Listener Call

BRIAN: This is BackStory. I’m Brian Balogh.

ED: I’m Ed Ayers.

PETER: And I’m Peter Onuf. Today’s show, the history of domesticated animals, from livestock to Lassie.

BRIAN: We’ve reached the point in our show where we turn to listeners who have reached us at backstoryradio.org or on Facebook.

PETER: And we have Cyrus on the line, calling in from New York City. Cyrus, welcome to the show.

CYRUS: Thanks. Glad to be with you all.

PETER: Hey, were talking about domesticating animals. So we’re on best behavior today. What’s your question?

CYRUS: I was calling about a famous dog from the 19th century, Seaman. He was a pet of Meriwether Lewis’s. And he accompanied Lewis and Clark and the entire Corps of Discovery on their expedition. And while he survived the entire trip, it seems that he witnessed the slaughter and consumption of hundreds of dogs by the expedition during their trip. And I was just wondering why he got fed while the other animals, other dogs were meat?

PETER: Well, I want you to think back to the early period, to my period, Cyrus, when all men were not created equal. And the same went for dogs. Some dogs were useful. And Seaman was one of them. So Cyrus’s is question here is, why do we distinguish, on the Lewis and Clark, one dog, that lucky dog, Seaman, from all the others, the hundreds that were consumed on the road or on the trail by Lewis and Clark?

BRIAN: Peter, if I could intervene from the 20th century with my sketchy knowledge of all of this. As I recall, a lot of that dogs, perhaps all of the dogs they ate, were sold to them by Indians.

PETER: That’s right.

BRIAN: And so we do we have to introduce the other here. These dogs, they’re just not part of the team.

PETER: That’s exactly right.

CYRUS: Heathen dogs? The Indians’ dogs shared their characteristics?

BRIAN: I don’t think it’s the characteristics, Cyrus. I think it’s that those dogs were just not part of the group. No bond had been established. And they were not that different than they deer or other game to the Lewis and Clark expedition. I don’t think it’s that they were Indian dogs, per se. But I think it’s that the dogs came from outside, from elsewhere.

PETER: I think the whole idea of giving a name to a dog– And I think that’s the key thing here. He had a name– it distinguished him and established a bond with his human owner, with Meriwether Lewis, and therefore all the other people on the expedition.

So Seaman is the anomaly. He’s the exception. He’s not for dinner.

ED: And would have been a lot of dinner. He was a Newfoundland. And so he was an enormous dog. So Peter, how uncommon would it have been for a dog to have been named? Would the Puritans have named their dogs?

PETER: No. No. And dogs were considered pests in many places. And they were really accepted and domesticated because they had uses, as with sheepdogs, herding dogs. And I would guess that Seaman’s use was as a guard, as somebody who would alter them to danger.

BRIAN: The myth was– and it goes back to references in their diaries– that he scared off bears and he procured squirrels for the team. We know he was a good swimmer. That kind of dog is a good swimmer.

PETER: And that brings up the Seaman thing. If you have to think of the Great Plains and going across the continent as a mighty ocean, because when early modern people think about travel, they think about crossing the seas. And that image of the Plains as the seas, that applies. So he was an able Seaman.

So that’s probably a bit of a stretch, but I think it does point to a real characteristic with domestic animals. And that is, names usually are associated with use until we start seeing ourselves in our dogs. When dogs became our best friends, then we weren’t thinking of them instrumentally, as what they did for us. It was because they were– It’s a pretty sad story. We didn’t have any other friends, so dogs became our best friends.

ED: I’d like to focus on the part of the show here that is more cheerful, which is about Seaman, because I’m sentimental. Seaman has really been memorialize all around the country.

PETER: Seaman statues.

ED: Yeah.

PETER: Yeah, I do think that Seaman has loomed larger in historical memory because we are a pet-loving people than at the time. It wouldn’t have been anything particularly notable. We need to acknowledge the contributions of dogs through history. And Seaman becomes the great dog who stands in for all those dogs who have been our friends.

In fact, the history of our relationship with animals is that we eat them and use them. And it’s nice to think, to layer over that sentimentally, is this idea that we love each other.

ED: So Cyrus, I think it’s a great question about where the boundary is between pets as our friends and pets as our sustenance. And I think you’d have to say, in the global prospective, the boundary is remarkably malleable.

CYRUS: I’ve noticed, too, in the modern world, countries where they develop a middle class, it seems that suddenly meat animals become pet animals.

PETER: Yeah. You can afford to do that. It’s a conspicuous form of non-consumption, you might say. We don’t need to eat these guys.

CYRUS: Right.

PETER: Well, Cyrus, you’ve given us a lot to chew on. [LAUGHTER] Thanks for your call.

CYRUS: Thanks. It’s been a pleasure.

BRIAN: Thanks a lot, Cyrus. Bye-bye.