Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers

The Past and Future of Human-Animal Relationships

Richard Bulliet

• Editorial: Columbia University Press
• Año: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780231503969
• Categoría: Histoire
• Categoría: Histoire du monde

Richard W. Bulliet has long been a leading figure in the study of human-animal relations, and in his newest work, Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers, he offers a sweeping and engaging perspective on this dynamic relationship from prehistory to the present. By considering the shifting roles of donkeys, camels, cows, and other domesticated animals in human society, as well as their place in the social imagination, Bulliet reveals the different ways various cultures have reinforced, symbolized, and rationalized their relations with animals.

Bulliet identifies and explores four stages in the history of the human-animal relationship-separation, predomesticity, domesticity, and postdomesticity. He begins with the question of when and why humans began to consider themselves distinct from other species and continues with a fresh look at how a few species became domesticated. He demonstrates that during the domestic era many species fell from being admired and even worshipped to being little more than raw materials for various animal-product industries. Throughout the work, Bulliet discusses how social and technological developments and changing philosophical, religious, and aesthetic viewpoints have shaped attitudes toward animals.

Our relationship to animals continues to evolve in the twenty-first century. Bulliet writes, "We are today living through a new watershed in human-animal relations, one that appears likely to affect our material, social, and imaginative lives as profoundly as did the original emergence of domestic species." The United States, Britain, and a few other countries are leading a move from domesticity, marked by nearly universal familiarity with domestic species, to an era of postdomesticity, in which dependence on animal products continues but most people have no contact with producing animals. Elective vegetarianism and the animal-liberation movement have combined with new attitudes toward animal science, pets, and the presentation of animals in popular culture to impart a distinctive moral, psychological, and spiritual tone to postdomestic life.

1. Postdomesticity

Our Lives with Animals

Let’s start with sex and blood.

In the shock year 1969, half a million young people celebrated drugs, sex, and rock ’n’roll at Woodstock. Tens of thousands more joined campus protests against the secret bombing of Cambodia. In New York, a police raid on the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village provoked the first gay protest.

Most Americans responded by shaking their heads in bafflement or disgust and settled for less demonstrative recreations. Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch was in theaters, with its shockingly bloody but viscerally electrifying final shootout—body shots only, as squib technology for squirting blood hadn’t yet developed a capacity for head shots. Also showing were Vilgot Sjoman’s I Am Curious (Yellow), featuring frontal nudity and simulated sexual intercourse, and Paul Mazursky’s comic look at the then-titillating practice of wife swapping, Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice. On Broadway, the musical Hair, which was also known for its full frontal nudity, entered a triumphant second year, and in Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, the bestseller list shed comical light on the then taboo subject of masturbation.

President Nixon led the older generation in deploring the national wallow in decadence of all kinds: “Drugs, crime, campus revolution … on every hand we find old standards violated, old values discarded, old principles ignored. [This threatens] the fundamental values, the process by which a civilization maintains its continuity.”¹

When the century ended three decades later, campus demonstrations were ancient history and Woodstock the fading, fond memory of the middle-aged. The country’s political mood had swung far to the right—almost far enough to remove from office a president more than suspected of hiding the “moral decadence” of 1969 behind his Arkansas folksiness. Crime was down, young people thought more about common stocks than communes, and college bookstores stocked ponderously academic books on queer theory.

Yet even with this backswing of the cultural pendulum, graphic sex and blood were still going strong. Blended together, they guaranteed lucrative sequels for slice-and-dice horror films like Halloween (1978), Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Candyman (1992), Scream (1996), and I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997). As the years passed, blood gushed more and more freely. The drenching blood that shocked in Carrie (1976) became commonplace and even parodied in the 1998 vampire movie Blade. And 2004 witnessed the extraordinary phenomenon of millions of Christian viewers being drawn to a particularly bloody depiction of their Lord’s passion.

As for graphic sex, triple-X video rentals, soft-core pornography on hotel TVs, and thousands of Web sites devoted to every sort of sexual taste more than compensated for the eviction of peepshows and porn theaters from Times Square. Estimates of the number of Americans habitually visiting pornographic Web sites ran as high as 25 million, with as much as 57 billion dollars being spent on pornography worldwide.

