The Intimate Bond (29 page)

Horses served as diplomatic currency as well. King Henry VIII, while allied to France, obtained draft animals from Flanders in the Low Countries, a region controlled by Spain. The king delighted in gifts of fine horses, especially from Italian princes, whose studs used high-quality brood mares and stallions from North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. Diplomatic gifts between monarchs continued, always for the benefit of only a few. Landowners, who used foreign horses for breeding purposes, paid big money for them. The quality of native English horses improved markedly as a result. Most people purchased their mounts at horse fairs, while the gentry tended to buy much more expensive horses from one another, from people who were friends of equivalent social status, or through agents.

By the seventeenth century, imposing stables served as wings to large country houses, said to look “like so many gentlemen's seats.”
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Just the cost of feeding pampered beasts was enormous, preferably with some upland pasture close at hand. The ultimate prestige mounts were Eastern horses, widely admired for their strength and beauty. Increasing
numbers of them arrived in England during the early seventeenth century. The diarist John Evelyn admired three Oriental horses in London's Hyde Park in December 1784. One bay, valued at five hundred guineas, was “in all regards beautifull and proportion'd to admiration.” The three horses “trotted like does, as if they did not feele the Ground.”
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Prominent artists painted the beautiful Arabian, which became an equine icon. Arabians were lively yet gentle beasts that responded well to kindness. So they received the best of quarters. The progeny of such imported horses and local stock gave rise to the thoroughbreds that defined English horseracing, where humans and equines worked together in perfect harmony. The aristocracy spent enormous sums of money on their cherished racehorses, while millions of commoners lived in grinding poverty.

But horses, however valuable, were a depreciating asset. When once-cherished mounts grew old and infirm, few wealthy owners put them out to grass to end their days in comfort. They usually discarded them when they could no longer fulfill their role in life. By the end of their often-long lives, they were worthless in a country that abhorred horse meat on the dinner table. Old or worn-out beasts were worth a few shillings for their hides and as dog meat. Many became meat for foxhounds. Wrote John Flavel, a preacher, in 1669, “By such cruel usage, they have been destroyed and cast into a ditch for dog's meat.”
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Perhaps this sentiment is the origin of the common expression “going to the dogs.” In a moment, at the whim of its master, a cherished mount became disposable, impersonal flesh for other beasts.

Have We Dominion over Beasts?

One should not be surprised at this in a devout age when Christian doctrine governed the ways people treated animals. The Scriptures gave humans the right to rule over animals that were made by God for humans. The Bible's teachings were set down long before the Romans relied heavily on working animals for food and transporting loads. People may have liked individual animals in their possession, but they were considered, ultimately, either food or unpaid labor. The abundance
of working animals seemed to strengthen assumptions that beasts served people. Many believed there was a natural instinct in some animals to obey humanity. Wrote the Puritan pastor Jeremiah Burroughes in 1643, “Sometimes you may see a little child driving before him a hundred oxen . . . as he pleaseth; it showeth that God hath preserved somewhat of man's dominion over the creatures.”
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A physician, George Cheyne, even proclaimed in 1705 that God had made horse manure smell sweet knowing that people would spend much time among their steeds. Every animal had its purpose, Cheyne wrote—fearsome beasts to serve as “our schoolmasters,” apes and parrots to entertain. Even horseflies were God's way of taxing human ingenuity in dealing with them. The Creator's design was utter perfection; the animal kingdom was part of his grand blueprint.

Nevertheless, established doctrine changed perceptibly over the centuries. By the eighteenth century, many thinkers argued that domestication was good for animals: Cattle and sheep were better off because they were protected from predators. Butchering animals was an act of kindness that prevented beasts from suffering in old age and provided food for “a more noble animal.” Beasts had no reason, no divine authority, and thus had no rights. The Sixth Commandment, which forbade murder, applied, of course, to humans alone, not to animals. Traditional Christian theological opinion had no truck with the gentler attitudes toward animals and nature associated with Eastern religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism. Christianity was an anthropocentric faith that tended to ignore those parts of the Gospel that spoke of human responsibilities to care for animals, implying that they were part of God's covenant. Thus, an unbridgeable gap separated animals and humans.

Were Animals Rational Beings?

Only a few voices defended animals, the most prominent among them being French statesman and writer Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), who wrote of animals, “It is no great marvell if we understand them not: no more doe we the Cornish, the Welsh, or Irish.”
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They have a
“full and perfect communication” and were no more “brutish” than humans. A flood of discussion about animals during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries revolved around three emerging trends; new generations of experimental science that involved vivisection, the increasing commodification of animals for food, especially for growing urban populations, and more widely available printed media.

