Agricultural History Review, Volume 60 Part 2 (2012), p. 319

Given that there is only a solitary Anglo-Saxon paper in the 1960s, followed by Andrew Fleming’s ‘Bronze Age Agriculture on the marginal lands of north-east Yorkshire’ (1971), the evidence would suggest that readers of the Review rarely travel into the realms of prehistory, or the Stone Age, in the ways that Animals as domesticates does. However, the book in question is worth perusing; this is a text that intrigues in its wide sweep and relative brevity. Thorough-going, it includes the classic literature, that is, Francis Galton and Charles Darwin; new material, citing current work by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy; and also established texts such as Canon Tristram’s Natural History of the Bible (1867, though she dates it to 1889). Grounded in empirical observation and findings from a number of disciplines, archaeological, biological, palaeographic, archaeozoological, and using molecular, organic, material, linguistic, literary and visual evidence, Domesticates tells the story of domestication from post-Ice Age Europe onwards. The book is well-illustrated, with useful plates that help to ground the points and observations made. There is also an appendix of comparative nomenclature, and in the introduction the taxonomic issues are established within current academic debate. While recognizing the complexities, debates and uncertainties within this material, the book as a whole is organized along continental lines, and then goes animal-by-animal, including birds and bees. In this way the text ranges out across the whole of the world from Eurasia and Europe through to the Americas.

The book fits very clearly into the ‘animal turn’ and is positioned within the emerging work that takes mutualism as its basis – hence, in discussing the rise of dairying, the text mentions the Neolithic European genetic adaptation for the persistence of lactase, which allowed the adult digestion of fresh milk (p. 42) – and argues that domestic animals have adapted their behaviour to diverse human needs and environments, as part of the process of domestication. It outlines human practices in the agricultural management of animals for their bones and hides, hair/wool/feathers, dung, meat, blood, milk, but also other uses – cultural, companionate, religious and decorative, as much as nutritional and mechanical. Humans, it becomes clear, have always used the whole animal, and domestication is an extension of the uses to which hunted wild animals are put. The book begins by situating the origins of domestication within the human ability to nurture not just one’s own but also others’ children. Initially, it is argued, ‘cute’ young animals were nurtured as pets. Those that became domesticated in the long run (in the case of prey animals, those who did not run far; in the case of predators, those who lived in packs) were tamed, separated and, as they fell under complete human control, passed down their genetic characteristics through interbreeding to produce the full domestic form, and its (increasingly wide) range of variants. This was and is an effect produced by natural as well as artificial selection, as climatic conditions lead to certain adaptations. Pastoralism and herding, meanwhile, lead to the absorption of the domestic animal into human culture, that is, human social structures, and to a change in the animal’s own culture, which was also passed down. The broad sweep of the book demonstrates how human success (from the human point of view) in domesticating an animal is predicated on that animal’s behaviour, both at the level of the species’ habits and the temperament of the individual.

The book could have been less narrative; though there is a lot of material to get through, there is slightly too much exposition and the book is at its strongest when engaging in analysis and argument. The structure at times leads to something of a shopping list of discrete bits of information; some sections – for example, Chapter 7 on Bali Cattle, Bos javanicus (p. 88) – are only a few lines long. The narrative does help to put agricultural history into context; references to early agricultural advice, in both the Roman period – for example in respect of poultry (p. 79) – and in Ancient Greece, reveal clear evidence of early anxiety about animal welfare, which we might otherwise consider a purely modern concern (p. 80). But, there are some striking observations, such as that on the question of hierarchy and the status of indigenous animals vs. imported European animals in Africa in the nineteenth century (pp. 115, 117), that go undeveloped. In this respect, the situating material explaining the theory of domestication in the Introduction, together with the issues addressed in the Conclusion, are especially important in ensuring that the text coheres.

The Conclusion links the book more generally to an animal welfare approach, as might be expected given the Foreword by James A. Serpell. In the conclusion, the author reiterates that there were three ‘progressive’ (p. 133) phases in the historic relationship between humans and domesticates: firstly, an early phase of settlement, during which certain animals became ‘enfolded into the human environment’ (p. 133). Secondly, a phase during which livestock husbandry spread worldwide: the ‘pastoral phase’ (p. 134). The third phase – beginning in the late eighteenth century with the drive for ‘improvement’ (p. 135) – is linked to modernity and industrialization. Within this model, modern agricultural methods are brought into question. It notes, for instance, that human beings took livestock with them and moved them around the world in the earlier pastoral phase, but those that adapted to the local environment have been subsequently erased, it is argued, by improvers seeking to raise productivity by introducing European stock to native and local breeds. The author is particularly critical of both this practice, which has all but destroyed ‘adaptation to local environments’ (p. 135), and also the methods employed within modern livestock farming. The most problematic aspect of the latter in the author’s view is the focus on stock, rather than on the individual animal, wherein the animals ‘are no longer seen as individual sentient beings, but as rows of food-producing elements to be cultivated and then harvested in enormous numbers.’ (p. 136). Though the author recognizes earlier instances of human brutality, it is the mass-production of modern times that holds her attention.