, until sedentary dairy farming became more profitable. In the American West, the expansion of railroads throughout the country (also chronic overgrazing) tolled the death knell for much long-distance driving. All kinds of other research has relevance to early cattle herding. For instance, cattle herds should be larger than four head, for larger groups are more peaceful, housed as they are in bigger pens, which allows attacked animals to move away. It's important, too, to keep cattle together with beasts they know, as a way of reducing aggressive behavior.

Much of the behavior of range cattle during the nineteenth century and, for that matter, today seems to mirror what we know about the habits of
Bos primigenius.
A placid beast when calm, it can display aggressive and violent behavior with sudden movement or an unexpected noise. Hunting such a formidable, easily angered quarry required consummate stalking skills. However, if African game or range cattle are any guide, people moving quietly within clear sight of an aurochs
might well have triggered no emotional reaction from a grazing wild ox whatsoever. I've walked quietly among herds of antelope with no obvious threatening intent. They merely looked up, and then went on grazing. But if I'd suddenly appeared from among the trees or high grass, they would have bolted at once, feeling threatened. This is very different behavior from that of a beast that is aware it's being stalked and then attacked. And this may be a clue as to how cattle were first tamed.

Hunters survive and are successful in the hunt because they know their quarry at close quarters, at every season, at night and by day, at first light and dusk. They've learned when not to approach them, and how to allay their fears; they've watched how wild oxen protect their young. One can imagine a hunting group living in close juxtaposition to a small aurochs herd, even walking around them in the open with no plan for a kill. Perhaps a young calf or a juvenile bull became separated from the herd. The hunters, who probably knew different beasts individually, would gently herd the stray into a large enclosure, and then make sure it had fodder and water. And so the slow process would unfold until a few captive animals became habituated to humans and bred within their corral, or grazed nearby and were corralled at night. The hunters, now herders, would protect their charges against predators. The process must have taken years before the lumbering animals became accustomed to captivity and management, or to being milked. Regular milking must have developed a close bond between tamer and tamed, which may account for the intimate relationships that subsequently developed between cattle and their owners in many pastoral societies.

Exploitation, breeding, and nurturing—these practices resonate in modern experience with animal husbandry, which began during the eighteenth century (see chapter 15). Early cattle herders were concerned above all with acquiring docile beasts that were easily managed. They must have soon learned that castrating surplus males produced more manageable beasts. This also allowed a herder to choose which animals to breed. Within a relatively short time, domesticated cattle were smaller, almost juvenile (a condition known as neoteny), more docile, and less wary around humans.

Wild cattle may have been dangerous prey, but they offered important advantages to those who tamed them. Nutritionally, they are highly desirable, supplying 2,360 calories per kilogram. Almost certainly they were tamed initially not for their milk, but for their meat. As societies in Southwest Asia turned to cultivation, their predominantly carbohydrate-laden diet created both long-term health problems such as osteoporosis, and needs for protein to compensate for cereal-based diets. In the final analysis, it was easier to protect, breed, and cull herds than to hunt reliably—and we humans develop attachments to large mammals and their young. Domestication was a symbiotic process to which both animals and humans contributed.

Domesticating
Bos

Now let's look at the archaeological data. Most authorities believe that
Bos primigenius
was domesticated at least twice, perhaps three times. The Cro-Magnons of Europe never tamed
Primigenius
, which was first tamed in more arid, less-forested environments. There, perhaps, the beasts were easier to approach when they could see people clearly. Humpless cattle, sometimes called taurines (
Bos taurus
), were first corralled in the Taurus Mountains region of what is now Turkey, the place where the greatest genetic diversity of cattle occurs. If the molecular biologists are to be believed, cattle domestication may have involved a mere eighty beasts.
³
Mitochondrial DNA from ancient and modern sources tell us that only a limited number of cattle lineages was involved in a domestication process that may have taken as long as two thousand years, perhaps along the upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Syria and Turkey. Dja'de and Çayönü, both villages of the ninth millennium
BCE
, lie less than 250 kilometers (155 miles) apart. Between 8800 and 8200
BCE
, the inhabitants relied more and more on cattle at the expense of hunting. Hundreds of fragmentary bones from the two villages may document a gradual process of domestication.

Once domesticated, these cattle spread rapidly across Southwest Asia, a consequence, in part, of the need for nutritious grazing, and, perhaps,
of trading. They may even have been tamed in northeastern China as early as 8700
BCE
, but the evidence is not unequivocal. What is certain, however, is that cattle were in widespread use in China, Mongolia, and Korea by 3000
BCE
, when the first cities and civilizations appeared in Mesopotamia and along the Nile. Domestic cattle abounded in the Nile Valley well before founding of Egyptian civilization in 3100
BCE
and are known from sites occupied at least two thousand years earlier. Farmers brought cattle and other farm animals with them as they spread across Europe in about 5500
BCE
. The humped zebu (
Bos indicus
) was domesticated, most likely in the Indus River Valley of South Asia, by about 5000
BCE
and spread widely into southern China and Southeast Asia.

