Web Extra: The Science of Species

This is a transcript from an earlier broadcast of this episode, entitled “Pet Friendly: A History of Domestic Animals.”

ED: This is BackStory. I’m Ed Ayers. According to a recent poll, 61% of American voters own pets. And half of those people let their pets sleep with them in bed. And so the question is, how in the world did we go from having farm animals to treating our pets like people?

Well, it turns out a lot of this pampering has its roots in the late 1800s, when the line between human and beast was not especially clear.

SUSAN PEARSON: The ideas about how to discipline animals and how to discipline children are shuttled back and forth across the species line.

ED: This thinking was sometimes taken to an extreme. Circus elephants, for example, were forced to watch as other elephants, who were judged guilty of killing their handlers, were executed.

AMY WOOD: In the news reports they say, we wanted this to be a warning to the other elephants of what the price of disobedience is.

ED: Today on BackStory, the history of Americans’ relationship with their domesticated animals.

PETER: Major funding for BackStory is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and an anonymous donor.

ED: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory with the American Backstory hosts.

BRIAN: Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh, and I’m here with Ed Ayers.

ED: Hi, Brian.

BRIAN: And Peter Onuf’s with us.

PETER: Hey, Brian. We’re going to start the show today with a little bit of poetry.

SARAH HAND MEACHAM: From December 15, 1768.

PETER: This is Sarah Hand Meacham, an historian at Virginia Commonwealth University. And she found this poem published in the Virginia Gazette.

SARAH HAND MEACHAM: And I’ve pulled a section here for you.

PETER: This poem was allegedly written by a woman in memoriam of her pet, named [? Phil. ?]

SARAH HAND MEACHAM: “Then did I stroke him, scratch his head, and in my bosom made his bed. For my affection was and still is all engrossed by charming Phil. But he is gone, ne’er to return. And unless ’tis to sigh and mourn, I’ll therefore seek another pet. A husband I may surely get.”

PETER: Whoa.

ED: Lucky guy.

PETER: You might be wondering, what kind of pet was Phil?

SARAH HAND MEACHAM: So she’s lamenting the death of her squirrel.

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Squirrels were the fashionable courtship token. Powhatan Robertson left us a very nice diary from 1816 when he was a student at the College of William and Mary, and he writes in his diary about sending [? Miss N ?], a young woman he was interested in, a pet squirrel, and being very pleased when her family allowed her to accept it.

BRIAN: There were advice pamphlets on how to care for squirrels. Young boys would catch squirrels and tame them to sit in their shirt pockets. People would stand for portraits and be painted, yes, with squirrels. And so the obvious question for Meacham, why squirrels? I mean, why not rabbits or ducks?

SARAH HAND MEACHAM: Well, I think 18th century people read animals in ways that we just don’t anymore. So a squirrel, in particular, because of the patience required to get the meat out of the nut was an emblem of diligence and patience. And so these were sort of aspirational virtues that people had for their children. So they’d like to give children these squirrels so that they would, too, become patient and diligent.

BRIAN: I wanted to ask you a bit about the training part of the squirrels. Was there anything more than training up a trinket to give to the girl you were interested in?

SARAH HAND MEACHAM: I think so. I think much like today how parents give children pets, hoping it will train him to some sort of responsibility, that that was part of why pets were popular in the 18th century, particularly among elite or white colonists, that it was a way that parents were training children to take on their adults roles.

And some of these adult roles are very distasteful to us now, and correctly so. So some of these Virginia children would grow up and become masters and mistresses of enslaved men and women. By capturing a wild animal and domesticating it and taming it, the boy got some practice in the way he would be restraining humans later on. And girls, when they had to accept these animal gifts and keep the animal alive, showed that they would make good mothers and good mistresses. So it has a dark side.

ED: So on today’s episode of BackStory, we’re going to look at the long and sometimes sordid history of domesticating animals. And we’ll ask what our relationship with those animals tells us about our relationships with each other.

PETER: We’ll tell the story of America’s most unrelenting imperialists, pigs, with a taste for shellfish. We’ll look at how expanding animal rights actually led to greater human rights. And we’ll remember the elephants, circus elephants, that got out of hand.

