Animal husbandry

• 1. Introduction

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  Animal husbandry began around 13,000 BC, during the Neolithic Revolution, when humans first domesticated animals before they had cultivated a single crop. The first creature brought into the human fold was not a source of meat or milk at all. It was the dog, a half-wild scavenger and killer of vermin that, as a natural pack hunter, was already predisposed to join the human pack and the hunt. From those early bargains grew a branch of agriculture that now occupies roughly a third of the Earth's ice-free land. How did a search for food on hand when hunting failed turn into broiler houses holding thousands of chickens? Why does a practice this old now stand accused of driving climate change, ocean acidification, and biodiversity loss? And what does it mean that a single word, husband, once meant simply to manage a household carefully?

• 2. The Long Domestication

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  Pigs were domesticated in the Near East between 8,500 and 8000 BC, and sheep and goats in or near the Fertile Crescent about 8,500 BC. Cattle came from wild aurochs around the same time, in the areas of modern Turkey and Pakistan. Sheep and goats traveled with the nomads of the Middle East, while cattle and pigs settled in with more rooted communities. A cow gave a villager more milk than her calf needed. Her strength could pull a plough, drag a sledge, and later draw a cart of produce home from the field.

  Draught animals were first put to work around 4,000 BC in the Middle East, lifting agricultural production immeasurably. In southern Asia, the elephant was domesticated by 6,000 BC. Fossilised chicken bones dated to 5040 BC turned up in northeastern China, far from the tropical Asian jungles where their wild ancestors lived. Archaeologists believe the birds were first tamed not for food but for the sport of cockfighting.

  In South America, the llama and the alpaca were domesticated probably before 3,000 BC, kept as beasts of burden and for their wool. Neither was strong enough to pull a plough, a limit that held back farming in the New World. Horses, native to the steppes of Central Asia, were first tamed around 3,000 BC near the Black Sea and Caspian Sea, valued at first for their meat before riding and packing followed. By 1000 BC, caravans of Arabian camels linked India with Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean.

• 3. Old Worlds And New

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  In ancient Egypt, cattle were the most important livestock, with sheep, goats, and pigs kept alongside them. Ducks, geese, and pigeons were captured in nets, bred on farms, and force-fed with dough to fatten them, while the Nile supplied plentiful fish. Honey bees were domesticated from at least the Old Kingdom, yielding both honey and wax. In ancient Rome, every animal known to Egypt was available, and rabbits were domesticated for food by the first century BC. To flush rabbits from their burrows, Romans tamed the polecat as the ferret, a use described by Pliny the Elder.

  The Domesday Book recorded every parcel of land and every animal in England, leaving, as the record boasts, not one ox, cow, or swine unset in the king's writ. The royal manor of Earley in Berkshire held in 1086 two fisheries and twenty acres of meadow, with woodland enough to feed seventy pigs. Around this era horses took over from oxen as the main providers of traction, and peas, beans, and vetches spread, enriching the soil through nitrogen fixation so that more livestock could be kept.

  The colonisation of the Americas carried maize, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and manioc into Europe. Flowing the other way, the principal Old World livestock, cattle, horses, sheep, and goats, reached the New World for the first time, alongside wheat, barley, rice, and turnips.

• 4. Breeding For Profit

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  Robert Bakewell established selective breeding as a scientific practice during the British Agricultural Revolution in the 18th century. Working with native sheep stock, he quickly selected for large, fine-boned animals with long, lustrous wool. He improved the Lincoln Longwool, which in turn produced the hornless New, or Dishley, Leicester, with its square, meaty body and straight top lines. These sheep were exported widely and feed into numerous modern breeds. Under Bakewell's influence English farmers began breeding cattle chiefly for beef, crossing long-horned heifers with the Westmoreland bull to create the Dishley Longhorn.

  Selective breeding has driven striking gains in productivity. In 2007, a typical broiler chicken at eight weeks old was 4.8 times as heavy as a bird of similar age in 1957. Over the thirty years to 2007, the average milk yield of a dairy cow in the United States nearly doubled. Modern dairy breeding has produced specialised Holstein Friesian-type animals that yield large quantities of milk economically, helped by widely available artificial insemination.

  Farmers select for hardiness, fertility, docility, mothering ability, fast growth, and better fibre, while breeding against health defects and aggressiveness. The reproductive arithmetic shapes the meat trade too. Cattle generally produce a single calf a year that takes more than a year to mature, sheep and goats often bear twins ready in under a year, and pigs can produce more than one litter of up to about eleven piglets annually.

