In our modern, Western culture, we conceive of two distinct categories of animal: wild animals, who live in nature and must be hunted if they are to become food; and domestic animals, who are considered property and usually destined for human plates. We recognize domestic animals as cultural products, created through artificial selection to better serve our needs. They represent our domination of nature, even the very evolutionary forces behind it. On the other hand, wild animals are often thought of as noble beasts, worthy of our protection or at least consideration, while domestic animals are stupid, unfeeling, and uncouth. Yet all this presupposes a divide between nature and culture, a line crossed only by humans — specifically modern, Western humans. There is a wide spectrum of human-animal relationships, ranging from the most intimate acts of pig-suckling to the most distant remove of eating star-shaped chicken nuggets. And in the end even intimacy doesn’t guarantee interspecies understanding.

My Family and Other Sheep

Sheep are very special to the Navajo. They are not a native species, but once introduced by Europeans in the 1600′s, the Navajo began breeding the sheep themselves and before long sheep herding was a way of life (“Churro Sheep History”). The introduction of domestic animals required a change in thinking, however, from traditional conceptions of animals as powerful spiritual beings. The Navajo believe that humans and animals “are products of the same act of creation and are essentially the same type of being”, therefore worthy of respect “both actual and ritual” (Downs 90). Game animals who are killed during a hunt are considered complicit, sacrificing themselves for the well-being of humans. This is not an uncommon belief in hunter-gatherer societies, and it is one that reinforces the close relationship between humans and nonhumans: “A hunt that is successfully consummated with a kill is taken as proof of amicable relations between the hunter and the animal that has willingly allowed itself to be taken” (Knight 3).

But the practical details of maintaining a herd of sheep come in conflict with this ideology. The rough treatment required of the herdsman — “sheep must be man-handled, killed when needed, earmarked, vaccinated, beaten, penned, shouted at, and so forth” (Downs 90) — meant that values of respect had to be compromised in order to adopt this lifestyle. The sheep became part of a new category, that of domestic animals. The animal kingdom was thus split between those with power over humans and those whom humans overpowered. “As domestic animals became more useful… their spiritual qualities evaporated” (Bulliet 42) and the Navajo developed a method for taking it away from them.

‘Marking’ is the process by which human owners assert their control over animals, removing their ‘natural’ powers. As one person explained it, “Us Navajo we say that a dog or a sheep or a horse ain’t really yours until he’s got your mark on him. Cut off his tail or ear or something. Then he’s yours” (Downs 91). Wild animals and humans maintain the same origin, but these introduced creatures have their own origin, one of artifice. Yet at the same time sheep can be substituted for wild animals in ceremonies (Wood 26), and there is always the danger of an unmarked animal remaining untamed and unmastered. The division is drawn uneasily for the Navajo, perhaps because the category of domestic animals is even more artificial than the sheep.

Sheep maintain a more distinctive position in Navajo culture than mere specimens of a shaky taxonomy, however. As the center of domestic life, they are potent symbols of family and identity. Of all livestock kept by the Navajo, sheep are one of the most labor-intensive (Wood 29). Many of the activities surrounding the herds are done communally, and some require the participation of the entire family (Downs 91). Sheep must be herded year-round, and most families keep their sheep near their homes (Wood 29). When Navajos start or expand their own herds, most “obtain their animals from relations as gifts” (26). These practices may increase people’s intimacy with their sheep, but they do more to increase intimacy among the humans involved.

Navajo say that sheep herding “keeps our family together” and provides a “sense of belonging” (Wood 26). Perhaps sheep are attributed value and respect after all, since “the word ‘love’ is used frequently to describe a Navajo’s feelings toward his sheep” (Downs 92) and a person might reasonably travel home simply because “I haven’t seen the sheep in a long time” (91). But love for one’s livestock is no more conducive to treating them like property — with the requisite marking and rough handling — than seeing them as spiritual equals. The sheep aren’t loved for their own sake, they are loved as a symbol of family solidarity. And when the family is falling part, the sheep get neglected as well (92). They become a tool for “expressing both affection and hostility towards one’s close relatives” (ibid), and their possession is a means of social interaction as much as it is an economic venture.