Montaigne's claim that animals were more rational than people contrasted with the views of the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1660).
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This learned gentleman developed a doctrine, later called Cartesianism, with Spanish antecedents that proclaimed animals to be mere equipment, just like clocks, incapable of speech and reasoning, without minds or souls. Some of his followers even argued that animals did not feel pain. The howls of a beaten dog were merely external reflexes totally unconnected to any inner sensations. Cartesianism became a way of rationalizing how humans treated animals, especially the heinous practice of live vivisection, a regular event at London's Royal Society during the 1660s. The watching fellows enjoyed the gruesome spectacle and verified the results. Such cruelty was entirely justified, in their minds, for humans were unique, separated from animals as heaven was distinct from earth. Wrote the eighteenth-century novelist and poet Oliver Goldsmith, “In the ascent from brutes to man, the line is strongly drawn, well marked, and impassable.”
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Even some human beings were considered beasts or near-beasts in an era when the exploration of distant lands was much in the news. The Tahitians of the South Pacific enjoyed brief popularity as noble savages living in a tropical paradise. Others, such as the Hottentots of the Cape of Good Hope, became the epitome of animal-like humans with “piggish” habits and an odor so powerful that one was said to be able to smell them from thirty paces—upwind. Closer to home, the insane seemed like people whose inner beast was emerging, while the treatment of the poor, of slaves, often resembled that accorded sheep. Only spurs and whips could restrain the common people, such as farmworkers or the urban poor. Breaking in a horse often seemed an appropriate analogy for educating the young. For people accustomed to the management of cattle, leadership appeared to resemble the task of a shepherd. Even
the poorest farm laborers believed in the general principle of domination, for they could kick and curse their animals when insulted by their superiors.

Cruelty at Close Quarters

Domination and brutality went hand in hand in a world where everyone depended on animals for food, all manner of products, and for work. Subsistence farmers rarely kept their stock for sentimental reasons; cruelty was commonplace.
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Castration was routine, as it had been for thousands of years, making beasts easier to handle and reducing the amount of energy spent on sexual activity; it was also thought to make their meat fattier, healthier, and better tasting. There were even special measures for fattening beasts: shutting pigs in close quarters with one another and keeping cattle, lambs, and poultry in special dark houses for fattening. Some farmers even nailed the feet of geese to the floor, which was said to help them put on weight. Dogs often baited gelded cattle before slaughter, an ordeal said to thin the cattle's blood and make their flesh tastier. Many towns even had ordinances making it compulsory to bait a bull before it was butchered. The slaughtering itself was inhumane. Butchers poleaxed cattle, and then killed them with a knife. Calves and many lambs died more slowly. First their necks were slit with a knife so that they bled copiously, which made their flesh white. The bleeding was then stopped, and the animal allowed to linger alive for a day or so. Farmers habitually bled pigs to death.

Ceremonies and rituals of all kinds were integral to the lives of hardworking commoners, an escape from the arduous routines and suffering of daily life.
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Many of these involved cruelty to animals and the use of animal imagery, including horns, which symbolized masculine virility. People whipped dogs on St. Luke's Day and drowned strays purely for sport. In 1232, Pope Gregory IX proclaimed that the cat was a “diabolical creature.” Felines were suspect because many pagans cherished them, which meant that they were evil in the eyes of the Lord. Furthermore, they were seminocturnal, and somewhat mysterious. In low light, the reflective layer of cells behind their retinas made their eyes glow, so
perhaps, inevitably, they became seen as demons. An association with witches soon followed: people who sold their souls to the devil, who gave them a feline familiar (demon), perhaps the source of their power. Many people believed this, so much so that many families gave up having cats for fear of being burned at the stake. Cats were stoned to death as demonic minions in league with heretics, pinned to posts at village festivals on saints' days, and then killed. In France, the monarch ordered sacks of live cats burned publically. An early Tudor school textbook bears a sentence for translation into Latin: “I hate cats.” Nevertheless, some people kept cats to keep down rodents, among them millers, fisherfolk, and merchants (see sidebar “The Cat That Urinated”). Many villagers raised young cats for their flesh and fur. An abandoned well excavated in Cambridge yielded the remains of seventy cats that had been killed and then skinned, apparently for their meat.

For all the brutality and hard work, the relationships between medieval owners and their beasts were much more intimate than those today. Closer relationships with animals were commonplace during centuries when herds were still small. Shepherds knew the faces of their sheep and those of their neighbors', even the footprints of their charges. Almost invariably, cattle received names, and were often decorated with bells and ribbons, just as the Nuer adorned their beasts. A rich vocabulary of calls and words summoned animals, or encouraged them while plowing, a practice with deep roots in the remote past. Farm animals were really part of the human family. As the natural philosopher Sir Kenelm Digby wrote in 1658, “There's not the meanest cottager but hath a cow to furnish his family with milk; 'tis the principal sustenance of the poorer sort of people . . .which makes them very careful of the good keeping and health of their cows.”
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For centuries, too, humans and animals lived under the same roof, often in long houses that were combination dwellings and animal byres, accessible one from the other. One writer of 1682 described “every edifice” as a “Noah's Ark,” where cows, pigs, chickens, and the human family all slept together under the same roof. Farmers finally began moving animals out of their homes during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but such cohabitation persisted in some parts of the Britain and Ireland, and in Europe, into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The affectionate naming of farm animals was commonplace in many rural European communities continuing into modern times, a custom known from Greece as early as Mycenaean times, some three thousand years ago. The Victorian poet Jane Ingelow waxed lyrical about cows in a medieval meadow as if they were familiar parts of a family linked by simple verbal bonds, using what she thought was spelling of the time: