Pets in America A History Trade paper - 2007 - 1st Edition

Details

• Title Pets in America A History
• Author Grier, Katherine C.
• Binding Trade Paper
• Edition number 1st
• Edition 1
• Pages 512
• Language EN
• Publisher Harvest Books
• Date August 6, 2007
• ISBN 9780156031769

1
A Natural History of Pets
 
In the late 1700s and 1800s, Americans were enthusiastic readers of popular natural history books. Evolving from a centuries-old tradition of scientific writing about minerals, plants, and animals, these texts mingled more or less scientific description and storytelling. While some natural histories for common readers represented the developing science of the age, others were little more than collections of thirdhand information, entertaining anecdotes, and thinly veiled moral lessons. This latter emphasis is particularly apparent in natural histories of animals. Directed to both children and adults, natural histories of animals enchanted readers with stories of the exotic wild beasts of the world (they were the wildlife documentaries of their day), but a surprising number emphasized common creatures—cows, sheep, horses, chickens, songbirds, cats, and dogs—and small incidents set in ordinary places.
           Since the first questions in any history of pet keeping are “When did people actually have pets?” and “What kinds of animals did they have?” it seems right to begin this account of pet keeping in America with a chapter in the tradition of natural history. While animals were their subjects, many natural histories also shared stories of the interactions of animals and people, and the books were as much about human actions, ideas, and values as they were about the lives of other creatures. This chapter, too, is necessarily full of stories of the interactions of pets and the people who owned them, from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. After all, people create pets, a truism that has had important implications for the animals regarded this way. I follow the model of Mrs. R. Lee, the author of a popular natural history who explained the character of her work this way: “Dry details of science and classification have been laid aside” in an effort “to throw as much interest as possible over these recorded habits and actions of the brute creation.”1 In other words, scientific description was not the point then, and it is not mine now. Like readers of natural histories, I, too, am interested in stories.
 
Beginnings
Before the arrival of European migrants as permanent settlers, the indigenous people of North America had complex relationships with a wide variety of animals; animals were sources of food, raw materials, and muscle power. Animals occupied important positions in the cosmologies of cultural groups as well. Occasionally young wild animals lived in villages as casual pets and children’s playthings. Native Americans’ dogs occupied the most complex position of any animal in indigenous cultures. Depending on the tribe, Native American dogs were sources of muscle power pulling travois and sleds, representatives of cosmic forces that were sometimes sacrificed in religious ceremonies, fellow hunters, livestock herders, sources of protein, playmates for children, and beloved companions. In many Native American groups, dogs occupied multiple and, to modern eyes, contradictory roles simultaneously.2          