The sheep herds also become deeply tied to concepts of community identity. Just as the individual herd is a symbol of one family group, the Navajo-Churro breed itself is a symbol of Navajo culture. The Churros’ properties — their hardiness, the quality of their meat and wool — are held superior to those of “contemporary breeds”, and the Churro’s history parallels the struggles of the Navajo themselves (“Churro Sheep History”). This is not a fabrication, either: Since domesticated animals have been “constructed by people to fit into particular rural spaces” (Yarwood 99), they get intertwined with the places and ways of life specific to the people who bred them. As the people moved, the animals went with them; as the culture changed, the animals changed (100).

It was only in the 18th and 19th centuries that the development of more ‘scientific’ methods of selective breeding, for the purposes of improving efficiency and product quality rather than socialization, “led to the diffusion of livestock breeds across wider areas and diluted association with particular places” as well as the people who lived there (100). The contemporary breeds that the Navajo compare to their own to are not integrated into human society, nor are they icons of particular families or cultures. As purely economic commodities, they would seem to be especially unavailable for human-animal relationships. Yet the Navajos, with their intimate ties to their sheep herds, do not truly relate to their sheep at all. The sheep are used as an interface for building family relationships and community identity. They are physically maimed to symbolically strip them of their wild nature and place them solidly in the realm of human control. Any identities the sheep might have of their own, and whatever ‘natural’ functions they might have, are appropriated for sociocultural use.

It is not clear from this brief and selective ethnography whether the Navajo are dualistic or monistic with regards to the nature-culture divide, but it is clear that domestic animals are singled out as animals wholly encompassed by human social relations. The Navajo’s concern over marking them makes their default state ambiguous, however, as if without bringing them into the fold of humanity they would maintain some of the power of non-domestic animals. Thus they require constant vigilance to keep them as cultural symbols. They do not just bear the brands of their owners, they become them.

Pig Children, Pig Wealth

In Papua New Guinea, there are wide range of cultures, but pigs are important to most. Although pig-raising peoples may be said to keep domestic animals, the reality is that the relationships between people and pigs are much more variable and complex. As with Navajo sheep, domesticity is more meaningful as the integration of pigs into New Guinea societies than as a property of the pigs themselves.

Generally, there are three types of pig-raising cultures. The first is exemplified by the Kubo, who live in the lowlands where there are an abundance of wild pigs. Even so, the Kubo keep domestic pigs, which they catch as piglets and raise in the most intimate manner (Dwyer & Minnegal 39). A single woman acts as a piglet’s carer, supplanting its attachment to its actual mother (40). The piglet sleeps in her house, and is isolated from all other pigs until it is finally old enough to forage on its own (ibid). At this point the pig is moved away from the village — the pig has formed such a close attachment to its carer that it is actually dangerous to other humans (ibid). If the attachment is too great, the pig may return to the village and wreak havoc. In one case, a sow made her nest nearby, and “both the piglets and the sow were judged to be worthless. The former were killed by the carer when they appeared in the village and the latter dispatched soon after by fabricating a need to give gifts of pork” (41).

The bond between human and pig is apparently one-way. Indeed, women are not particularly disturbed when these pigs, whom they raised from two-week-old piglets, are slaughtered. “Kubo women do not cry at the time a pig with which they have been so intimately associated is killed… They soon return to the butchery site to issue directions concerning the distribution of portions of the carcass both before and after cooking” (52). It may only be in our postdomestic age that we are able to feel moral qualms when faced with the reality that domestic meat animals are destined to be killed and eaten (Bulliet 3). Such a practical outlook is also had by the Wola women, who tend herds of pigs for themselves and male relatives, but still give them individual names. Yet they assert that the names are for utilitarian purposes only, and that they have no “emotional attachments to the pigs in their charge. They do not hesitate on occasion to eat pork from animals they have kept” and only get upset when their pigs are traded without their consent or compensation (Sillitoe 250).

