Livestock

The term LIVESTOCK refers to domesticated animals utilized for food, fibers, hides, fertilizer, and/or labor. The category of livestock includes such domesticated ungulates as bison, camels, cattle, donkeys, goats, horses, llamas, reindeer, sheep, swine/pigs, water buffaloes, and yaks, with cattle and sheep being the two most abundant types of livestock worldwide. Nonungulate livestock include first and foremost poultry, as well as rabbits, guinea pigs, and even honeybees, among other animals. Livestock are usually distinguished from wildlife and pets, although there occasionally is categorical overlap (e.g., farmed ostriches or herding dogs).

The domestication of plants and animals for food began some 11,000 years ago in southwest Asia and was a hallmark of the Neolithic, or New Stone Age. Some humans transitioned from hunting, gathering, and fishing sustenance strategies to more stationary ones based on the deliberate production of foods. Based on archaeological evidence from northern Mesopotamia, it appears that sheep and goats were among the first animal domesticates ancestral to today's livestock. Although dogs appear to have been domesticated by 16,000 years ago, they apparently served as hunting companions and not a food source. Aurochs, the now extinct ancestors of today's cattle, were likely independently domesticated in multiple sites through Asia and Europe. Domesticated pigs had become popular in parts of southwestern Asia and chickens in southeastern Asia perhaps by 8,000 years ago. The domestication of these latter species overlaps with increasing trends of humans becoming less nomadic and the expansion of agriculture. From that point onward, humans intentionally and unintentionally reconfigured their environments, as they constructed ways to raise their domesticated plants and animals, as well as protect them from pests and predators.

Although domestic animals and animal husbandry practices have varied greatly around the world, livestock have become crucial to agricultural life in general. Livestock convert low quality (by human standards) roughage into protein, fat, and other nutrients fit for human consumption and provide fertilizer for croplands. Ungulates supply additional labor power as pack animals, transport, and plowing aids, and their manure can also be dried and then burned for fuel. With increasing specialization in agriculture and the growth of pastoralism, people have endeavored to control the reproductive rates and birth timing of their livestock and to breed them selectively for certain qualities.

Specialized pastoralism in precolonial East Africa serves as an example of how livestock-keeping, under certain conditions, fits ideals of ecological sustainability. In this semiarid savanna region, pastoralists focused on cattle, sheep, and goats, while also keeping donkeys and sometimes camels. They practiced transhumance, moving herds and family between wet-season pasturelands near temporary water supplies and dry-season grazing lands based near permanent water sources. They managed the grasslands by moving livestock in such a way as to limit encroaching bush while not overgrazing and thus damaging grasslands, and would practice what have been called “cool burns” of dry, nonnutritious grasses to promote new grass growth, with a side livestock benefit of reducing tick populations.

It appears that such management techniques also generally benefited wildlife, as wild ungulates grazed the new grasses and were afforded some protection from predators by remaining close to human activity. Conflicts arose between humans and predators when the latter attacked livestock. Still, the livestock and wildlife populations remained relatively stable for more than a century prior to the onset of the colonial enterprise in the late 1800s.

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