ED: In the 1600s, English settlers started arriving in the region now known as New England. And at their sides were the pigs, cattle, sheep, and goats they had brought with them across the ocean. They were animals never before seen in the New World. And they triggered not a small amount of conflict with the humans who were already here.

PETER: Virginia DeJohn Anderson is an historian at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the author of Creatures of Empire, How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America. I asked her, which would have been more alien to Indians, the Europeans or the animals they brought with them?

VIRGINIA DEJOHN ANDERSON: In some ways, I can’t help but think the animals maybe are. Because the Indians, we now know, had had contacts with Europeans well before European settlement, that ship captains and fishermen would be stopping off the coast. And so there had been encounters between Indians and Europeans. But it’s not really until settlement occurs that the animals are coming along as well.

And although there’s not a tremendous amount of direct evidence of this, I suspect a lot of Indians first encountered an English pig or cow when that animal was not near a colonist. And so it was just a strange creature in the woods that the Indians had to figure out what is this? Why is it here? And what do I do with it?

PETER: Well, this was Indian country, of course. And they had lived with their own animals. Why couldn’t they deal with these new English animals?

VIRGINIA DEJOHN ANDERSON: The problem is not so much dealing with the animals themselves as with the package of ideas that the English settlers brought with them about their domestic animals. And the most significant one is that the English perceived of their livestock as property, whereas Indians did not conceive of living animals as anyone’s property.

PETER: Well, let’s talk a little bit more about the Indian perspective on these animals. They don’t have that same idea of property rights, so what do they think about animals? They don’t have that dominion that goes back to the Bible in the Christian tradition, Judeo-Christian tradition. What do they think?

VIRGINIA DEJOHN ANDERSON: Well, as far as we can tell, the native view of animals consisted, in effect, of these creatures being, sometimes you hear the phrase other than human persons. That they were living beings sharing the earth who were different from human beings, but not necessarily inferior to them.

And a lot of different kinds of animals, particularly some of the major prey animals like deer, were thought to have spiritual power or spiritual protectors. And the notion of animals having any kind of spiritual protector is heretical to the English Christians.

PETER: How did English animals precipitate conflict between the settlers and Native Americans?

VIRGINIA DEJOHN ANDERSON: They did in any number of ways. And in part, it’s because the English did not have full control over their animals’ behavior. So we find a lot of instances of English animals trespassing on Indian planting fields, destroying crops, digging up the land, and so on, creating real damage to the Indians’ subsistence practices, even to the point of pigs, for instance, going out to the coasts at low tide, digging up the shellfish that the native peoples relied on for their subsistence. Animals chewing on the same kinds of bark and eating the grasses that deer and other indigenous animals that the Indians relied on for hunting.

And especially because, in the Northeast, a lot of Indian hunting was with traps, not bows and arrows. You set a trap for a deer, but if a cow wanders into it, you didn’t make that happen. But if that cow wanders into the trap, is injured or killed, then the Indian who set the trap is liable for damages.

And where it becomes a problem with Indians without a sense of property and animals on their side, is that when they encounter an animal that’s creating problems, an Indian might be tempted to deal with that animal as he would any wild animal, which is, to say, kill it. But if he does, he finds that it’s not the same thing to kill a piece of property. And the native person may well find himself hauled into court as a criminal who has committed an offense against the English.

PETER: Well, it takes a while before push comes to shove and we have a great big war, that would be King Phillip’s War.

VIRGINIA DEJOHN ANDERSON: Well, King Philip’s War begins in 1675, almost accidentally, with a number of young Indian men raiding a village, an English settlement. And then it sort of blows up into this larger conflict. And Philip himself takes charge of this uprising. But it’s a culmination of tensions that have been building for years as the burgeoning English population has been encroaching on Indian lands, putting pressure on Indians to move away, and so on.

And when I bring animals into this story, it’s not just me doing this. This is me speaking Phillip’s own words. There’s an interesting incident that occurs right at the start of the war, where a Rhode Island official named John Easton goes to Philip and says, wait a minute, what’s this all about? Is there some way we can halt this bloodshed?

