Historically Speaking: Pets and the Humans Who Loved Them

From prehistoric times to the age of Covid-19, people have looked to animals for companionship.

May 7, 2020

The Wall Street Journal

Americans have been adopting pets at a record pace since the pandemic began. It’s as if the crisis has intensified our need for animal companionship, which goes back a long way. Scientists agree that dogs were the first species to form a relationship with humans: Inside Chauvet Cave, a Paleolithic site in southern France, archaeologists recently found 26,000-year-old canine paw prints alongside those of a human child.

John Steinbeck with his dog Charley.
PHOTO: BETTMANN ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

Humans kept animals as companions long before we domesticated livestock like sheep, goats and cattle, some 10,000 years ago. By contrast, horses were only tamed in Eurasia around 6,000 years ago. Though they weren’t household pets, they inspired passionate feelings in their owners, as the equine imagery of ancient art and poetry so beautifully attests.

One of the first pet dogs whose name is known to us is Abutiu, who belonged to an Egyptian pharaoh in the early third millennium B.C. After Abutiu’s death, his heartbroken owner gave him a royal burial. The inscription on the tomb explained, ‘His Majesty did this for him in order that he might be honored before the great god, Anubis.’

By around 1000 B.C., the Egyptians’ love affair with dogs had given way to an obsession with cats, which they revered as semi-divine creatures. It was illegal to kill a cat or take one out of Egypt. The ancient Greeks were baffled by Egyptian felinophilia; they were more taken by the loyalty of canines. In Homer’s Odyssey, the old dog Argos waits 20 years for Odysseus to return, then dies content once he has seen his master.

The Romans made pets of cats, dogs, snakes, insects and birds—indeed, almost anything that breathed, except for goldfish. Those didn’t become household companions until 1369, when China’s Hongwu Emperor ordered the creation of the first fishbowl.

Pet ownership was a status symbol in early modern Europe, like having a carriage. Cardinal Richelieu, an adviser to the French King Louis XIII, shared his rooms with 12 cats, while Madame du Barry, the mistress of Louis XV, kept an orangutan and a parrot. Almost no one bothered to house-train their pets, much to the chagrin of unwary visitors to Versailles.

During the French Revolution, pedigree pets suffered by association with their aristocratic owners. The future Empress Josephine was incarcerated in Paris along with her pet pug Fortuné. Always protective of its mistress, the dog reacted badly on her wedding night to Napoleon in 1796, sinking its teeth into his leg.

As the cult of Romanticism swept through Europe in the 19th century, a pet became more than just a companion. It was an alter ego and “loving friend,” as Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote in her poem “To Flush, My Dog.” Many authors felt the same way about their pets: Charles Dickens had his pet raven Grip, Ernest Hemingway had his six-toed cat Uncle Willie, and of course John Steinbeck had his poodle Charley, whom he immortalized in his 1962 book “Travels with Charley.”

They aren’t alone; a 2018 meta-review of mental health studies by researchers at Liverpool University confirmed the emotional benefits of pet ownership. Steinbeck once admitted to his publisher: “I need a dog pretty badly. I dreamed of dogs last night. They sat in a circle and looked at me and I wanted all of them.”

Historically Speaking: Plagues From the Animal Kingdom

The coronavirus is just the latest of many deadly diseases to cross over to human beings from other species.

February 6, 2020

The Wall Street Journal

Earlier this week, the still-rising death toll in mainland China from the coronavirus surpassed the 349 fatalities recorded during the 2003 SARS epidemic. Although both viruses are believed to have originated in bats, they don’t behave in the same way. SARS spread slowly, but its mortality rate was 9.6%, compared with about 2% for the swift-moving coronavirus.

A scientist examines Ötzi, a 5,300-year-old mummy discovered in the Tyrolean Alps in 1991.
PHOTO: EURAC/MARION LAFOGLER

Statistics tell only one part of the story, however. Advances in the genetic sequencing of diseases have revealed that a vast hinterland of growth and adaptation precedes the appearance of a new disease. Cancer, for example, predates human beings themselves: Last year scientists announced that they had discovered traces of bone cancer in the fossil of a 240-million-year-old shell-less turtle from the Triassic period. This easily surpasses the oldest example of human cancer, which was found in a 1.7 million-year-old toe bone in South Africa. The findings confirm that even though cancer has all kinds of modern triggers such as radiation poisoning, asbestos and smoking, the disease is deeply rooted in our evolutionary past.

Unlike cancer, the majority of human diseases are zoonotic, meaning that they are passed between animals and people by viruses, fungi, parasites or bacteria. The rise of agriculture around 10,000 years ago, which forced humans into close contact with animals, was probably the single greatest factor behind the spread of infectious disease.

Rabies was one of the earliest diseases to be recognized as having an animal origin. The law code of Eshnunna, a Mesopotamian city that flourished around 2000 B.C., mandated harsh punishments against owners of mad dogs that bit people. Lyme disease was only identified by scientists in 1975, but it too was an ancient scourge. Ötzi, the 5,300-year-old mummy who was discovered in the Tyrolean Alps with cracked ribs and an arrow wound in his shoulder, was an unlucky fellow even before he was killed. DNA sequencing in 2010 revealed that while he was alive, Ötzi was lactose intolerant, had clogged arteries and suffered from Lyme disease.

Smallpox, which was eradicated by the World Health Organization in 1979, had been one of the most feared diseases for most of human history, with a mortality rate of 30%. Those who survived were often left with severe scarring; the telltale lesions of smallpox have been identified on the mummy of Pharaoh Ramesses V, who died in 1145 B.C. The disease is caused by the variola virus, which is thought to have crossed over to human beings from an animal, likely a rodent, in prehistoric times.

Although it can’t be proved for certain, it is likely that smallpox was behind the terrible plague that killed 20% of the Athenian population in 430 B.C. The historian Thucydides, who lived through it, described the agony of those infected with red pustules, the dead bodies piled high in the temples and the scars left on the survivors. He also noticed that those who did survive acquired immunity to the disease.

Thucydides’s observation turned out to be the key to one of humanity’s greatest weapons against infectious disease, vaccination. But apart from smallpox, the only eradication programs to have made some progress have been against viruses transmitted from human to human, such as polio and measles. Meanwhile, since the 1970s more than 40 new infectious diseases have emerged from the animal realm, including HIV, swine flu and Zika. And those are just the ones we know about.