Change Everything No 46: Super-smart dogs, independent-minded sheep and millennia-old human traditions
A beleaguered few are preserving an alternative to the Anthropos monocrops, the 'gold of life' itself
Events
You can listen again to Start the Week, the Radio 4 programme first broadcast this morning, on which I took part in a discussion on all things nuclear. Also going out on Radio 4 again 9pm tonight. The tone is conversational and calm. The rage I felt about some deeply dishonest and ignorant nuclear boosterism will have to be taken out in a gym when I have a chance.
Tonight I’ll be joining Iain Dale on LBC for a semi-regular slot on his 8pm parliamentary panel. And on June 13, I’ll be speaking at the Durham Union, on the proposition that “This House would prioritise the environment over the economy”. Which is pretty simple really, can be won in a few words: “No jobs on a dead planet.”
Disappearing into wild pastoral life
Recess reading included Kapka Kassabova’s Anima: A Wild Pastoral. A bit further into the literary non-fiction format than I usually read, so forgive me if this reflection on it runs more to facts than emotions. But the facts are fascinating, and important. For one surprisingly little reflected aspect of the modern world is how much biological diversity has been lost not just in the “natural” world, but also in the animals and plants created by humans over millennia, carefully bred, managed and husbanded to be resilient in the face of adversity. Many – probably most - have disappeared in the homogenisation of crops and animals, the chase for maximum yield with industrial inputs, the dangerous dominance of wheat, maize and rice, the flooding of the world with Frankenchickens and ludicrously high-yielding dairy cows.
Kassabova embeds herself deep in the pastoral community of the Pirin Mountains in Bulgaria, where after the enormous destruction of communist-era collectivisation, followed by the arrival of the neoliberal bulldozer of globalisation, sees tradition breeds of animal and lifestyles hanging on by a slender thread. And through close – and often hard, dangerous and uncomfortable close contact – she comes to understand not just the people and animals of the area, but also the way they operate as a system that can preserve a whole complex web of living systems.
The best known animal that she engages with – and clearly loves, and who wouldn’t – is the Karakachan dog, a fiercely independent, intelligent and powerful type, which almost died out in the 1990s, yet was rescued by the efforts of a few enthusiasts.
“These dogs were made to be one with the tough mountains of the southern Balkans and their web of large predators, grazing animals and humans. They were adapted for these conditions and could survive, but not thrive, as house pets. Guardian dogs didn’t just protect the flock from large predators. They also protected large predators from being shot by people with livestock…. Mountain dogs, mountain sheep, mountain goats and mountain horse go together, and human livelihoods and psyches have been woven into this web for thousands of years.” (p. 33)
Kassabova shows how the tearing at that fabric by outside forces also caused emormous human suffering, with those who preserved the animals often being at the absolute margins of mainstream society, those who could not, or would not, adapt to new regimes, often those who were already islands of difference in a sea of diversity that had come through centuries of political and cultural change. “Many of them were Pomaks in the Rhodope Mountains – the Bulgarian-speaking Muslims of the southern Balkans…. The state had taken their Arabic-Turkish names and replaced them with state-approved ones in the 1970s.” (p. 34) The economy was built on transhumance, the men and boys taking sheep and goats up into the heights in summer, the milk being carried from subalpine pastures to be turned into cheese. (As many authors have said: What is the difference between “transhumance” and “nomadism”, the first happens in Europe, the second in the colonialised South?)
“It is awesomely wild terrain, unrelentingly upwards… I could not understand how several hundred sheep could pass through these multiple obstacles and come out at the top, intact. But the shepherds of old had done it with thousands of sheep and hundreds of horses… this had been an animal metropolis for several months of the year. The gorges echoed with barking dogs, men shouting over hilltops, boys milking and milk vats loaded onto horse saddles and taken down the bandit path to the dairy.” (p. 42)
The next most prominent animals in this story are sheep.
“They were a mineral black-brown and with their small, dense, woolly bodies, they looked as old as the stones. … Their faces were distinctive, with velvet snouts under their curly hair, and as finely drawn as a pharaoh’s head…. The Karakachans had preserved their animal breeds in a remarkably unadulterated state. This in itself was a sign of a longstanding nomadic existence of these people and animals…their deepest contact had been with the natural environment. That is why their sheep remained semi-wild. In the first half of the twentieth century, there were between half a million and a million of these sheep. In November 1957, army lorries blocked the roads and took the migrating nomads’ animals, leaving three sheep per family. The Karakachans were literally pushed off the road and forced between four walls. This is called sedentarisation, to rhyme with homogenisation. When the flocks were taken, the dogs dispersed and went wild, howling like wolves. But they were in fact following the north-south trails – all the way from here to the Aegean Plains. And then, at the end of the season, they would come back along the trail. Without the flock. Without the humans.”