Why did graphic depictions of sex and blood survive the resurgence of “traditional” values in American culture? Why do conservative Republicans, yuppies, and evangelical Christians seem no less inclined toward pornographies of sex and blood than the hippies and radicals whom they so often blame for initiating a decline in national morality? Psychologists, pundits, politicians, and preachers offer so many different answers that it is evident that no one knows for sure. Most likely, the phenomenon is too complex to be explained by any simple equation.

A hitherto unrecognized part of the answer, I would propose, lies in the dawning of a new era in human-animal relations. At first blush, this may seem implausible, if not absurd. In the context of the many other changes in outlook and behavior associated with the attitudes of “domesticity” giving way to those of “postdomesticity,” however, its relevance becomes hard to ignore.

“Domesticity” and “postdomesticity” are key concepts of this book. Both are comparatively straightforward, even though they have never before been identified or defined. “Domesticity” refers to the social, economic, and intellectual characteristics of communities in which most members consider daily contact with domestic animals (other than pets) a normal condition of life: in short, the farming existence of a bygone generation for most Americans, but contemporary reality for most of the developing world. “Postdomesticity” is defined by two characteristics. First, postdomestic people live far away, both physically and psychologically, from the animals that produce the food, fiber, and hides they depend on, and they never witness the births, sexual congress, and slaughter of these animals. Yet they maintain very close relationships with companion animals—pets—often relating to them as if they were human. Second, a postdomestic society emerging from domestic antecedents continues to consume animal products in abundance, but psychologically, its members experience feelings of guilt, shame, and disgust when they think (as seldom as possible) about the industrial processes by which domestic animals are rendered into products and about how those products come to market.

Domestic societies take for granted the killing of animals and experience few moral qualms in consuming animal products. By contrast, postdomestic societies, which include a steadily increasing portion of the U.S. population, an even greater portion of the British population, and significant numbers in Australia and (less so) Europe, are fully immersed in the emotional contradictions inherent in postdomesticity. Meat, leather, and test animals are hard to give up, but details about what goes on behind the scenes to provide these goods and cultural services are revolting. Pets and wildlife evoke deep positive feelings, but domestic animals feeding the consumer market are a morally troubling reality.

Among the unconscious reactions to the changes wrought by the transition to postdomesticity is an increasing fascination with fantasies of sex and blood. To understand this in the American context, we must consider how American relations with animals have changed in the twentieth century. In 1900, some 40 percent of the U.S. population lived on farms. By 1990, the proportion had fallen to 2 percent. The generation that shouldered the burden of World War II, those born between roughly 1900 and 1925, for the most part either grew up on farms or had parents or close relatives who lived on farms. Among immigrant city folk, the parental farming village may have been far away in Europe, but even they grew up seeing live poultry for sale in the neighborhood market and hearing the regular clip-clop of draft horses pulling wagons in the street. Animal-drawn transport flourished in a country that in 1915 still had only 32,000 miles of hard surface roads outside of incorporated towns and cities. Not only had livestock not yet disappeared from urban life, but farm animals were still an integral part of daily existence. Then as now, most children learned the sounds ascribed to domestic animals—“moo-moo,” “baa-baa,” “cock-a-doodle-doo”—even before they learned real verbs and nouns. But back then they also had opportunities to hear those sounds in real life.

As for animal products, in the first half of the century, most people slaughtered their own chickens and hogs, or watched their butcher carve steaks and chops from a fat-sheathed carcass. When Clarence Saunders opened the first supermarket in Memphis in 1917, his Piggly Wiggly did not carry meat. (The up-to-date version of the chain’s smiling Mr. Pig logo is dressed cannibalistically as a butcher.) Not until the second half of the century—after the relaxation of wartime rationing, when large supermarkets sprouted everywhere, getting Americans back in their cars—did meat begin to come prepackaged, with Styrofoam trays and polyethylene film eventually replacing the customary brown butcher paper. Studious cooks may still have known what part of the animal body the words “brisket,” “chuck,” and “sirloin” referred to, but most younger buyers maintained a studied obliviousness toward the gutted, skinless, headless, and hoofless carcasses hanging from hooks in the cold-room and felt no loss when the meatcutters who carved their steaks and ground their hamburger were shifted from behind the counter to somewhere out back.

