Domesticated animals : $b Their relation to man and to his advancement in civilization — John Shaqi
Domesticated animals : $b Their relation to man and to his advancement in civilizationShaler, Nathaniel Southgate
History
Domesticated animals : $b Their relation to man and to his advancement in civilization
Shaler, Nathaniel Southgate
Domestic animals
Of all the influences which have been exercised on man by the care of
his flocks, herds, and droves, perhaps the most important is that which
has arisen from the broader development of his sympathies. The savage
may be defined as a man who cares only for his family and his tribe; the
civilized man as one whose kindly interest extends to mankind and beyond
to all sentient beings. In the development of this altruistic motive the
care of the dependent species has evidently been most effective. We note
that the peoples who have attained the first upward step in the
association with domesticated animals are in their quality, so far as
tested by literature and history, much above the mere savage. With the
care of the flocks we find associated poetry, the first notes of higher
religious motives, and a largeness of the sympathetic life which is
favored by the nature of the occupation. Where the nomadic habits of the
original shepherds pass into the more sedentary state of the soil
tiller, the element of personal care and the affection and the
consequent education of the sympathy were increased. Men had now to care
for half a dozen or more kinds of animals; they had to learn their ways,
in a manner to put themselves in their places and conceive their needs.
Thus the life of a farmer is a continual lesson in the art of sympathy;
with the result, certainly in part due to this cause, that there is no
class of people from whom the brutal instincts of the ancient savage
life which we all inherit have been so completely eradicated.
It is perhaps too much to attribute the advance of the agricultural
classes of our civilized peoples, in all that serves to remove them from
the brutality of their savage ancestors, altogether to the nature of
their work--to the very large element of kindly care for which it calls,
and which is the price of success in the occupation. Yet when we note
the immediate way in which the people bred in cities, under
circumstances of excitement are wont to behave like savages of the lower
kind, showing in their conduct a lack of all sympathetic education, and
contrast their behavior with that of their kinsmen from the fields--we
see essential differences in character which cannot well be explained
save by the diverse natures of the training which the men have received.
Thus in the French Revolution, the baser, more inhuman deeds were not
committed by the peasants, who had been the principal sufferers under
the regime which was overthrown, but by the people of the great towns
who had been less oppressed by the iniquities of the old system of
government.
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