And Philip, at least in Easton’s rendition of this, pours out this litany of grievances, agreeing to sell land to English settlers, and when those settlers are the ones who are drawing up the deeds, the property that the Indians have suddenly transferred is a whole lot bigger than what the Indians had though, things like that.

But then Philip goes on to say that even when the Indians move 30 miles away from the settlers– he uses that 30 miles away– they still can’t keep their planting fields free from livestock. And at one point he says, the Indians had thought that when the English bought the land of them, they would’ve kept their cattle on their own land. And so Philip himself is identifying trespassing animals as this sort of phenomenally irritating aspect.

PETER: So Virginia, you’ve described domestic animals as creatures of empire, suggesting that cattle and pigs are more significant for the process of settlement than we have recognized. Is this just a New England problem?

VIRGINIA DEJOHN ANDERSON: No. You see the exact same thing happening in the Chesapeake at the same time. And then when you push forward into the 19th century, what you find often is that as settlers, first English colonists and then Americans, move westward, often sort of the leading edge of that settlement are livestock, who are creating the same kinds of frictions with native peoples along the edge of the frontier as it moves forward. The same kind of problems reappear into the 19th century. So I see the story of New England in the 17th century with King Phillip’s War or the 17th century Chesapeake as just the first chapter in an ongoing story in American history, in a critical part of the Euro-Indian encounter.

PETER: Virginia DeJohn Anderson is an historian at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She’s the author of Creatures of Empire, How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America.

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BRIAN: It’s time for a short break. When we come back, Thomas Edison gets his hands on an elephant. And the outcome is, well, shocking.

ED: You’re listening to BackStory. We’ll be back in 60 seconds.

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Unless you’re listening to the podcast, in which case, we’re back right now.

PETER: This is BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf.

ED: I’m Ed Ayers.

BRIAN: And I’m Brian Balogh. Today’s show is about the history of domestic animals. And we’re going to take a very brief detour here for a story about a little girl, a girl named Mary Ellen Wilson.

SUSAN PEARSON: The story of Mary Ellen Wilson really begins with a woman named Etta Wheeler.

BRIAN: This is Susan Pearson, an historian at Northwestern. The story takes place in the late 19th century.

SUSAN PEARSON: The winter of 1873.

BRIAN: And this woman, Etta Wheeler, is what was called a church friendly visitor in New York City.

SUSAN PEARSON: A church friendly visitor is kind of a proto social worker.

BRIAN: She’d go around to the needy, pray with them, talk with them, sometimes bring food to them. And one day, in Hell’s Kitchen, she stops by to see a woman–

SUSAN PEARSON: Who was elderly and dying of tuberculosis, and who was confined to her apartment. And this woman, this dying woman, told Etta Wheeler that she was very disturbed, that every day, all day long, she heard through her walls the cries of a young girl who was living next door. And this elderly woman believed that be young girl was being abused.

BRIAN: So Etta Wheeler checks with some neighbors.

SUSAN PEARSON: Who confirm the story about the young girl and the cries that came through the walls.

BRIAN: And so with some corroborating stories–

SUSAN PEARSON: Etta Wheeler decided to knock on the apartment where the cries came from. And a woman opened the door. And Etta Wheeler described her as very sharp, having a sharp voice, and a mean face. And she wouldn’t allow Etta Wheeler entrance.

But Wheeler got a peek inside the apartment through the open door. And she claimed that she saw a young girl inside, who was pale and thin, wearing tattered clothes. Wheeler also claimed that she could glimpse a whip lying on the table in the kitchen, and that she saw evidence of ts use on the girl’s legs and arms, bruises and other marks of abuse. And although Wheeler was not admitted to the apartment, she felt just through this crack in the door that she had seen all that she really needed to see.

BRIAN: So Wheeler goes back to her church and tells her priest.

SUSAN PEARSON: And he said, well, there’s nothing I can do about it. Why don’t you go see the police?

BRIAN: And she goes to the police.