Door-to-door milk delivery was another commonplace of American domesticity in the first half of the century and one of the last common roles of the horse-drawn wagon. The milkman kept the buyer in touch with an actual dairy to which the empty bottles had to be returned for refilling. Marketers of animal products assumed a general familiarity with real animals. One mid-century hair cream commercial invited skeptical customers to run their hands through a sheep’s wool and feel the natural lanolin that would lend a sheen to the wavy locks of whoever used the product. But by 1969, disposable cardboard cartons on supermarket shelves had long displaced the milkman, and nobody on Madison Avenue was proposing advertising campaigns based on presumed personal contact with a sheep or any other farm animal.

Whatever else might be said of the countercultural youth of 1969, the vast majority of them had grown up entirely removed from the world of domestic animals that their parents had taken for granted in their own childhoods: for them, there was no harnessing of horses, milking of cows, collecting eggs, plucking feathers, or butchering pigs. Some flower children followed their nature-loving consciences by abandoning meat and extolling vegetarianism. A few others bought a goat or two and retreated to communes in New Mexico. But every member of the post–World War II generation, whether hippie or Young Republican, reacted subliminally to the removal of domestic animals from their lives, and in particular to the disappearance of animal slaughter and animal sex from childhood experience.

Postdomestic Fantasies: Sex

Domestic societies around the world have generally had a scornful attitude toward engaging in sexual intercourse with animals,² but they have also recognized that it happens—and not all that infrequently. At the turn of the twentieth century, when domestic attitudes toward animals were still largely unquestioned and intellectual interest in sexual behavior was shifting from centuries of religious proscription and legal regulation to pseudoscientific study and classification, the pioneering sexologist Havelock Ellis made the following remarks:

Bestiality … is … the sexual perversion of dull, insensitive, and unfastidious persons. It flourishes among primitive peoples and among peasants. It is the vice of the clodhopper, unattractive to women or inapt to court them. Three conditions have favored the extreme prevalence of bestiality: (1) primitive conceptions of life which built up no great barrier between man and the other animals; (2) the extreme familiarity which necessarily exists between the peasant and his beasts, often combined with separation from women; (3) various folk-lore beliefs such as the efficacy of intercourse with animals as a cure for venereal disease, etc.³

Though psychologists working decades later surpassed Ellis in many respects, his observation that sex with animals was of “extreme prevalence” probably reflects a degree of acquaintance with rural situations that was rapidly diminishing in Europe. Other reports support Ellis’s view. Two surveys of the sexual practices of Soviet university students in the 1920s revealed that eight percent of men from peasant backgrounds admitted to having had intercourse with animals and considered it “a fairly natural part of a peasant childhood.”⁴ Men from village backgrounds in parts of the world still immersed in the mentality of domesticity readily recall certain companions of their adolescence—never themselves, of course—resorting to intercourse with an animal. On being informed that Americans use congress with a sheep as their bestiality cliché, one Turkish informant, who acknowledged that village acquaintances of his youth engaged in intercourse with donkeys, remarked: “A sheep? That’s disgusting!”

Ellis considered the sow the most common sexual companion, but also knew of multiple instances involving mares, cows, donkeys, goats, and sheep. Instances of intercourse with dogs, cats, rabbits, hens, ducks, and geese also showed up occasionally in his research. Though Ellis considered bestiality primarily a male vice, he took note of numerous cases of women seeking gratification with dogs or having sex with dogs or donkeys as an entertainment for men—including in “select circles of Paris,” according to one of his informants.

By contrast with the situation in domestic society, in postdomestic society male intercourse with animals appears to be rare. In this one small area, the rural-urban migration of postdomesticity seems to have fulfilled the age-old wish of sex regulators for an improvement in sexual mores, by separating men and boys from their pigs, sheep, and donkeys.

