ABSTRACT
Just as humans have a history of their relations with animals, so also animals have a history of their relations with humans. Evidently a transition in the quality of relationship, from trust to domination, affects relations not only between humans and non-human animals, but also, and equally, among human beings themselves. A special role is created for that category of human beings who have yet to achieve such emancipation from the natural world: known in the past as wild men or savages, they are now more politely designated as hunters and gatherers. Taking the hunter-gatherer understandings as a baseline, this chapter constructs an alternative account of the transformation in human–animal relations that in Western discourse comes under the rubric of domestication. It contrasts human–animal relations under a regime of hunting with those under a regime of pastoralism.