The Wola are thus placed in a second category, in between the extremes of the hunting-and-gathering Kubo and a third category, that of the pig-farming highlanders. The people living at higher altitudes do not have plentiful wild foods, such as the bananas that sustain the Kubo, so they — specifically the women — grow sweet potatoes in their gardens (Dwyer & Minnegal 49). This gives them less time to spend caring for pigs individually, and the pigs themselves pose a danger to the crops rather than humans. They are therefore fenced in where they associate primarily with each other (ibid). Fortunately there are also few wild pigs, so the domestic ones remain domesticated and tame without much human interaction (ibid). On the other hand, the greater division of labor between men and women creates more tension, especially surrounding the pigs.

Pigs are cared for by women, but they are owned and controlled by men. A Kubo woman’s pig is hazardous to anyone but herself, so it remains under her control. The close attachment it forms to its caregiver requires that any transactions involve her consent (53). Pigs are important entities of wealth and ceremony for New Guinea peoples, forming the glue of interpersonal and intercommunity relationships (Sillitoe 242). They also act as symbols for the women who raise them, granting respect for adept management (241). And when the women are slighted, they frame their discontent in terms of the pigs, crying over slaughtered animals and lamenting the deaths of those so close to their hearts — even though “the pigs they weep for may well be ones which they themselves did not feed as young animals” (Dwyer & Minnegal 53). These public displays of emotion among highland women do not represent actual attachments to the pigs, but are “public statement about the usurpation of the product of their sustained labor” (ibid). Even among the Wola, it is the men who control pig slaughters and exchanges, and it is the men whose social status depends on the success of these activities (Sillitoe 242). The pigs themselves are left as pawns.

In the middle category, occupied by the Etoro and the Maring as well as the Wola, pigs are treated neither as commodities nor as troublesome children. They are raised with an intermediate level of attention which makes them friendly with all humans (Dwyer & Minnegal 43). For the Maring, they become productive members of the community, weeding and aerating the gardens, eating garbage and waste, and of course providing pork for ritual occasions (Rappaport 57-58). The pigs are still kept by women, and a piglet “receives a great deal of loving attention — it is petted, talked to, and fed choice morsels. It shares the living quarters of the woman’s house with the humans until it is between eight months and a year of age,” at which time it left to forage during the day and to return at night for a ration of substandard tubers and a stall adjoined to the house (58). Although there are wild pigs around, this edible incentive and the bond between the pigs and their carers are enough to keep most of them coming back (59). “It is hardly facetious to say that the pig through its early socialization becomes a member of a Maring family” (59).

In fact, the life the Maring revolves so much around pigs that patterns of cultivation change to keep them all fed (63). In a large herd, the pigs might be eating more crops than the people, and as substandard tubers become insufficient for their rations, the Maring begin to spend extra time and labor cultivating food just for their animals (60). The pigs even affect residence patterns, as people space themselves far enough apart that their pigs don’t ruin each other’s gardens — and social relationships in the process (68). According to Rappaport, the reason for the ritual cycle of slaughter is to keep herds a manageable size, and the reason for keeping pigs in the first place is to convert “carbohydrates into high-quality protein and fat” (ibid). But given the social integration of pigs into Maring society, their value is more than just utilitarian. Since the pigs are theoretically free to wander off, they are not forced to play a part in human transactions but instead occupy a cultural position that they participate in themselves.

