Animals as Neighbors: The Past and Present of Commensal Animals

Introduction

1 introduction it hardly needs saying that animals are central to our individual and collective lives. As utilized livestock, they feed us and provide other resources such as wool and leather. in arid lands, they convert the poor vegetation of rangelands into animal protein, enabling some living to be made in otherwise unproductive places. in less-industrialized economies animals provide power, hauling carts and plows, again making agriculture possible. in our homes, animal companions become a part of the family, an outlet from the complexity of human relations, and a way of teaching our children about responsibility and care. Domestic livestock have been with us for around 10,000 years, replacing the uncertainties of hunting by bringing animals under direct control.1 Pets and companion animals are more difficult to trace in the past, though the association of people and dogs predates the domestication of livestock.2 so important and familiar have livestock and companion animals become that it is easy to assume that all such relations have arisen because people willed it. We see the emergence of animal husbandry and its subsequent elaboration as “stages” of human cultural development,3 instances of people taking ever more control of their lives and of the world around them, in parallel with the emergence of more complex metalworking and other pyrotechnologies. As our cultures elaborate and diversify, so animals come to be seen, at best, as one of the media through which human economic and power relations were mediated, as part of the props and scenery of the human drama, not as actors in their own right. it is all too easy to forget that those other species are adaptable, resourceful animals with drives and agendas of their own. For some of them, the global spread of one noisy, untidy, demanding primate has been little short of an unmitigated disaster. The archaeological and paleozoological records are rich in examples of species that have been driven to extinction, locally or globally, either by the direct actions of people or by the indirect consequences of our habits of constructing and modifying the world around us.4 other species have successfully adapted to us and our ways, seizing the opportunity that our planetary dominance presents, greatly increasing their numbers, and extending their range beyond what was possible in the absence of people. This book is about the ways in which many species of animals have contrived to gain some benefit from living alongside people within the constructed and heavily modified environments that we make for ourselves, and the long history and prehistory of that process of cohabitation. in order to explore that relationship, it will be necessary to discuss human-animal affiliations more generally, and to question the terminology that we apply to them. it will be clear by now that “animals” refers predominantly to vertebrate animals, and to mammals and birds especially . That is not to say that invertebrate animals and microbes are somehow less significant: far from it. search the scientific literature for the term commensal, and the great majority of results will be papers dealing with the microbiota that populate our bodies. however, if we want to understand the past status of our neighbor species, we need to study those that leave substantial traces in the historical and archaeological records, and if we are interested in the 2| Introduction diversity of cultural responses to other species, we need to limit our study to those groups— mammals, birds, the larger herpetiles—that are conspicuous enough to have prompted some response. We are all familiar with such species: we see them every day. exactly which species we see will depend upon where on earth we live, though some will be familiar everywhere. my own animal neighbors include some that would be familiar to a visitor from overseas (house sparrows Passer domesticus, cats), some from animal families that have commensal members worldwide (mice), and some that have locally adapted to a commensal life (bullfinches Figure 1. A hard-working donkey in Luxor, Egypt, and a much-loved family pet, both are indisputably domestic animals, though they have very different relationships with the people around them. (Source: author.) Introduction| 3 Pyrrhula pyrrhula). What is consistent, right across the planet, is that close association of our species with others. They have adapted to our living space, either because we have extended that living space across more and more land area, forcing species to adapt, depart...