• 5. Extensive And Intensive

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  Ranching in the Western United States turns large herds of cattle loose to graze across public and private lands, a pattern echoed by cattle stations in South America and Australia where land is wide and rainfall low. In the uplands of the United Kingdom, sheep are sent onto the fells in spring to graze mountain grasses untended, then brought down late in the year with extra feed in winter. In some African communities, hens may live for months without being fed and still lay one or two eggs a week.

  At the other extreme sit the intensive systems of the developed world. Dairy cows may be kept in zero-grazing conditions with all their forage carried to them. Beef cattle may stand in high-density feedlots, pigs may live in climate-controlled buildings and never go outdoors, and laying hens may be caged under controlled lighting. Battery cages run in long rows across multiple tiers, with external feeders, drinkers, and egg collection, the most labour-saving method of egg production. It has drawn criticism on welfare grounds because the birds cannot perform their normal behaviours.

  Between the extremes lie semi-intensive, often family-run farms. Livestock graze outdoors for much of the year, silage or hay covers the months when grass stops growing, and feed and fertiliser are brought in from outside. An older rhythm survives in transhumance, where people and livestock move seasonally between fixed summer and winter pastures, the summer grazing up in the mountains and the winter grazing in the valleys.

• 6. What Livestock Eat

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  Ruminants like cattle, sheep, goats, deer, and antelopes digest food in two steps, chewing and swallowing, then regurgitating the semidigested cud to chew again and squeeze out the maximum food value. Grasses suit them well because the blade grows from its base, letting it thrive even when heavily grazed or cut. Herbivores split into concentrate selectors that pick seeds, fruits, and young foliage, grazers that mainly eat grass, and intermediate feeders that take the full range of plant material.

  In many climates grass grows only seasonally, so some of the crop is cut and preserved as hay or fermented into silage to fill the lean season. Extensively reared animals may live entirely on forage, but intensively kept livestock also need energy and protein-rich foods. Energy comes from cereals, fats, oils, and sugar-rich foods, while protein may come from fish or meat meal, milk products, and legumes, often the by-products of vegetable oil extraction.

  Pigs and poultry are non-ruminants that cannot digest the cellulose in grass and forage, so they are fed entirely on cereals and other high-energy foodstuffs. Rations may be grown on the farm or bought as pelleted or cubed compound feed, formulated for different classes of livestock and balanced with added vitamins and minerals. Farmed fish are usually fed pelleted food.

• 7. Sickness And The Herd

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  Classical swine fever and scrapie strike only one type of stock, while foot-and-mouth disease affects all cloven-hoofed animals. Crowded conditions invite internal and external parasites, and rising numbers of sea lice now trouble farmed salmon in Scotland. When good husbandry fails to keep animals well, farmers and veterinarians turn to medicines, and in the European Union farmers treating their own animals must follow treatment guidelines and record what they give. Antibiotics were once routinely added to compound feed to promote growth, a practice now discouraged in many countries over the risk of antimicrobial resistance.

  Governments worry about zoonoses, diseases humans may catch from animals. An outbreak of Nipah virus in Malaysia in 1999 was traced to pigs that fell ill after contact with fruit-eating flying foxes, their faeces and urine, before passing the infection to people. Avian flu H5N1 lives in wild bird populations and can be carried far by migrating birds, spreading easily to domestic poultry and to humans living near them.

  The risk reaches even the gentlest corners of farming. A strain of E. coli infected 93 people who had visited a British interactive farm in an outbreak in 2009, a hazard sharpened when children handle animals and then fail to wash their hands.

• 8. The Cost To The Planet

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  Since 1950, meat production has tripled, dairy production has doubled, and egg production has risen almost fourfold, while meat consumption worldwide has nearly doubled. Animal husbandry now kills 60 billion animals a year and uses between 20 and 33 percent of the world's fresh water. Livestock and the feed grown for them occupy about a third of the Earth's ice-free land, and some 70 percent of agricultural land and 30 percent of Earth's land surface is involved in animal husbandry directly or indirectly.

  Clearing forests to grow feed and graze stock destroys habitat, and animal husbandry causes up to 91 percent of the deforestation in the Amazon region. Cows produce some 570 million cubic metres of methane per day, which accounts for 35 to 40 percent of the planet's overall methane emissions. Livestock production is responsible for 65 percent of all human-related nitrous oxide emissions, and stands as the primary driver of the Holocene extinction.

  The practice carries a softer cultural shadow too. Children meet farm life through Piglet in A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh, Babe in Dick King-Smith's The Sheep-Pig, and Wilbur in E. B. White's Charlotte's Web, where pigs become bearers of cheerfulness and innocence. In Britain some five million people a year visit a farm of some kind, where historic farmstays sell a carefully curated, romanticised image of a pastoral idyll from an unspecified pre-industrial past.