Domestication as Sacred Contract
by Joshua Tenpenny
On a deep spiritual level, our relationship with the living things around us forms a complex web of obligations and responsibilities. One of those fundamental relationships is our domestication of plants and animals. This is typically seen as a process of powerful humans exerting their will over passive and essentially helpless beings, but as an animist, I do believe there is consent and cooperation. A species cannot be domesticated without its consent, as you can see by the countless species which cannot be successfully domesticated.
I believe that each species has an overarching spirit of some sort, that goes beyond the consciousness of the individual plant or animal. This overarching spirit influences the behavior and form of the species, and it is the consciousness which drives evolutionary changes to that species. A human culture forms relationships with these overarching spirits through their interactions with the individual plants and animals, whether or not they also have an intentional direct relationship with that overarching spirit. These spirits have a very clear and unsentimental understanding of the cycles of life and death.
In their efforts to reproduce and flourish, some plants have developed particularly tasty nutritious bodies to entice animals (including humans) to eat them. It is their intention to be eaten. When human cultures have come across particularly tasty plants growing wild, they try to cultivate them to gain access to a larger and more consistent supply. There are some plants which refuse to cooperate with this, and can only be gathered wild. There are some who cooperate enthusiastically, developing into new species who are substantially more useful to humans.
Some plants seem to be of such marginal food value in their wild, uncultivated state that it is hard to imagine humans selectively breeding generation after generation of these plants unless they had some good reason to think this plant had substantial food potential. This is particularly curious in plants like cassava which are very poisonous unless thoroughly processed, and plants like corn which seem to have developed quite suddenly from a wild barely edible state to a much different domesticated state where they are incapable of reproduction in the wild. I don’t mean to insult the ingenuity or perseverance of our ancestors, but my intuitive understanding is that there was some kind of spiritual communication which inspired these things. I believe the spirits of those soon-to-be-domesticated species intentionally and voluntarily offered themselves to the human culture, establishing a contract whereby the humans nourish and support the plants, and the plants nourish and support the humans.
With livestock animals, it is very much the same process. In the wild, these were prey animals. They have always been food. They understand this. It is all right with them. They have entered into relationship with humans, gaining protection from wild predators as well as a consistent and ample supply of food. The overarching spirits of these animals do not mind ending up as food, but they do mind suffering in the meantime. Up until recently, animals kept in substandard conditions would get sick and die. This is their means of ensuring a certain standard of treatment. Unfortunately, advances in modern medicine have allowed us to keep animals in increasingly unpleasant environments, administering a steady stream of antibiotics and other medications to prevent the deaths that would be the natural consequence of these living conditions. I consider this to be a breach of our sacred contract.
Another way in which we may have overstepped the boundaries of our contract is the direct genetic modification of plants and animals. Selective breeding provides a natural means of genetic modification, and leaves the overarching spirit of that animal with plenty of room to influence the outcome. The direct genetic modification seems coercive to me. Like the routine medicating of livestock, it is most troubling when it is used to raise these plants and animals under conditions that would kill the unmodified species. (Herbicide-tolerant plants, such as the “Roundup Ready” soybean, are especially problematic, because in addition to this coercion of the species, it leads to the increased use of stronger and stronger pesticides. The competing plants, the “weeds”, have overarching spirits of their own, and are quite resourceful in adapting to the increasingly toxic environment. Since these plants are not putting their resources into food production, they can focus solely on reproduction and survival.)
But there are people who are going back to that sacred contract, whether they understand it in those terms or not. Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm bases his agricultural model on “…mimicking natural patterns on a commercial domestic scale [which] insures moral and ethical boundaries to human cleverness.” There is increasing public awareness of food production issues, from the environmental impact of pesticide, the rise of food-borne illness, awareness of farm workers’ rights, concern about the humane treatment of animals, and many other issues. I recognize my point of view is a minority even within my religious community, but I do hope for solutions to these problems that treat these plants and animals as our partners in the food production process, rather than our property or our victims.