SUSAN PEARSON: And the police said, well, this is hearsay that you’re telling us. We can’t really do anything about it.

BRIAN: At that point, she kind of feels that she’s out of options. She goes home and she starts telling her family about this poor little girl. And somebody pipes up with, well, a strange suggestion.

SUSAN PEARSON: Her niece says, well, why not go to Mr. Bergh? Now, Mr. Bergh is the president of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the ASPCA, which had been founded seven years earlier in 1866 in New York City.

And the niece says, go to Mr. Bergh, for she is a little animal, surely, referring to Mary Ellen.

BRIAN: Now, that sounded a little bizarre. But what did she have to lose? Wheeler went to Mr. Bergh. And it worked.

SUSAN PEARSON: The ASPCA gets a writ to remove Mary Ellen Wilson from her home. They bring her abusers, who turn out not to be her parents, into court. They are prosecuted. She is sent to a foster home in upstate New York. And according to all accounts, grows into a healthy young girl and a respectable woman, who marries later and has children of her own.

What’s significant about this story is not simply that the ASPCA intervenes to rescue this girl, but that members of the ASPCA decide, as a result of this case, to form a child protective society, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, an SPCC, rather than an SPCA. And this kind of movement spreads like wildfire across the late 19th century.

BRIAN: So if I could just stop you there, are you saying that there were, presumably, a number of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals before there was even that kind of protection for children?

SUSAN PEARSON: I am saying that, yes.

BRIAN: How do you explain that?

SUSAN PEARSON: Well, the family is the private sphere that is separate from the public world of work and politics and business. And what happens in that world is the business of the family. So there’s that kind of ideology about privacy that makes interfering between parents and children an extremely high hurdle to get over.

And this is, I think, reflected in how Etta Wheeler tries to go to all these different sources, people who should be able to help her, we think, but who say, well, there’s nothing I can do about that. Either that’s not my business, or I don’t have the right evidence.

But there’s no institution, as there is today, that would dedicate itself to saying, well OK, you’ve made a claim about child abuse. We’re going to check that out.

BRIAN: So to get back this connection between children abused and animals abused, how do we get these animal protection societies in the first place?

SUSAN PEARSON: So we tend to think, well, when there’s urbanization, people move to cities, they leave animals behind on the farm. That’s where animals belong. And if there are animals in the city, they’re pets.

In the 19th century city, that’s really not the case. The 19th century is crowded with and stinking of animals. There are horses and mules and dogs that are performing work. They’re all over the place.

And so, it’s no accident that the first animal protection societies are formed in urban areas. They’re not formed in rural areas where you might think people have a more direct relationship with animals. But they’re formed in reaction to these kind of very public industrial uses of animals.

BRIAN: So that it would not fall into that private sphere you referred to. It was more a matter of workplace regulations, in some way.

SUSAN PEARSON: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they do, technically, have the power to go into the private sphere. And that’s one of the things that’s novel about them. But most of what they focus on, really, is that public use of animals.

And I think there’s a couple different ways to explain what makes 19th century Americans think that animal protection organizations can also be child protection organizations. If you’re looking around the landscape of charitable and reform organizations in your city, the one that’s going to seem the most powerful and have the greatest ability to intervene in something private is going to be the SPCA, because it has law enforcement powers, because you will see its officers out on the streets, actively seeking out problems to solve.

And they’re willing. And they’ve announced that their willingness is based on a kind of moral philosophy which holds that even the most helpless and defenseless among us deserve protection.

But behind that, there’s, I think, a much deeper set of cultural beliefs and habits of thought that link animals and children in the mid to late 19th century. So that pet keeping has become very, very prevalent by the mid 19th century in the middle class family. There’s this idea that children can learn from keeping pets. They can learn about being benevolent, being a caretaker.

But there’s also the sense that animals and children have a special kind of emotional or affective connection, that is different from the kinds of connections that adults can have with animals or that children can have with adults. And you’ll see this in the form of stories that talk about children and their pets, and position the pets as friends that they go through life with and have adventures with. You’ll see this in the form of animals that talk in children’s literature. that doesn’t happen in books for adults. There’s this assumption that there’s this kind of shared affective space between animals and children.

