American Environmental History. Группа авторов

American Environmental History - Группа авторов


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that “it shalbe lawfull for any man to kill any swine that comes into his corne”; the dead animal was to be returned to its owner only after payment had been made for damages to crops. The inadequacy of this solution is suggested by the proliferation of swine laws in the ensuing years. Colonists were glad to have swine reproducing and fattening themselves in forested areas distant from English settlements – where only Indians would have to deal with their depredations – but towns tried to restrain the animals whenever they wandered too near English fields. By 1635, Massachusetts had ordered towns to construct animal pounds to which untended swine could be taken whenever they were found within one mile of an English farm. A year later, the Court went so far as to declare an open season on any stray swine: unless pigs were restrained by fence, line, or pigkeeper, it was lawful “for any man to take them, either alive or dead, as hee may.” Anyone so doing got one half the value of the captured animal, while the Commonwealth of Massachusetts claimed the other; the owner got nothing. Ownership rights to swine were thus much more circumscribed than similar rights to cattle. The law produced so much protest from pig-keeping colonists that it was repealed two years later, but the battle of the swine nevertheless continued for many years. Complaints against pigs were a near constant feature of colony and town court proceedings, where the animals were sometimes portrayed almost as a malevolent force laying siege to defenseless settlements. The Massachusetts Court in 1658, for instance, reported that “many children are exposed to great daingers of losse of life or limbe through the ravenousnese of swyne, and elder persons to no smale inconveniencies.” To modern ears, such statements perhaps seem a little comic, but that reaction is surely one of ignorance: swine could indeed be vicious creatures, and no animal caused more annoyances or disputes among colonists.14

      In the vicinity of English settlements, regulations were eventually passed requiring that hogs be yoked so that they would be unable to squeeze through fences, and ringed through the nose so that they would be prevented from rooting out growing plants. But the chief goal of swine regulations was to keep uncontrolled pigs away from settlements. At a heated New Haven town meeting in 1650, farmers declared that, if swine were allowed to forage freely, “they would plant no corne, for it would be eaten up.” The compromise solution was an order that no pigs should run loose unless driven at least eight miles from town center. Other communities passed similar regulations. And yet driving swine to the edges of town was obviously a temporary solution that lasted only so long as a town had edges beyond which were unenclosed common lands where pigs could run. Moreover, this “solution” tended to provoke conflict between towns when swine crossed town boundaries to descend on other settlements. Massachusetts Bay in 1637 pointed to the long-term solution of this problem by disclaiming any direct responsibility for the regulation of swine and delegating that burden to individual towns. “If any damage bee done by any swine,” it said, “the whole towne shalbee lyable to the parties action to make full satisfaction.” By making the control of swine a community responsibility, the Court redefined the property boundaries that applied to this particular animal so as to ensure its proper regulation. As the landscape gradually became peopled with settlements, the effect of legal liabilities was increasingly to restrain the movements of wandering hogs, until finally the beasts were more or less entirely confined to fenced farmyards.16

      English colonists reproduced these broad categories of land use wherever and however they established farms. Early land divisions had been done communally, each town deciding what agricultural activity would take place in different parts of its territory. Later divisions were generally made through the abstract mechanism of land speculation and tended to ignore both the ecological characteristics of a given tract of land and its intended agricultural use in order to facilitate the buying and selling that brought profits to speculators. This marked an important new way of perceiving the New England landscape, one that turned land itself into a commodity, but from the point of view of ecological practices, it merely transferred land-use decisions from the town to the individual land-owner. Every farm family had to have its garden, its cornfields, its meadows, and its pastures, no matter who decided where they would be located and how they would be regulated. In so dividing their lands, colonists began to create the new ecological mosaic that would gradually transform New England ecosystems.18

      Before examining the ecological relationships of domesticated animals, it is well to remember their economic relationships. Livestock very early came to play a role in the New England economy comparable to that of fish and lumber: they proved to be a most reliable commodity. By 1660, Samuel Maverick, who had been one of the earliest English settlers in Massachusetts Bay, could point to increased numbers of grazing animals as one of the most significant changes in New England towns since his arrival. “In the yeare 1626 or there-abouts,” he said,

      there was not a Neat Beast Horse or sheepe in the Countrey


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