Yet fantasies of exhibitionistic sex involving women—especially intercourse between women and dogs or women and horses—continue to excite the interest of the postdomestic male, at least so far as one can judge from the abundant animal-sex pornographic sites on the Internet. This shift from actually having sex with animals to luridly fantasizing about it is part and parcel of the general shift from real-world carnality to sexual fantasy that is an integral aspect of the societal movement from domesticity to postdomesticity.

From the perspective of the generation of Havelock Ellis, the prime indicator of this shift has been the revaluation of masturbation, which went from being a dangerous habit subject to the sternest disapproval to being considered, by the 1970s, a harmless or even encouraged practice. Contemporary sex advice often observes that masturbation, the handmaiden of sexual fantasy, has never given anyone a sexually transmitted disease or caused an unwanted pregnancy. Rules and warnings about masturbation, from the biblical condemnation of the sin of Onan and the harsh penalties imposed on priests and monks in medieval penitentials to the moralizing paragraphs contained in early Boy Scout handbooks, culminated in the nineteenth century in pseudoscientific determinations that masturbation, primarily male, caused physical weakness and mental deterioration. Popular and scientific opinion alike identified blindness, idiocy, and death as the woeful consequences of habitual “self-abuse.”

The first generation of Soviet students, who had openly and shamelessly admitted to having sex with animals, agonized over masturbation. “I may guess that the influence of masturbation has been mainly on the memory, which has begun to get noticeably duller,” wrote one. “It sometimes happens when I start to speak that the thought which I had in my mind to say has got lost somewhere.” Another wrote: “When I think about masturbation, my hair stands on end. It rises before me like a gigantic monster clutching me in its claws. As result of ten years of masturbation, I myself have turned from a man into a monster.”⁵

The transition to postdomesticity contributes to an explanation of both the near disappearance of bestiality in the United States over the first half of the twentieth century and an increasingly benign—even downright positive—attitude toward masturbation in the second half. Moving adolescents off the farm and into the town largely explains the former phenomenon. Boys lost access to farm animals, and the increasing availability of the automobile for dating gained them private access to girlfriends.

The latter phenomenon, with its attendant rise of sexual fantasy, brings us back to Havelock Ellis’s description of sex in the late domestic era:

Among children, both boys and girls, it is common to find that the copulation of animals is a mysteriously fascinating spectacle. It is inevitable that this should be so, for the spectacle is more or less clearly felt to be the revelation of a secret which has been concealed from them. It is, moreover, a secret of which they feel intimate reverberations within themselves, and even in perfectly innocent and ignorant children the sight may produce an obscure sexual excitement. It would seem that this occurs more frequently in girls than in boys…. The coupling of the larger animals is often an impressive and splendid spectacle which is far, indeed, from being obscene, and has commended itself to persons of intellectual distinction [Ellis footnotes here the Countess of Pembroke, Sir Philip Sydney’s sister, whose interest in the mating of her horses his source describes as “very salacious”]; but in young or ill-balanced minds such sights tend to become both prurient and morbid.⁶

The unspoken assumption of this passage, whether one agrees with all its particulars or not, is that in Ellis’s day and for many preceding centuries, both children and adults commonly witnessed animal copulation. The conditions of domesticity made this more or less inevitable. Not only did children observe what was going on around them—“the birds and the bees” was a euphemism for “the dogs and the horses” (has anyone outside entomological and beekeeping circles ever paid attention to bee sex?)—but they found it, in Ellis’s words, “mysteriously fascinating.”

It is hard to see much aesthetic appeal in the sight of dogs or sheep—or even humans—copulating. When the sight is no...

Índice

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Poem
• Contents 
• 1. Postdomesticity: Our Lives with Animals
• 2. The Stages of Human-Animal Relations
• 3. Separation: The Human-Animal Divide
• 4. Predomesticity
• 5. Where the Tame Things Are
• 6. Domestication and Usefulness
• 7. From Mighty Hunter to Yajamana
• 8. Early Domesticity: My Ass and Yours
• 9. Late Domestic Divergences
• 10. Toward Postdomesticity
• 11. The Future of Human-Animal Relations
• Notes
• Suggested Reading
• Index