In the Highlands, domesticated pigs are livestock set apart from human life. They play a central role only as abstract entities with exchange values, as representatives of human relationships between different communities and between men and women. As animals per se they must be fenced off, away from gardens and also the wild spaces they might return to. For the Etoro, the Wola, and the Maring, pigs instead are brought into society, raised as members of the community where they provide services both utilitarian and ritual, and in return receive human services. And the Kubo, whose women raise piglets practically from birth, form the most intimate bonds with their pigs, so close that the pigs are actually excluded from the rest of human society. Kubo pigs only gain exchange value by becoming pork (Dwyer & Minnegal 48).

If the lowland women do not cry over their pigs, it is because they have control over them. Pigs in New Guinea must be domesticated on an individual basis since “the wild and domestic pig populations remain today genetically continuous” (Sillitoe 244). Domestic males are castrated for the purposes of making them docile (Rappaport 70), so all piglets haves a wild father. In the lowlands pigs are left to forage in the forest, meaning that they are only domesticated so long as they form attachments to their human caregivers. “They always remain potentially free and wild” (Sillitoe 334). This ambiguity is felt most keenly for highland women, for whom pigs are effectively wild animals who escape control and become effective social entities only in the hands of men. As with the Navajo and their sheep, domesticity is a measure of human domination; it is only with those animals slightly beyond our control, yet socialized to be within our grasp, that we can hope to relate, and not just use as tokens in our own human interactions.

Hunting Allies

The Achuar people of the Amazons do not keep sheep or pigs for meat, but instead hunt game in the forest. Despite the fact that once having met an animal, a hunter is unlikely to see it again alive, the Achuar conceive of their relationships with game animals as long-term and highly social affairs. “The hunter must establish with each game type a personal bond of unity that he must cultivate throughout his lifetime” (Descola 260). He pays respect to the animals he has killed by “reverently” keeping their skulls and mounting them on his house (258). The animals are even considered to be “very special ‘guests’ at human meals” in what Descola conceives of as “an extension of the domestic domain to include game” (268).

Game animals are indeed domesticated to the Achuar, but they aren’t their domestic animals. They are instead the possessions of “game mothers”, a variety of spirits who care for and consume wild animals, acting “as humans do towards their domestic animals” (258). It is through negotiations with the game mothers that hunters are able to take from what are essentially herds of livestock. Thus game animals are not conceived of as wild and beyond human control. Hunting is a cultural transaction with threatens to leave real animals out of the picture.

That said, hunters also negotiate with the animals, but still through a cultural lens. The Achuar are animistic, considering animals to have an interiority much like that of humans. In fact, as they see it, animals believe they are human. This allows human-animal relationships to become knowable in terms of social relations that already exist between people (267). For example, woolly monkeys are considered to be brothers-in-law and exemplars of the prescribed bilateral cross-cousin marriage law. Since the monkey’s supposed affinal relationship to the hunter makes his sisters potential spouses, in one anent — a magic song that hunters use to contact game mothers and the representatives of prey species — the hunter “must therefore convince the animal that it has to hand over its sisters to this man for a necessarily deadly union” (262). Although animals are “recognized as having a social existence” (268), that social existence is not their own. In this case the charming and cajoling is addressed not to the particular woolly monkey that the hunter hopes to kill, but an abstract entity constructed for the purposes of making wild animals understandable in human terms.

So we return to the predomestic Navajo conception of game animals as part of the same spiritual essence as humans, complicit in their deaths because they are part of productive relationships with hunters. These relationships are not between individual humans and individual animals, however, but rather imagined relationships between individual humans and whole species, or the guardians of those species. “Human sociality is based on a recognition of other human beings as individual persons, whereas hunter sociality with prey seems to be based on a view of empirical animals as substitutable tokens in a class” (Knight 4-5). This is true of commodified livestock as well. Though prey animals are not dominated by humans, they lack the closeness required for mutual social interactions to occur. The Achuar see ‘wild’ animals through cultural conceptions which may be informed by animal behavior, but which nonetheless claim intimate domestic relationships with them that do not exist for the animals.

