"Our effort was to show that animals influence the historical development of societies, and that the actual characteristics of animals, not just the meaning humans make of them, matter," says sociologist Richard York. (Photo: Moroccan climbing goats/thesantosrepublic.com)

by Jim Barlow, University of Oregon

Apr.10, 2013 (TSR) – Animals don’t get their due for their role in sculpting human societies throughout history, argue sociologists.

Animals are more than pets or domesticated creatures bended to human needs, say Richard York of the University of Oregon and Philip Mancus of the College of the Redwoods in Crescent City, California.

That idea has been slowly emerging in sociology, which focuses on the origin, development, organization, and functioning of human society. In 2002, the American Sociological Association created the section “Animals & Society” as a response to new interest in the relationships of humans and non-human animals.

Last year, the book Animals and Sociology by Kay Peggs summarized past approaches used to study animals’ contributions and how that research had marginalized them.

The new paper in Sociological Theory is, “to an extent, a call to action” to seriously advance such research, York says.

In making their case, York and Mancus, who received a doctorate from University of Oregon, reviewed the Ecological-Evolutionary Theory, which was introduced in 1966 by Gerhard Lenski.

The new paper cites a limitation of Lenski’s theory: the tendency to ignore the influence of animals on the evolution of societies while focusing instead on how technology and economics have driven sociocultural evolution.

“It was our effort to suggest that sociologists and other social scientists should give greater consideration to how animals affect societies,” York says. “In the past few years, there have been a slowly growing number of studies addressing animal-human connections, but most of these in sociology are either focused on a micro-level of human relationships with animal companions or focused on the symbolic meaning people ascribe to animals.

“Our effort was to show that animals influence the historical development of societies, and that the actual characteristics of animals, not just the meaning humans make of them, matter.”

In a section of their new paper, the authors address those characteristics, asking the question: “Who Made Whom?” They argue that animals are complex creatures, not just “putty that humans sculpted to fit their needs” as seen in the traditional view that says localized cultural factors alone drove human efforts to make use of them and export them to new lands.

Just five of 14 species of large animals domesticated before the 20th century—the cow, sheep, goat, pig, and horse—became widespread and important around the world. More domestication was tried but failed, the authors note, at least in part, because of the nature of the animals involved.

York and Mancus also took issue with Lenski’s heavy emphasis on the role of the plow, rather than the animals that pull it, in driving technological advances. Plows are only useful when combined with draft animals such as horses and oxen.

Thus, a major difference between the Old World and New World was that the former had large draft animals and the latter—with only small animals such as the llama, alpaca, guinea pig, and dog—did not. The Incas, for example, instead devised the taclla, a human-powered digging stick that also served as a hoe.

The use of the horse and elephant in warfare also serves as an example of societies’ making use of local-origin animals. Hannibal deployed elephants against the Romans, and Spanish conquistadors were aided by their mastery of the horse in bringing down the Aztec and Incan empires.

“Not only does the social construction of animals affect their fate,” write the authors in reference to work by Lenski, now professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and other scholars who have addressed human-animal interactions, “but also the material properties of animals affect ours, conditioning the social being and the consciousness of a people.”

Sociological theory, they concluded, can be improved by recognizing the role of animals in human societies and enrich the field “by adding new ideas to old debates and opening up new debates in turn.”

Read the original study here.

DOI: 10.1177/0735275113477085

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