So I think that contributes, as well, to people’s sense of there’s something that animals and children have in common that goes beyond just they’re both being helpless and defenseless.

BRIAN: Did these societies go their separate ways once this idea was broached formally? Did we have just distinct organizations for children and distinct organizations for animals?

SUSAN PEARSON: What’s interesting about the history of animal and child protection is that although the original Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children that’s formed in New York City becomes separate from the ASPCA, in most places animal and child protection remain joined under the same institutional mantle throughout the 19th century and into the 20th century. So that by 1908, there are 354 active anti-cruelty organizations in the United States.

And the plurality of those, 185 of them, are what were called dual societies, societies that did both animal and child protection. And those very often went by the name of Humane Society. So if there’s a Humane Society in your town, there’s a good chance that it once did both animal and child protection, rather than just one or the other.

BRIAN: Do attitudes towards animals actually lead to broader change in the way we deal with humans?

SUSAN PEARSON: That’s a good question. I know that my 19th century subjects would say that they do. Well, they used to say, a man who is cruel to his beast will be cruel to his child.

And this is one of the other rationales for animal protection, which is to say that the way you treat a dependent being under your care, like an animal, is an indication of your basic moral fiber. And if you treat that being cruelly, you will go on to treat other similarly positioned beings of any species in the same way. So there’s a kind of slippery slope theory of violence, that what begins with animals will ultimately manifest itself in human society, in human relationships.

BRIAN: Susan Pearson is an historian at Northwestern University. She’s the author of the Rights of the Defenseless, Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America.

PETER: We just heard how late 19th century Americans linked the proper treatment of animals to the proper treatment of people. But it wasn’t all humane societies and child welfare. That linkage also had a dark side.

ED: In 1903, for example, Thomas Edison filmed and amazing, if disturbing, event. It’s called, very descriptively, Electrocuting an Elephant. And it basically consists of this elephant being led into the frame. We see is standing there for a few seconds, secured with ropes. It sort of impatiently shakes its legs, at which point smoke starts to billow from its feet. The elephant’s legs stiffen. And then it leans forward and collapses.

PETER: The elephant’s name was Topsy. And in life, she had been a circus performer. But over the course of her final three years, she trampled and killed three circus workers. Her owners deemed Topsy a threat and contracted Edison to help Topsy, and I’m quoting, “ride the lightning.”

ED: And Topsy was not alone. More than a dozen elephants were kill publicly around the turn of the 20th century, some by hanging, others by firing squad. And historian Amy Wood says that the amazing part about all of this is that people understood the killings as executions.

AMY WOOD: The New York Times, which is a pretty reputable paper, used the line, “She paid the price of the death penalty for her murders.” And the more tabloid-like papers obviously reported on this at length and basically imposed this narrative of remorse and justice onto the execution, onto what was happening to her.

ED: So who held remorse?

AMY WOOD: Topsy. And I can read to you a little bit from The New York Herald, if you’d like to hear that. OK. “A moment before, the hundreds of men, women, and children who had gathered to see the execution had looked pityingly upon Topsy as she was led to the death post. There was nothing vicious in her manner then. As far as it is possible for man to comprehend the thoughts of animals, it appeared that Topsy was repentant for her bad behavior in the past. That she had grave apprehension as to what the occasion meant was also suggested by her conduct.”

And it goes on like that. And that line, “As much as it’s possible for man to comprehend the thoughts of animals,” part of it you could say, well, they’re being kind of sardonic, or they’re trying to be funny. But I think with that line it also seems like they really are straining to read her mind, to see what she’s thinking at that moment.

And for the execution to have meaning for them, they had to see the elephants as human-like, as potentially having accountability, of showing remorse, for this kind of narrative of justice to make sense to them.

ED: One of the stories you told really dramatizes this, the story of Nick and Dick. So could you please tell us that story?

AMY WOOD: Well, there’s actually three stories. There’s Nick in 1899. And then there’s Dick in 1900. And then there’s Columbia executed in 1907.