Love Your Meat

Meat, and the animals that provide it, are central to social discourse. “Meat which was shared became a token of the group itself, of its identity, unity, and power” (Spencer 180), just as the sharing of sheep duties is for the Navajo and the exchanging of pigs is for the tribes of New Guinea. Achuar men say they must hunt because their wives crave meat, and “maintain that without meat life is hardly worth living” (Descola 250). They also differentiate between regular hunger and meat-hunger, as do other cultures around the world including the Canela of Amazonia and the !Kung of the Kalahari (Fiddes 13). The most salient and important thing about meat is that it comes from animals, and thus viscerally represents the power of humans over those animals. It is the final stage of domesticity, before which there is always the danger, however slight, that the animals will escape our limited conceptions of them.

We mark, bribe, and woo them, but rarely do we find the middle ground in which we come to know them in a framework that they also actively participate in. In modern postdomestic society, identities and interpersonal relationships do not feature domestic meat animals. There are no sheep to build families around, no pigs to mediate gender relations. Stripped of its sociocultural values, the posited human-animal relationship involved in eating meat disappears. Relating to animals directly through meat becomes awkward, as in the case of this humane farmer who raises lambs and loves every one: “Instead of being sad or upset at the lamb chop on my plate, I was overcome with gratitude. It wasn’t the sort of gratitude you feel when someone sacrifices something for you, since the animal I was eating had made no such choice; I’d made the choice for it” (Friend 252). In a similar case, an organic free-range meat vendor remarked, “‘Oh, yes, these animals are our dear friends.’ I responded, politely but seriously: ‘That’s an odd thing to say; I hope that you don’t treat your other “dear friends” this way.’ The vendor laughed. She thought I was joking” (Francione).

The close connection between farmers and their traditionally-raised animals is what makes this ‘happy meat’ so appealing. Yet perhaps it is not that factory-farmed animals are treated inhumanely, but rather that they are so disconnected from human society that they no longer make sense to us. People do not interact with animals, they interact through animals, and if meat “tangibly represents human control of the natural world” (Fiddes 2), then this control must be made clear through our ability to dominate in our relationships with those animals. Since humans are largely absent from factory farms, domesticity loses all intelligibility. At the same time, the relationships we perceive ourselves as having with our domestic animals are illusions. They require a reciprocity that for the most part does not exist outside of our cultural imagination. There may be a middle ground between domestic and wild, culture and nature, in which human and non-human animals can socialize each other, but that may involve giving up meat — and certainly giving up control.

Bibliography

Bulliet, Richard W. 2005. Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers, Columbia University Press.

1. “Churro Sheep History”, Dine be iiná, http://www.navajolifeway.org/navajochurrosheep.htm.

Descola, Philippe. 1994. In the Society of Nature, Cambridge University Press.

Downs, James F. 1964. Animal Husbandry in Navajo Society and Culture, University of California Press.

Dwyer, Peter D. and Monica Minnegal. 2005. “Person, Place or Pig”, Animals in Person, Berg Publishers.

Fiddes, Nick. 1991. Meat: A Natural Symbol, Routledge.

Francione, Gary L. 21 Sep 2008. “These animals are our dear friends”, Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach, http://www.abolitionistapproach.com/?p=166.

Friend, Catherine. 2008. The Compassionate Carnivore, Da Capo Press.

Knight, John. 2005. “Introduction”, Animals in Person, Berg Publishers.

Sillitoe, Paul. 2003. Managing Animals in New Guinea, Routledge.

Spencer, Colin. 1995. The Heretic’s Feast: A History of Vegetarianism, UPNE.

Rappaport, Roy A. 1984. Pigs for the Ancestors, Yale University Press.

Wood, John, Walter Vannette, and Michael Andrews. 1982. “Sheep is Life”, Northern Arizona University Press.

Yarwood, Richard and Nick Evans. 2000. “Taking stock of farm animals and rurality”, Animals Spaces, Beastly Places (eds. Philo and Wilbert), Routledge.