“Goods to Think With”

By 7500
BCE
, farming villages, even some small towns, flourished over a wide area of the Near East. One of the larger settlements, Çatal Höyük, on Turkey's Anatolian Plateau, gives us a clear portrait of the increasingly sophisticated relationships between cattle and humans.
⁴
Here, every aspect of daily life, whether secular or ritual, unfolded not in great public buildings, but in houses occupied for many generations. They were literally “history houses” that commemorated ancestors, lavishly decorated with wall paintings that displayed elaborate symbolism. There were paintings of humans. Dangerous animals and bulls were everywhere. Ox skulls modeled with plaster features adorned houses from their moment of first occupation. Bull's horns projected from walls and benches. Plastered skulls of revered ancestors and ancestral burials lay under the floors. Çatal Höyük's history houses were vibrant archives with a status that involved control of history, religion, and interaction with ancestors. They may also have played an important role in ceremonial feasts involving wild bulls that had mythical and spiritual associations. Ancestors, animal and human, protected the occupants of the house, part of a strong motif of continuity that permeated early farming societies throughout Southwest Asia, where farming life revolved around the endless passage of the seasons (see sidebar “Disengaging from Nature?”).

Cattle herding and its values permeated farming societies over a large area of Southwest Asia. The same values continued to shape the customs of these societies long after they had changed profoundly and moved away from any emphasis on herding. The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once remarked that animals, among them cattle, were goods to think with—and think their owners did. Cattle became wealth, accumulated, displayed, fought over, and sacrificed with reverence. But they were also the focus of human behaviors and values deeply embedded in animal husbandry. The herders manipulated their herds, their control helping both animals and humans to thrive. Milk and cheese, provided by cows year after year, formed a powerful bond between people and their cattle, which was expressed in a reluctance to kill animals, except in a sacrificial setting. It followed that slaughtering herds for their meat was a problem, partly because killing beasts reduced the herd, but also because of the conflict between necessity and social values.

Cattle, power, wealth—the close relationships between cattle and their herders developed in the earliest days of domestication, thanks to the close bonds developed between corralled animals and their guardians, especially with cows. From this interdependence developed distinctive social values that permeate subsistence cattle herding societies to this day. The relationships they forge with their beasts are profoundly emotional and sometimes border on obsession.

Cattle herders range their beasts over considerable distances, especially in semiarid environments where even a small amount of rainfall can make a dramatic difference to animals on the land. The number of
hectares required for such grazing was enormous. One estimate has it that had not the herds of the Maasai of East Africa been decimated by an epidemic of rinderpest (cattle plague, now extinct) in the late nineteenth century, their cattle would eventually have required all of Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda for their range. Such landscapes are like giant sets of lungs, sucking people in when rainfall encourages plant growth and creates standing water, pushing them out when conditions are drier. Herein lies a central dynamic of history triggered by animals—the often hostile relationship between farmers anchored to their fields and nomadic herders on the margins. In drought years, marauding nomads would drive their beasts onto better-watered farmland, seeking water and forage for them. Sumerian cities, such as Ur, in what is now southern Iraq, lived in constant fear of raiding nomads, especially in times of drought. In 2200
BCE
, so many herds moved downstream that the city's ruler built a 180-kilometer-long (112-mile) wall, named the “Repeller of Amorites,” to keep herder immigration in check. His efforts were to no avail. The population of Ur increased threefold, and the economy collapsed.
⁷

Cultivated, settled lands symbolized order and continuity at least to their settlers, constantly under threat from those without, who possessed animals but no land. Such beliefs permeated ancient Japan, Egypt, the Greeks, and the Romans, who considered Corsican shepherds from island mountains to be brigands and savages, effectively wild beasts. As Englishman Edmund Spenser was to write in Elizabethan times, “Loke into all Countries that live in suche sorte by keeping of Cattle and you shall finde that they are bothe verie Barbarians and uncivil, allsoe greatly given to warre.”
⁸
The fourteenth-century Islamic geographer and historian Ibn Khaldun described Arab camel herding groups as defiant of authority. “They are the most savage human beings that exist. Compared with sedentary people, they are on a level with wild untamable [animals].”
⁹
For all these derogatory remarks, the relationships between humans and nomadic herders shaped key ideas and values that were fundamental to people in many parts of the world.