And what’s interesting is that in those cases the circus– I don’t know if it was the owner or the circus keepers and trainers– lined up the other elephants for them to watch their fellow elephant be executed. And that’s where you get the language of this isn’t just a joke. It sounds funny to us, but for the people at the time, for them to do that– And they talk about in the news reports, they say, we wanted this to be a lesson to the other elephants. We wanted this to be a warning to the other elephants of what the price of disobedience is. And then they showed all sorts of shock and disappointment when the other elephants watched the execution indifferently.

ED: Were other animals executed?

AMY WOOD: I haven’t found reports of it. And to give you a sense of it, the circus archives in Baraboo, Wisconsin, it was kind of the World Circus archives, they have whole folders on elephant executions. There aren’t folders for lion or tiger executions.

There was a particular fascination with elephants throughout the 19th century. People had these kind of dual feelings about elephants at the time. On the one hand, elephants showed attachment to their kin and to their keepers. They were seen as very intelligent. They have a capacity to mourn.

But at the same time, they were seen as these kind of exotic monstrous beings. Their faces are not human-like at all. They’re inscrutable in some ways. You can’t read an elephant’s face. So that kind of tension between seeing elephants as intelligent, but also seeing them as strange, exotic, and monstrous is what led to that kind of fascination.

And it also led to– you can see that they became good substitutes for criminals in that way. Because people’s views towards criminals also had that dual aspect in the 19th century. On the one hand, criminals were seen as these kind of monstrous, irrational beings who stood outside of human society and who should suffer for their crimes. People felt a deep sense of vengeance or wanting retribution with criminals.

And at the same time, particularly in the late 19th century, you’re seeing new kinds of understandings of criminal, seeing them as objects of pity, people who might not be fully responsible for their actions or who failed to repress or contain animal impulses that we all struggle to retain. And so you can see kind of parallel there between how people are viewing elephants and how people are viewing criminals at the time.

ED: Amy Louise Wood is a professor at Illinois State University. Her book is called Lynching and Spectacle, Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890 to 1940. And if you’re interested, you can see the somewhat disturbing video of Topsy being electrocuted at our website, backstoryradio.org.

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BRIAN: It’s time for another break. When we get back, we’ll just how close Puritans were with their animals. Fair warning, this one gets a little weird.

ED: You’re listening to BackStory. We’ll be back in a minute.

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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.

In thinking about different ways Americans have used animals over time, one that springs to mind is high fashion. In the mid 20th century, mink was the pinnacle of fashion. In the American Midwest, well, that was sort of a hub for mink fur production. The 1940 census showed nearly 3,000 mink farms operating in more than 40 states.

FEMALE SPEAKER: I remember coming down here the first time, and going back and tell Mom and saying, Mom, we found this place. These tiny little houses. And it’s full of cages and it smells really weird. It’s gross. And she’s like, oh, that was the old mink farm.

BRIAN: This is Grace [? Multani ?]. She and her sister Megan grew up near an abandoned mink farm in Wisconsin. They recently went back to visit.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Dude. It’s gone. That is a field of corn.

BRIAN: And things have changed a bit. But as kids, they would sneak onto the old farm, imagining what it was like in its heyday.

FEMALE SPEAKER: I guess in my head, it was like, oh, they being groomed, and they get showers and baths. And they brush them and make their fur so nice. It’s a mink farm, where they go to live happily and out their life. And we’re they’re ready to go, and they age, then they can decide, oh, you’ve lived a good life, mink. It’s time for you to become a coat. Would you like to be a coat? I think I’d like to be a muff instead. That’s what being on a mink farm was.

And then you look and see cages. That’s probably not, maybe that’s not the nice life that they had.

BRIAN: The demand for mink came on the tail end of what’s known as the age of extermination, when wealthy Americans covered themselves with all sorts of animal skins, from seal to beaver pelts. Mink, it turned out, were easier to tame and feed than other mammals. By 1940, nearly 300,000 mink were being killed each year in the United States for their fur.