The ignorance of the state had serious consequences. Kassabova quotes a local source: “The hills above this gorge used to be mixed. Oaks, hornbeam, juniper. No pine. And cultivated fields. Rye, vines, later, tobacco. Fields were mown for hay. It was a biodiverse patchwork and locals grazed their animals throughout the year, moving them around to give the land a rest.” She adds: “The patchwork sustained itself naturally. People pruned the juniper, which grew back, but without invading. Goats and sheep are drawn to varied pasture and they too pruned the juniper… Then the communist state arrived to rearrange the mountain, felled the mixed forest, erected barbed-wire fences to keep out people and animals, and planted pine not suited to this lower climate belt. … the long-term result was monoculture. It changed the soil and the microclimate, caused erosion and stripped bare the weave in which grazing animals were a key thread.” (pp. 64-5) That was mirroring of course what was happening in the West at the same time – the God of Progress carrying out his destructive work. It was a system perfected over millennia, almost destroyed in the blink of an eye.
“I notice cup-marks in the giant boulders, just like the druidic ones in Scotland. They were left behind by the early hill dwellers here, the Thracians… the sheep are the same. The dogs are the same... The woman with the spindle and horse halter in hand continued to walk this land without interruption until 1957, spinning the world’s oldest wool like an oracle… the Medi, a Thracian tribe who lived in this mountain until the Romans arrived and who probably left those cup-marks. They were semi-nomadic shepherds and in one such community, in one of the hills we walk now, Spartacus was born… As a child he walked these hill with sheep and wolf-dogs just like these before her was taken by the system and became a Roman mercenary…. Here… the ruins of the Roman project lie under the ruins of the Ottoman project and on top of those sit the ruins of the communist project, overseen by the empty hills that signified the current absence of any project whatsoever”. (pp. 114-116)
These are systems with logic, and durability. “’Not of my rug’. One of the many expressions that come from people of the rug, the chergari. Everybody knew that you should marry someone of your own rug (social standing), that you should live according to your rug (cut your coat according to your cloth) and that you shouldn’t pull the rug your way unduly (take more than your due).” (p. 126) Although it is clear that there was a great deal of mixing and movement. I thought of James C Scott’s work on Southeast Asia, and applying his thought to how people chose lowland or highland lives here.
The horse of these parts too has a long, and separate, history. “The Karakachan horse is an old mountain breed from the Balkans, one of the few indigenous types that have not disappeared, although it’s gravely endangered. It is descended from a wild mountain horse that travelled from Asia to south-east Europe at some unknown point in time....It was normal for Karakachan horses to travel great distances. They liked it best living separately from other animals. The pastoral nomads used their horses during migration from winter to summer pasture and once they arrived at the summer pastures, the horses were taken to remote peaks for the season. Donkeys, not horses were used during the summer to take food to those shepherds who were far from the base camp and these donkeys grazed with the sheep all summer… the horsemen were single men who didn’t mind living in primitive conditions without the comforts of a hut and seeing nobody but horses for months. The horses were not hand-fed and relied on pasture only, with the odd treat of salt mixed with cornmeal. The horsemen’s diet and everyday life was even more monotonous. By the end of the summer months of free grazing, usually from May to November, the horses would go wild again”. (pp. 133-4)
This was a society that had capacity to cope with diversity of human types, diversity of human ways of living, something we cannot say of our own.
“A hundred years ago, some Roma were settled craftsmen in the towns, but most Strymonian Romani were wanderers with horse katunas (travellers’ camps). … For centuries, the katun camp settlement had a major role in the social, cultural, political, economical and ecological landscape of the Balkans, as it did in Central Asia and the Caucasus or anywhere where pastoral nomads were major players… Industrialisation and urbanisation under the communists stripped Roma of their traditional trades and pushed the men into slave-like labour units deployed on large building projects … The country’s infrastructure was built by anonymous Roma men, whose life expectancy remains the lowest in Europe. The professions the Gypsies lost were horse grooming and trading, blacksmithing, copper smithing, ironmongery, small-scale trade, wood carving, musical instrument making and many other small crafts, like wooden-combmakers called grebenari, spindlemakers called vreterani and of course bell-makers for animals.” (p. 138-139)
This produced quality objects that lasted. And the food system produced nutritious, richly tasty food very different to that of the industrial pap of today.
“No native breed is naturally ‘productive’ in any industrial sense. It is too close to the wild. Sheep that are a mixture of sex breeds have been created expressly to give 2 litres of milk, instead of the more modest yield of the mountain sheep, 300 millilitres per milking. Horses that are bigger and more spectacular, so that you can show them off at a rally. But these bigger, cosmetically enhanced animals with large udders are not adapted to survive longterm… they have no kinship with place and no resistance to endemic disease like the autochthonous breeds do. They are used as food machines, trophies and toys that feed the industrial model of growth and profit… all of which is collapsing: genetically, ecologically, economically and ethically.” (p. 143) They have vitality, are able to cope with what natural systems throw at them. They are, she reflects, “A bank vault with the gold of life itself.” (p268)
But it is not that this system was not at its height productive even in our terms.
“A single family had anywhere between four and 70 horses. In the late Ottoman era, when Vlachs, Yuruks and other transhumanants were at their strongest and kept the Ottoman army supplied with cheese and wool, it could be up to 200 horses per family. You could see a caravan of 8,000 horses carrying the luggage belonging to a single company of 1,000 people. The sheep went with their drover-shepherds and milkers, off-road through the forests, often moving at night to avoid clashing with other flocks, run-ins with hostile villages or being seen trampling the fields. Everything was dicctated by the animals’ needs and the nature of the terrain, which changed dramatically day by day.” (p. 161) “Their work was essential to running the empire. They kep the population and the Ottoman army in meat and milk products and in wool and felt, horses and dogs. And when the empire was hone, they remained essential to running the economy of the newly independent nation states.” (p. 182)
And it is so important to talk about the possibility of diversity, the capacity of humans to live in many different ways, in partnership with the more than human world.
“Transhumance has UNESCO status as intangible cultural heritage of humanity. Yet, most of humanity has forgotten about it. We have forgotten that this too is something we can do, if we fancy it: walk with animals, live with animals, care for animals and be cared for by them. Even made a living from it. Today, it is just as difficult to make a living from pastoral farming as it is from making non-commercial art, music or literatire.” (p. 163)
This is not sentimentality. These were not systems prone to such:
“When Stamen’s grandmother agreed to get hitched to his grandfather, already a widower, she did it with typical peasant pragmatism: because his house was ‘top of the brook’. You didn’t want to be at the bottom of the brook after everyone else had used it.” (P. 149)
In some ways they were very hard on women. But they also produced strong women with a clear place and role, and a lot of independence.
“When a woman got married, her father-in-law gave her a small cohort of animals, perhaps a horse and a few sheep. They would remain her personal property for the rest of her life. She could lose her husband in an avalanche or her children to sickness, but she would have her animals.” (p. 161)
“Yuruk women in particular were adept at using guns. They often passed through tough mountain terrain without their men and elected one among them as a chieftain: and she never missed the bull’s eye because they knew that the line between outlaw and gamekeeper was blurred. It still is. The likes of Stamen’s mother always carried a knife with her and still had scissors in her mobile knitting kit attached to a string that hung from her heavy black headdress along with the beads and the coins… There were plenty of hidden folds in her layered dress for a discreet gun.” (p. 182)
And the respect for nature and life went deep.
“Surprisingly, the Karakachans were not hunters or even fishers, despite living in places rich with game and despite their monotonous diet. They only began hunting when they became settled later in the 20th century. Hunting just wasn’t their thing. They preferred to buy cured meat from settled peasants and seemed content with cheese and legumes... The same went for agriculture: they were forced into it by sedentarisation. They joked that no nomad can make a good ploughman. It was a painful joke, for one of their points of pride was that while the shepherd walks upright, the peasant is bent over the land. To swap the shepherd’s staff for the hoe of the peasant was never a choice.” (p. 207)
This is a book deeply embedded in the place and moment, but at times the author looks bigger and more systemically, as when she reflects on returning to the town below:
“It’s been a week in the fully human world where there is no place for animals. It has shown me something: we are a monoculture. Like those fields of single crops that go on for miles. The single crop is the Anthropos. We hhave built a flat, boring world for ourselves on top of the original one in which we were just one component of a web that constantly moves, like plasma. This is what the shepherding life has shown me… variety nourishes you, it makes you alive.” (p. 232)
And that is the case with traditional systems, which worked with all forms of nature. cheesemaker: “She puts live liquid rennet in a bit of water. It has to be one part to 55,000. It can’t survive outside the fridge for more than 20 minutes”. What about before refigeration, Kassabova asks? “They took a yeasty curdlike substances from the stomach of a slaughtered lamb or goat kid. But it had to be a suckling.” Or raided an ant heap for ant’s acid. And if you lived near figs the milk from the leaves and stalks of fig trees.” (p. 315)
Picks of the week
Reading
A useful reflection from Chatham House on the relationship between India and China, clearly of key importance in this multipolar century, with the two together accounting for almost 40 per cent of the global population. China is the world’s second largest economy, with India currently the fifth largest – and soon to be the third largest.” (Which is of course only restoring the status quo briefly (?) overturned by European military adventurism over a couple of centuries.)
India seeks to leverage its democratic credentials and offer a more benign, non-western (not an anti-Western) worldview. This contrasts with China, which seeks to utilize its enormous financial resources to shape the existing global governance system according to its own preferences.
Listening
Recess week has meant listening to a lot of podcasts, so how to choose? Well today something rather off the beaten track - on the New Books Network Ancient History podcast, although rather stretching that definition. Andrew Griebeler, author of Botanical Icons: Critical Practices of Illustration in the Premodern Mediterranean, talks about his comprehensive unpicking of the moderns’ credulous swallowing of Renaissance/Enlightenment propaganda, that the scholars and thinkers, all of the people who came before, were ignorant, dim sheep, who swallowed what the Ancients and the Church told them while gradually degrading it, rather than critically engaging with it.
Griebeler does start really ancient, with written records from Mesopotamia in the 9th century BCE recording the systematic study of the huge diverse plants of the Mediterarannean basin, which spread east very early through trade. But his focus is mainly on the illustrated herbals that start what he identifies as Eurasia’s longest continual tradition of secular and scientific imagemaking. He writes: “I address here evidence for critical practices, namely, exercises of reasoned or informed judgment in the visualization and transmission of botanical illutrations,” that “counter prevailing views of premodern botanical art and science as stagnant traditions based on the uncritical copying of earlier manuscripts”. (That has in some respects been drawn from a focus on Latin texts; add in Greek and Arabic and the picture becomes, literally, far more complicated.
An Arabic translation of De Materia Medica (Source)
A lot of his focus is the De Materia Medica of Pedanius Dioscorides, a pharmacologist and physician from Anazarbus in Roman Cilicia who wrote in the 2nd century CE. It was not originally illustrated, but acquired them over the centuries, the oldest extant such version being a 6th-century text from Constantinople now in the Austrian National Library. Over the centuries the arrangement fundamentally changed, from an original focus on plants’ effects to alphabetical, and illustrations appeared, disappeared, and were adapted and rearranged. It was a reproduction that was continually changing, not through error or laziness, but reshaping according to the needs, understandings and new knowledge of the moment. Yes, people of the past were just as innovative, curious and intelligent as we are today.
Thinking
Talk about negative health impacts for households from cooking, and most people will be thinking of Global South setting burning charcoal or, even worse, plastics. But in recent years understanding of the dangers of gas cooking have become clearer. Basically, and rather obviously, burning things inside is a really bad idea. Generally, burning things in general is a bad idea for public and environmental health. So I was astonished recently to learn that 30 per cent of the hobs sold in the UK are still gas burners. Okay, if your old one has just died, and you don’t have the time or money necessary to reshape energy provision to electric, I can understand why you might still buy one, but the idea that new homes are still having them installed is nonsensical and dangerous. Indeed, why are we installing gas in new homes at all, when some European cities are ripping out their whole networks?
Just no! Photo by KWON JUNHO on Unsplash
Researching
Antimicrobial resistance, eeeeks – Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a bacteria associated with well over half a million deaths globally each year, many from hospital-acquired infections in surgery and burn patients or those with catheters. It can be particularly hard to treat because it forms biofilms, resistance to immune system action and antibiotics. Researchers studying one particular strain found that not only could it break down plastic, it could use the plastic as food to grow. And MORE, it “was producing bigger biofilms by including the degraded plastic in this slimy shield – or “matrix… using the plastic as cement to build a stronger bacterial community”. The piece to which I’ve linked here aims for reassurance at the end, suggesting, don’t worry, scientists are working to build antibiotics into plastics. To which there is only one word in response, RESISTANCE! Microbes have been around for about four billion years. We really can’t assume that we have technological answers to their powers.
Almost the end
A friend concerned about neonatal health asks me to highlight the benefits of delayed cord clamping, particularly for very premature babies, well established for over a decade, but still, I gather, often not practiced. Worth sharing with anyone who might be affected and want to ask their medical practitioner.
What did you think?
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Fascinating stuff, I'll look out for the Anima book. I did listen to Start The Week and was not impressed with how much air time was given to those in favour of nuclear power. Absolutely no bias there huh?