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The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492
A dramatic new interpretation of the encounter between Europe and the Americas that reveals the crucial role of animals in the shaping of the modern world.
When the men and women of the island of Guanahani first made contact with Christopher Columbus and his crew on October 12, 1492, the cultural differences between the two groups were vaster than the oceans that had separated them. There is perhaps no better demonstration than the divide in their respective ways of relating to animals. In The Tame and the Wild , Marcy Norton tells a new history of the colonization of the Americas, one that places wildlife and livestock at the center of the story. She reveals that the encounters between European and Native American beliefs about animal life transformed societies on both sides of the Atlantic.
Europeans’ strategies and motives for conquest were inseparable from the horses that carried them in military campaigns and the dogs they deployed to terrorize Native peoples. Even more crucial were the sheep, cattle, pigs, and chickens whose flesh became food and whose skins became valuable commodities. Yet as central as the domestication of animals was to European plans in the Americas, Native peoples’ own practices around animals proved just as crucial in shaping the world after 1492. Cultures throughout the Caribbean, Amazonia, and Mexico were deeply invested in the practice of capturing wild animals―not only parrots and monkeys but even tapir, deer, and manatee―and turning some of them into “companion species.” These taming practices not only influenced the way Indigenous people responded to human and nonhuman intruders but also transformed European culture itself, paving the way for both zoological science and the modern pet.
When the men and women of the island of Guanahani first made contact with Christopher Columbus and his crew on October 12, 1492, the cultural differences between the two groups were vaster than the oceans that had separated them. There is perhaps no better demonstration than the divide in their respective ways of relating to animals. In The Tame and the Wild , Marcy Norton tells a new history of the colonization of the Americas, one that places wildlife and livestock at the center of the story. She reveals that the encounters between European and Native American beliefs about animal life transformed societies on both sides of the Atlantic.
Europeans’ strategies and motives for conquest were inseparable from the horses that carried them in military campaigns and the dogs they deployed to terrorize Native peoples. Even more crucial were the sheep, cattle, pigs, and chickens whose flesh became food and whose skins became valuable commodities. Yet as central as the domestication of animals was to European plans in the Americas, Native peoples’ own practices around animals proved just as crucial in shaping the world after 1492. Cultures throughout the Caribbean, Amazonia, and Mexico were deeply invested in the practice of capturing wild animals―not only parrots and monkeys but even tapir, deer, and manatee―and turning some of them into “companion species.” These taming practices not only influenced the way Indigenous people responded to human and nonhuman intruders but also transformed European culture itself, paving the way for both zoological science and the modern pet.
448 pages, Hardcover
Published January 9, 2024
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August 20, 2024Sometime in 1543 on the island of Hispaniola, a group of Spanish soldiers searching for runaway slaves came across three seemingly feral pigs in the wilderness. The Spanish slaughtered them without a thought. But then they met an Indigenous man. He was distraught. He had been living in the wild for 12 years, and had trained the pigs to hunt with him: together they used to track down other wild pigs, which the man killed with a spear. He fed the innards of the kill to his pigs, and kept the rest for himself. ‘These pigs have given me life and have maintained me as I maintained them’, he told the soldiers. ‘They were my friends and good company.’
The soldiers later told their story to the conquistador Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, author of Historia general y natural de las Indias. It puzzled and fascinated him. Oviedo admired the man’s resourcefulness and skill in taking a hunted animal and turning it into a hunter: his ability as a trainer, ‘teaching [the pigs] in hunting, bringing a trainable relationship to that occupation’, was a mark of his higher human intelligence, Oviedo thought. But he didn’t understand why the man was ‘content living with beasts and being bestial’ – that is, on a kind of parity with the animals. Was the man superior to them, or not?
That clash of ideas is at the heart of The Tame and the Wild, Marcy Norton’s ambitious and absorbing exploration of Indigenous American beliefs and practices with regard to animal life before European – here exclusively Spanish – colonisation. (Norton confines her discussion to the peoples of Greater Amazonia and Mesoamerica.) In Europe, she argues, human relationships with animals were governed by the scriptural authority for human dominion over the natural world. There were ‘vassal animals’ – dogs, horses and so on – who undertook labour and who were often individuated, and ‘livestock animals’, who were viewed to a greater or lesser degree as objects. The latter were eaten; the former were not.
Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
Mathew Lyons writes the ‘Months Past’ column for History Today.
The soldiers later told their story to the conquistador Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, author of Historia general y natural de las Indias. It puzzled and fascinated him. Oviedo admired the man’s resourcefulness and skill in taking a hunted animal and turning it into a hunter: his ability as a trainer, ‘teaching [the pigs] in hunting, bringing a trainable relationship to that occupation’, was a mark of his higher human intelligence, Oviedo thought. But he didn’t understand why the man was ‘content living with beasts and being bestial’ – that is, on a kind of parity with the animals. Was the man superior to them, or not?
