Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 15, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 April 1893 — The Taming of Animals. [ARTICLE]

The Taming of Animals.

There are few benefits which we owe to our forefathers greater than the endless skill and pqtience with which they tamed those animals which we call at the present day “domestic.” It must have required a steady perseverance, extending through countless generations, to have succeeded in inducing such essenttally wild and mistrustful animals as cats to lay aside their timidity and suspicion, and to become the faithful friends of man. The people who accomplished this great benefit for posterity had more leisure tliaD their restless and hardworked descendants; they were, generally speaking, members of slave states, in which the food supply was plentiful, and in which we may suppose that both masters and slaves had plenty of time on their hands. In some cases the obvious utility of the animals caused them to be tamed; in some cases this very utility came to invest them with a special sanctity, which; as in the case of the cat in Egypt and the cow in India, afforded an additional guaraptee for their preservation. The ancients seem to have tamed almost all the existing animals known to them that were worth taming; had they known the American bison, they might have added him to the list ol draught animals we possess; possibly, too, the weasel, stoat, and polecat might have been reclaimed and employed as a useful foe to vermin. It is' certain that some animals which were once lamed have been allowed to relapse into a wild state, such as hawks, monkeys, and crocodiles in Egypt, and weasels in Greece and Rome.