Pet keeping in North America, in a form that we recognize as the antecedent of our modern practice, arrived with European settlers. The Spanish first carried European dogs to both North and South America as tools of war and conquest; in later colonization, settlers brought them as hunters, guardians, workers, and companions. Europeans also disembarked with long traditions of relationships with other small animals, and they either brought the animals to the New World, as in the case of the domestic cat, or they found comparable substitutes among local species. One of these relationships involved keeping animals simply for the purposes of delight; some people just liked animals. By the second half of the eighteenth century, caring for birds, squirrels, and small dogs was routine in some American households. Caged native songbirds—mockingbirds, cardinals, and goldfinches were among the most popular—may have been the most common pure pet, available to both rich and poor. However, continuing customs well established in England and northern Europe, families with the means and desire also succored “house” or “lap” dogs and other creatures who were not expected to be useful in the strictest sense. Then, as now, the edges of the category “pet” were flexible. Some Americans also grew very fond of animal workers—the mousing cats and watchful dogs essential to the good order and protection of the household or a docile, responsive milch cow or ox—to the extent that they were called “favorites,” the term many people in the eighteenth century used instead of “pet.” Mrs. Fobes, the subject of a large, three-quarter-length portrait with her pets painted by the provincial portraitist Rufus Hathaway in 1790, must have been quite fond of her cat, whose grumpy expression probably reflects young Hathaway’s limited skill rather than the animal’s temper (fig. 1.1).
           Documents shedding light on everyday life in the early United States are much scarcer than those for the 1800s and later, but evidence of pet keeping in the eighteenth century can be pieced together using artifacts as evidence along with the written materials that do survive. Some museums have preserved birdcages and engraved brass dog collars from the 1700s as examples of folk art, fine woodworking, or metal founding and engraving (see fig. 1.2). These objects suggest that, in some early households, pets were already provided with housing or equipment that reflected the prosperity of their owners as well as the pleasure owners took in their animals. Newspapers provide other clues. While the majority of “lost dog” ads in newspapers of the time concern hunting or guard dogs whose economic value was clear, some notices for pet dogs—and the occasional cat or parrot—do appear: “Lost or stolen on Sunday morning last . . . a small Lap Dog, called Juliet. She is all white, except about her eyes which are brown—she was very round by the great care taken of her by her owner—who will be much obliged to any person that will give information where she may be got, or will deliver her at No. 101 Church street. A reasonable reward will be given if required.”3
           Eighteenth-century diaries like that of Elizabeth Sandwith Drinker of Philadelphia (kept from 1759 to 1807) are unusual in any case. Hers, however, is particularly notable for its observations on the behavior of the family’s cats, dogs, and other small animals. During the 1760s and 1770s, when Drinker was a young wife and mother, occasional brief entries noted without comment such events as the death of the old watchdog and his replacement by another. Later, however, it becomes clear that this brevity was associated with the busy nature of Drinker’s household rather than her feelings. (For years, her daily diary entries are little more than a record of the ailments of family members and her efforts at doctoring them.) As her age permitted more leisure, Drinker’s notes about animals became more frequent and included more detail as she reminisced about pets kept by the family in the past: “a large mastiff dog” named Ranger, “a black cat—which we had for many years, and a white cock” called Chanticleer (named after one of the characters in Reynard the Fox, the most important “beast epic” of late medieval Europe), who was “a favorite of our sons.” When her small house dog Tartar woke her with his barking during the night, she commented that “something there was to set him agoing [sic], as he is too fat and lazy to exert himself for nothing.” She noted with pleasure that Tartar and the cat were the “first to welcome us” when the family returned from the country, and she commented on her grandchildren’s pets, including unusual “English rabbits,” chickens kept as “favorites,” and an orphan kitten that had been suckled by a dog.
           Drinker’s diary also suggests that pet keeping was not confined to wealthy Philadelphians and that even working animals could become favorites. She noted when her son William “gave our little squirrel to a Negro lad over the way[,] a barber who has several petts and appears fond of them”; she was glad to be rid of the creature but worried about the quality of care it would receive. Drinker also shared moments in the life story of an animal worker, her cat Puss, who had been elevated to a special status. When the Drinkers fled to Germantown to escape the yellow fever epidemic in 1797, Puss was transported in a basket; most animals in the city had been left behind. The next year, Drinker noted with humor that “Our Cats progeny are much in demand[;] whether it is her real merit, or the value her mistress sits on her, that gives her such consequence I cant say.”4
           Drinker’s life list of pets reflected the basic range of creatures kept by early American households, with the exception of cage birds. In the 1800s, pet-keeping households expanded on this basic catalog (see fig. 1.3). Although only fragmentary statistics survive until the mid-twentieth century, all evidence suggests that the trend over time was for more people to keep multiple animals as pets, and for more species to enter the category of “pet.” Cage birds, dogs, and cats (a poor third but with their passionate advocates) continued as the most important species. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, both adults and children dabbled in the specialized husbandry of “pet stock,” chickens, pigeons, and rabbits that were bred for their looks and sometimes shown competitively. By midcentury, some sturdy, relatively undemanding animals, including the recently introduced guinea pig and the white mouse, had become known as children’s pets, and some families experimented with keeping a fish globe or the more complex “balanced” aquarium.

© 2006 by Katherine C. Grier
 
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