That clash of ideas is at the heart of The Tame and the Wild, Marcy Norton’s ambitious and absorbing exploration of Indigenous American beliefs and practices with regard to animal life before European – here exclusively Spanish – colonisation. (Norton confines her discussion to the peoples of Greater Amazonia and Mesoamerica.) In Europe, she argues, human relationships with animals were governed by the scriptural authority for human dominion over the natural world. There were ‘vassal animals’ – dogs, horses and so on – who undertook labour and who were often individuated, and ‘livestock animals’, who were viewed to a greater or lesser degree as objects. The latter were eaten; the former were not.
Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
Mathew Lyons writes the ‘Months Past’ column for History Today.
April 17, 2024
I thoroughly enjoyed the discussion in this book on how animals were treated and seen in the America’s and Europe in a pre and post contact world. It was interesting how she discussed the roles of “vassals” and “livestock” for Europe were in the Americas it was “if you feed them, you don’t eat them”. It was also interesting on how Europeans try to order and specify creatures while Indegenous Americans focused more on relationships between creatures, almost like a proto-ecological understanding, and maybe it is no wonder Von Humboldt thought of the interconnected world while in South America.
The stories of smoking monkeys to capture them, using remora fish to hunt other fish, using pelts as a conduit of animals power, Cattle geographical laws in Spain lending to cleaner cities and the start of bullfighting, discussion of shepherds role with prized sheep, and the story of the boar hunt, and the creation of the European pets were personal favorites .
It was nice to have a more detailed history book, that focused more on research rather than trying to be popular. I do think Dr. Norton lingers too long on some subjects, as she will get very into the weeds.
The stories of smoking monkeys to capture them, using remora fish to hunt other fish, using pelts as a conduit of animals power, Cattle geographical laws in Spain lending to cleaner cities and the start of bullfighting, discussion of shepherds role with prized sheep, and the story of the boar hunt, and the creation of the European pets were personal favorites .
It was nice to have a more detailed history book, that focused more on research rather than trying to be popular. I do think Dr. Norton lingers too long on some subjects, as she will get very into the weeds.
December 18, 2024
4.5 stars bumped up to 5. I’m voraciously making my way through the last of these 2024 releases and I was so glad to have read The Tame and the Wild so expeditiously. This is thanks in no small part to the incredible detail and breadths of research done by Marcy Norton, who covers seemingly every possible area of hunting, domestication, husbandry, and more as it relates to animals, wildlife, and our human interactions with such across Europe and the Americas following that fateful day in 1492. This is a the relationships painted between humans and their animal counterparts, and how different they may be from a subjective and objective perspective, is fascinating to think and learn more about (I having been fairly unfamiliar with this particular area). Norton does an exemplary job making this subject accessible and engaging, likely reconfirming entirely our long held beliefs of civilization and interspecies dynamics. It’s a rare book where I would have loved for this to be longer and offer a clearer bridge from the past to the modern day, even just an additional chapter, showing the drastic changes which occurred both in Europe and the Americas, particularly after the Revolutionary War and especially into the slaughter of the American bison (which I think could have been an additionally unique exploration though may also have made the book prolonged for some). The Tame and the Wild is a must read for anyone interested in learning more about the history, biodiversity, and relationship between us and our pets, food, garments, and fellow companions on this planet.
November 14, 2024
“One of the most powerful potentialities of knowing history is its capacity to liberate our imaginations from the false idea that what we are used to is what is natural.”
Genuinely one of the most fascinating books I’ve ever read concerning the early Atlantic world and the nature of cultural assimilation and, more precisely, recombination in the Americas. You can take or leave (mostly leave, really) the full ideological implications of Norton’s history that she mostly saves for her conclusion and still benefit from the objective richness of her inquiry.
Genuinely one of the most fascinating books I’ve ever read concerning the early Atlantic world and the nature of cultural assimilation and, more precisely, recombination in the Americas. You can take or leave (mostly leave, really) the full ideological implications of Norton’s history that she mostly saves for her conclusion and still benefit from the objective richness of her inquiry.
December 11, 2025
Interesantísimo. No estoy segura de que la premisa se sostenga, me parece que a veces puede ser generalizadora (romántica, incluso), pero de que es interesante, lo es, muchísimo. Que se retuerza un poquito Gordon Childe, que se retuerzan todos los canónicos.
Lo de no comerse a los que alimentamos, uf. Y, bueno, las fuentes, obsesiva detecta obsesiva cuando la ve (y lo agradece).
Lo de no comerse a los que alimentamos, uf. Y, bueno, las fuentes, obsesiva detecta obsesiva cuando la ve (y lo agradece).
January 12, 2026
Fascinating, comprehensive, ambitious, and extremely thorough history of animals in colonial Latin America. Some blind spots, such as Norton's biblical interpretations, create a certain bias. Also, she only covers Amazonia, Mesoamerica, and the Caribbean. A focus on the Andean relationship to animals could have made this even more complete.
August 24, 2024
I don't know if this book is good or not, I wanted to find out, but the $30 bill for the book was too high for me to take a chance on the author. Pity, it seemed like an interesting idea, wish they would have priced it such that I could find out for sure.
August 2, 2025
Outside of my temporal specialty as a scholar but within my field of interest in animal studies, The Tame and the Wild was both deeply informative and engagingly written. Anyone interested in reading about the history of animals should consider this book.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews