Thinking Animals: Animals and the Development of Human Intelligence

7. WHAT GOOD ARE ANIMALS?

WHAT GOOD ARE ANIMALS? The land-use patterns that developed with Western culture are typically concentric around villages. As it spread north into Europe from the Mediterranean, agriculture repeated a design on the land. It was composed of zones around each human settlement. Close in, vegetables for the table were grown and milk animals housed. Near the village gate were field crops and, at a distance, pasture lands and the forest fringes where wood was gathered. Beyond was wilderness. The effect of these rings of land around each settlement was that wild and domestic creatures existed in a graded, reciprocal series: with few wild things in the village and few domestic ones in the forest between settlements. The same pattern was brought to North America and continued there until the opening of the Ohio frontier, the land survey, and the coming of farm machinery in the early nineteenth-century. In the newland the farmer lived at a distance from the village, each homestead becoming a domestic nucleus with its own concentric spheres of land-use intensity. As farmers in Europebecame more mobile and new farms in NorthAmerica filled the "empty" spaces, the habitat for most wild animals was greatly reduced, although the rough trim of most American farming and the casualness of field use and fencing allowed habitat for species like deer and rabbits, which require no undisturbed wilderness. An additional series of humanized nuclei in the wild lands began to appear with many dispersed industrial uses. Mining, logging, rail- and road-building camps, power-generating stations, research facilities did not produce the neat zones of modified space so much as intense impact with radiating lines of roads, rails, and wires. Now exclusions of wild things ran outward from them along the lines of transportation, so that a network of man-intensified, machine-occupied space added to the effects of agriculture and of towns themselves. This pattern is now repeating itself over the whole world. Until our industrial phases, 239 7 240 WHAT GOOD ARE ANIMALS? the amount of wild land was closely related to the size of human population. But in industrialized nations the effects are multiplied . Affluence and manufacture raise the per-person demands on nature many times, reducing wild habitat accordingly. In peasant agricultural India, the lion and tiger continued to exist in spite of heavy human populations. Now, with extensive land manipulation of a network of energy and material mining, the lions of Gir and the Bengal tiger are diminished. Human population growth intensifies the whole process, but is not necessary to it. The thrust of recent human history with respect to the reduction of the wild is beyond doubt. Extinction of species is only a small part of this pattern, though an important one. The concept of "endangered species" floats like some special curse over it all, but the massive reduction and local extirpation of animals and plants precedes the musical-chairs habitat game, in which they disappear forever, one by one. In sum, there is less room for wild things larger than a mouse, and there will be less in the future. This includes domestic as well as wild. Wild creatures existed in the past apart from our design, part of a heritage. But our design has grown and will soon include the whole planetary surface. The deliberately designated wild places, the parks and refuges, are not sanctuaries for wild animals in the long run because the constant presence of man slowly warps the animals, which become tamer. The wildness is lost both by natural selection and behavioral adjustment . Asmore and more people come to see them, their management becomes more and more intense. Finally, they will become wild game farms. Already the refuges are too small for wolves, grizzly bears, and condors. No matter how badly we want to preserve vestiges of those species, they are incompatible with the civilized mantle that covers all the land. As for the species not yetln jeopardy, false hopes encouraged the "game managers" in the early twentieth century, for they saw an increase in "edge species/' coming from the mixed landscapes of field, brushland, crops, and woodland that had emerged from the rural, set element patterns of the nineteenth century. The deer, quail, muskrat, foxes, raccoons were said to have become more numerous than they had been. The cause of this was the small family farm, with its weedy What Good Are Animals? 241 fencerows...