FLEAS AND RATS
Impact: Plagues, ending the Middle Ages
From
1347 to 1350, the a virulent disease ravaged the populations of Asia
and Europe, killing more than 25 million in Europe alone— about a third
of the population. Most people died just three days after becoming
infected. Scientists remain perplexed by the outbreak, but many agree
that the disease was probably the bubonic plague (or the “black death”)
and it was probably spread all over the world by infected fleas
traveling on rats. In those days, rats thrived among people— on ships
and in cities. Infected fleas, the thinking goes, simply hopped off of
dying rats and onto people.
The disruption to medieval society
was immense and the outbreak helped bring about the end of the
feudalism. Muslims in Crimea, in what’s now the Ukraine, blamed
Christians and expelled them from trading cities, spreading the disease
deep into Europe. The Christians blamed Jews and burned many of them
alive, killing crucial tradesmen and leaving towns without blacksmiths,
innkeepers, bakers, millers, and weavers. Many towns and farms were
abandoned, leading to food shortages. Ultimately, the nobles couldn’t
enforce control on their surviving peasant laborers. So, despite laws
aimed at keeping serfs’ wages low, the desperate noblemen began doubling
and tripling wages, encouraging the serfs of other noblemen to jump
ship. Over time, the serfs were able to demand and get a higher standard
of living and new rights, loosening the binds that kept them enslaved
to one estate and bringing an end to the economic system of feudalism.
DOGS
Impact: Hunting, herding, self-defense
Humans
began welcoming dogs into their settlements about 14,000 years ago, the
first animals to be domesticated. At first, groups of wolves probably
began scavenging human settlements, snatching up the scraps, bones, and
other perfectly good animal parts that humans threw out after hunting.
Eventually, people discovered that dogs also made good watch animals at
night. Humans favored the friendlier, less skittish animals and their
puppies, unintentionally breeding dogs that were tame. About 3,000 years
ago, people began breeding dogs intentionally, choosing specialized
hunting and herding functions. The results were affectionate, efficient
hunting animals, and the ability for one person to control an entire
herd of sheep, goats, cows, or swine. This allowed tribes to own more
livestock and freed up shepherds to pursue other needed occupations like
hunting, farming, and metalworking.
CATS
Impact: Made agriculture possible, prevented plagues
Historians
believe that about 10,000 years ago a few African wildcats decided to
adopt humans. Genetic studies indicate that all of the world’s 600
million house cats descend from as few as five original cat pioneers. As
a result of this very restricted inbreeding, house cats developed all
kinds of quirks and defects, including an inability to taste sweetness.
This
all happened in the Fertile Crescent— an unusually fertile area in
otherwise barren Egypt and Mesopotamia— at about the same time that
people began growing wheat, rye, and barley. These crops provided humans
with food stability and allowed them to stop wandering and erect
permanent settlements. A few wildcats discovered that the barns and
homes in these settlements offered sunny places to sleep, protection
from larger animals, scraps of food, and huge quantities of big, juicy
mice and rats. Humans, bedeviled by rodents that ate and contaminated
the crops they stored after harvests, learned to value their feline
friends. Ancient Egyptians even grew to worship cats, making it a crime
to kill one. The Romans spread cats across Europe, and the Europeans
took them to ports around the world. Cats went through a dark period in
Europe during the Middle Ages, when people began seeing them as evil
spirits and companions to witches, resulting in widespread extermination
of entire cat populations. But the result was a continent overrun with
rats and the diseases they brought, which eventually caused humans to
forgive cats and welcome them home.
CATTLE
Impact: Food, clothing, tools, and fuel
For
about 8,000 years, cows have provided humans with food from meat and
milk; clothes, blankets, and tents from their hides; fertilizer and
cooking fuel from their dung; tools from their horns, teeth, and bones;
and transportation and power. And they do it all by eating grasses that
humans can’t digest. Like cats, cattle were adopted by humans after
people organized into permanent settlements. That’s because, unlike
sheep and goats (which had been herded for more than a thousand years
before), cattle like to graze familiar fields and return to the same
shelter each night. So nomadic lifestyles don’t really suit them.
HORSES
Impact: Pre-industrial power and transportation, Mongol invasions
People
began domesticating horses about 6,000 years ago, and long before the
Industrial Revolution, humans discovered that the animals made great
workers and companions. The Mongols were master horsemen who, during the
13th century, ruled the largest empire in history, containing 100
million people and 22 percent of the world’s total landmass, stretching
from Hungary to the Sea of Japan. Mongol soldiers often rode for hours
without stopping, drinking blood from their horses as they conquered new
lands. Over time, horses became inextricably linked to humans,
providing transportation, power, and even tail hair for violin bows and
an estrogen supplement called Premarin, whose name honors its source
material: “pregnant mare urine.”
AMERICAN BISON
Impact: Native American settlement of the Great Plains; American roads; consciousness about saving endangered species
Massive
bison herds, numbering up to 30 million animals, once grazed the grassy
plains between the Rockies and the Appalachians, from the far north of
Canada to Mexico. Native Americans used their migration paths as
transportation routes that became road and rail beds still used today.
And for thousands of years, Native Americans survived on the grassy
North American plains by hunting the bison. But then came Europeans.
When
white settlers arrived in North America, they were amazed by the number
of bison, a seemingly endless supply, and began shooting them for skins
or sport, usually leaving the meat to rot in the sun. There are also
reports that wholesale bison slaughter was a deliberate tactic to
deprive the Plains Indians of their main food source.
By 1889
the American bison population was down to just 1,091 animals. When the
government shrugged off that fact, a few prescient ranchers saved a
handful of the remaining animals, breeding them for eventual
reintroduction into the wild. Those bison now make up the populations of
Yellowstone National Park and Canada’s Elk Island Park. The ranchers’
success inspired attempts to save other endangered species through laws,
hunting bans, and captive breeding programs that release animals into
the wild.
BEAVERS
Impact: European exploration of North America, destruction of Native American tribes
Like
the American bison, beavers were also nearly wiped out for their fur.
In the 1700s, 60 to 80 beavers populated every mile of every stream in
Canada and the northern United States. But within 100 years, the
critters were hunted to near extinction. Why? Because beaver-skin top
hats were all the rage in England. Fur traders had finished off the
European beavers, so they went searching for the animals in other
British holdings. They discovered a vast beaver population in North
America that, in the 1790s, allowed them to ship more than 30,000 pelts a
year back to Europe. As the beavers along the American East Coast
disappeared, fur trappers explored farther west, following the Great
Lakes and continuing in all directions. In 1793 Alexander Mackenzie, the
first European to travel across the North American continent, did so on
behalf of the North West Fur Company.
For Native Americans,
beaver-mania was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, they could exchange
furs for many goods they needed. But on the other, waves of European
interlopers were infringing on their lands. Worse, the diseases the
explorers brought were disastrous to many tribes, wiping out most or all
of the inhabitants of some villages.
Fortunately, in the
mid-1800s, beavers got a reprieve. Silk hats slowly gained favor,
leaving the few remaining beavers in North America alone long enough to
repopulate.