FEMALE SPEAKER: It was just a bunch of raised up buildings with cages inside. There’s never anything in the cages. There weren’t fancy brushes and fancy grooming stations. There weren’t anything like that. There wasn’t a walking area for the minks to get exercise, or they could go out for a jaunt and stay fit. It was just locked up pages. Similar to a chicken coop, almost.

BRIAN: But eventually, like all forms of fashion, the tide turned against mink. And it turned against fur more generally. By the early 1960s, mink represented, well, an older, stodgier form of femininity.

A fur was something that a husband thought to glam up his wife, as a sort of marker of ownership. With the rise of modern feminism, coupled with the rise of environmentalism, mink coats and mink farming became relics of a more violent past. And the farms, well, they started to disappear.

FEMALE SPEAKER: You had to use your imagination. Oh, maybe they got smart. And maybe they got out. [LAUGHTER]

FEMALE SPEAKER: The minks of NIMH.

FEMALE SPEAKER: The minks of NIMH.

Special thanks to Megan Molteni  for producing that story. If you have a special place where history happened back in your hometown, write to us about it. Write to us at backstoryradio.org. And maybe we’ll put it on the radio.

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BRIAN: We’re going to end the show today with a quick jump backwards, back to early America. Now, this story contains some less than savory material. You parents out there, you may want to turn down the volume for the next eight minutes or so.

PETER: In the mid 17th century, Puritan New England saw a sudden spike in prosecutions for one particular crime, bestiality. Sex with animals had been illegal back in England, too. But New Englanders prosecuted it more often and more harshly, sometimes imposing the death penalty. So why the harsher crackdown in the new world?

BRIAN: I put that very question to Doron Ben-Atar. He’s an historian at Fordham University, and he’s working on a book about bestiality in early America. Ben-Atar pointed me to the 1662 case of a respectable New Haven man, named William Potter.

DORON BEN-ATAR: Potter was caused by his son having sex with a dog. So William Potter confessed. And he admitted that he had a lifelong fondness for bestiality. A few years earlier, his wife caught him. And they even hung the seductress dog when his wife caught him.

He promised never to do it again. But you know how it is. It’s like cigarettes. Once you take one, you’re hooked for life.

BRIAN: Doron, I don’t know how it is, actually.

DORON BEN-ATAR: With cigarettes?

BRIAN: No. With animals.

DORON BEN-ATAR: So now, the wife and son decide to turn him in. And this was one of the founders of New Haven. He’s 60 years old. And he confesses, and he was sentenced to die.

And then what follows is the best line up in American history, in which Potter goes through the farm and points out the specific animals that he had sex with. And on the day of his execution, a cow, two heifers, three sheep, and two sows died with him, after he confessed to having sex with them.

The animal is always executed, in the 17th century, with the offender. There’s all this commentary about why they execute the animal. In other words, is the animal a guilty party? Is the animal seducing the man? Or is it only the lust of the man?

In the Middle Ages, up until about the 10th and 11th century, it was quite common to execute the animal and not the [? man ?], believing that animals are naturally lustful. What can you expect of them? They’re animals. They want to have sex all the time. And sometimes men in compromised state would succumb to temptation. So you can forgive.

Later on, as Christianity move to a far more anti-sex ideology, then you start moving towards executing the person and the animal.

BRIAN: Let me ask you how common bestiality prosecutions were in colonial America? Were these anomalies?

DORON BEN-ATAR: Well, there were a fair number of prosecutions. There were only seven executions in 17th century New England. But practically every colony had bestiality trials. And this raises an excellent question. Since bestiality, we know, happens in every society at every time, only at particular times do societies decide to prosecute.

For the most part, people tolerate bestiality. It’s a joke, but it doesn’t seem to be threatening society. And then at particular moments, the threat seems very real.

BRIAN: In 17th century colonial America, was there a much greater concern with bestiality than in England, for instance?

DORON BEN-ATAR: Yes. Absolutely. In New England, yes. In New England, there’s absolute concern with bestiality. And the concern has to do with the Puritan project. If you’re about to create a city on a hill and it’s supposed to be a model for all Protestantism all over the world, what kind of model will you be if you allow such abomination in you midst?

