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"Animals"
"Animals"
from Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe
from Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe
By. Alfred W. Crosby
The chapter entitled "Animals" from the late Dr. Alfred Crosby's book Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe is an in depth discussion of the rapid spread of old world domesticated animals through out Australasia and the Americas. According to Crosby, the Europeans access to Old World animals gave them a massive advantage over indigenous peoples. Supposedly, Old World livestock's incredibly high ability to adapt and reproduce allowed them to quickly change their new environments to ones more similar to Europe, making it easier for Europeans to create successful settlements. He asserts that "for almost every purpose" both American and Australasian domesticated animals were inferior to those from the Eurasian continent.
In my reading of the chapter, I found that Crosby failed to adequately support the claim that Old World animals' ability to alter the environment put Europeans at an advantage over indigenous people. Within the work, I even found it difficult to find much evidence that corroborated the idea that their animals did much in terms of helping the New World landscape "[become] a good deal more like Europe" as he claimed. In the few instances where Crosby did mention the effect that European animals had on the New World environment, I was left wondering why and/or how these effects helped the new European settlers gain any sort of advantage over indigenous people. This lack of explanation caused the claim to feel incredibly weak and irrelevant.
Although I did feel that the main point of his thesis was poorly supported, Crosby did a good job of explaining other aspects of his claim. Instead of elaborating on how the changes induced by European livestock were advantageous to settlers, Crosby spends the majority of the chapter proving the superior fitness and adaptability of Old World animals. A few different animals are individually examined, with Crosby providing evidence about how they managed to survive and even thrive in new unfamiliar environments without human assistance—and often times with human hostility instead.
One key point that is made for every one of the animals examined by Dr. Crosby is the overwhelming population growth experienced by their feral populations. Be it pigs, cows, horses, or even honeybees, once these domesticated animals were left to their own devices they thrived. We are provided with multiple reliable eyewitness accounts and records of the overwhelming numbers of these animals that roamed free in both the Americas and Australasia. If evolutionary fitness is all about the ability to survive and reproduce, the sheer numbers of wild pigs, cattle, etc. reported by Crosby from the first hand accounts are enough to prove them evolutionary fit. The account of one source, Felix de Azara, is particularly compelling as he estimated having seen about 48 million feral cattle in the Buenos Aires, a number that is apparently "comparable to those of buffalo on the Great Plains in their heyday." In only about 62 years the cattle population of Buenos Aires manged to explode from 5,000 to 48 million.
What is even more convincing is that the primary sources all seem to be in agreement with each other about the sheer numbers of livestock that existed wildly and thus are compelling to believe. It would be difficult to believe that that many first hand accounts would lie or purposefully hyper inflate their reported populations of feral livestock, especially because it seems as though they would have nothing to gain.
Another way Crosby proves the Old World species' superior ability to survive and thus reproduce (a.k.a. evolutionary fitness) is through settlers' inability to get rid of them once they had been introduced. After a while the enormous feral hog, cattle, etc. populations reached the point where they became nuisances to the settlers living near them. These settlers would then try to exterminate these animals. Despite the best efforts of humans to exterminate them, many of these animals persisted. To really drive the point home, Crosby effectively uses evidence that we have seen in our own lives and that we know to be true, reminding us of pests like rats which were accidentally introduced by Europeans in colonial times and still exist as pests now in spite of the "millions and millions of pounds, dollars, pesos, and other currencies [spent] to halt their spread."
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