But it’s not only the Puritan project in terms of what would the world say. It’s also the anxiety felt by the Puritans themselves as they are confronting the wilderness in America.

BRIAN: So it’s the environment also.

DORON BEN-ATAR: It’s the temptation of the environment. Temptation of running away, backsliding. Human beings backsliding into animal nature, or into being animal-like. And that’s the real threat. This is a era where people believed in werewolves. People believed that deformed children were born because women were watching dogs copulating while pregnant. I mean, this was the kind of belief that they had at the time.

BRIAN: But what was it about the American environment that put Americans at greater risk?

DORON BEN-ATAR: Well, A, because you can actually survive in the American wilderness. It’s a very fertile land. You’re not so dependent on other human beings. And the Indians are available. If you think of Virginia, early Virginia, one of the worst offenses one could do is to run away and leave with the Indians. The punishment for that was the death penalty.

BRIAN: And that is because it was considered that you were leaving civilization and returning to a primitive state.

DORON BEN-ATAR: Correct. And Indians were considered to be these liminal creatures of some sort. There’s this fear of human beings sliding back into animal-like existence.

BRIAN: So the law and the prosecution of those who violate the law is really a way to just shore up that rather porous line between humans and animals.

DORON BEN-ATAR: Exactly.

BRIAN: When did New England society become more relaxed about bestiality? And when did these prosecutions die down?

DORON BEN-ATAR: Well, the last prosecution in the 17th century is that of Benjamin Goad. And I believe that’s in the 1670s. 1674. Sorry. And then for a century, there are a lot of bestiality trials, but they don’t end in executions.

BRIAN: What about the animals? Did the animal still get it?

DORON BEN-ATAR: No. I think Benjamin Goad is the last recorded case that I am aware of in which the animal is buried with the offender. I think that what you get is with the 18th century, with the Age of Reason. It’s also the age of classification.

And the boundaries between species is established. It becomes the great chain of being, and each species occupying a particular place. It created boundaries between species. And those boundaries reduced the threat, the feeling that bestiality could really blur the line between animals and people. And therefore, we are not threatened by the animal world as they were in the 17th century.

BRIAN: So we’re feeling more secure about our distance from animals, so we don’t need the courts to shore that up?

DORON BEN-ATAR: Exactly. Doron Ben-Atar in an historian at Fordham University. He’s the author with Richard Brown of the forthcoming book Taming Lust, Bestiality in 18th Century America.

PETER: And if you still haven’t had your fill of early American bestiality, head on over to our website, backstoryradio.org. There you can hear about a prosecution in which the key piece of evidence was a deformed piglet, allegedly fathered by a local man name Thomas Hogg.

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BRIAN: Well, that does it for us today. But we’ve got all sorts of bonus material on the history of domesticated animals at backstoryradio.org. That material includes all our research for this show, and an extended interview with Sarah Meacham, about the kinds of pets enslaved people kept. She’s the one who told us about pet squirrels earlier in the show.

SARAH HAND MEACHAM: Thank you so much for letting me talk about things besides squirrels. [LAUGHTER] Just that I don’t go down as crazy squirrel lady.

PETER: Again, that’s all at backstoryradio.org. Thanks for listening. And don’t be a stranger.

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PETER: Today’s episode of BackStory was produced by Jess Engebretson, Nina Earnest, Jesse Dukes, Emily Charnock, Mary Caple, Jamal Millner, and Tony Field, and by Eric Mennel, who we say goodbye to this week.

For the last two years, Eric has been a key member of our production team. Not only has he had a strong hand in shaping the sound of the new weekly version of the program, he’s also been responsible for a lot of our best ideas. We wish him the best of luck and officially dedicate today’s show to him and to his good friend, Potus. Remember, Eric, you can take the dog out of Virginia, but you can’t take the history out of the dog.

BRIAN: Major support for BackStory is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the University of Virginia, Weinstein Properties, an anonymous donor, and the History Channel. History, made every day.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Peter Onuf and Brian Balogh are professors in the University of Virginia’s Corcoran Department of History. Ed Ayers is president and professor of history at the University of Richmond. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.