Abstract

Humans’ increasingly close relationship to animals constitutes one of the most important cultural, social, and economic developments of the past 10,000 years of our history. Animals have been and continue to be important sources of food, labor, and secondary products in many societies. As relationships with animals intensify, processes such as domestication ensure that humans are potentially able to control the behavior and deployment of large numbers of animals, altering ecosystems and creating an anthropogenic landscape. However, these types of relationships are heavily structured by the innate attributes of the animals involved: pre-evolved characteristics create the set of possibilities on which human agents can act, and actions undertaken by animals have major impacts on human as well as conspecific behavior. The agentive actions of wild and commensal animals are evident in trajectories of domestication and are further brought to the fore through the process of ferality, which is an agentive re-imagination of the domesticated niche and not always controllable by human actions.

All animals interact with other animals that share their environment, not only through predator/prey relationships but also through a variety of biological symbioses. One type of symbiosis is a mutualism in which individuals of both species benefit from the interaction, such as cleaner wrasse eating the parasites of larger fish: the larger fish benefits from a reduced parasite load, and the wrasse benefits by having an easily procured meal. Relationships in which individuals of one species benefit from the relationship while individuals of the other are neither helped nor harmed are known as commensalisms. Examples of this include cases where an animal benefits from the environment created by another, such as birds exploiting the disturbance caused by cattle to improve their success at hunting for insects (figure 10.1). A relationship in which individuals of one species benefit to the detriment of individuals of another is known as parasitism; this includes relationships in which members of one species feed off hosts of another species (such as ticks or lice feeding off mammalian hosts), but it can also encompass more complex interactions, as in the brood parasitism of a parasite that tricks or coerces the host into rearing its young. An amensal relationship is the opposite of a commensal one: members of one species are neither helped nor harmed by the interaction, while members of the other are harmed. An example of this could be the relationship between a swarm of locusts and a prairie dog colony. When the swarm of locusts denudes the vegetation from the colony’s location, the prairie dogs are left with nothing to eat (causing harm) but the locusts are indifferent to their presence or needs. A final type of symbiosis is neutralism, in which species share the same landscape but don’t directly benefit from one another’s presence, as in mixed herds of zebra and wildebeest.

Humans likewise have always maintained various types of relationships with the animals that shared their environment. Early hominins were poorly equipped to defend themselves from large predators, so a feature of this interaction would have been avoidance of becoming prey. Early hominids such as Australopithecus afarensis were frequently preyed upon by large cats, dogs, hyenas, bears, and even raptors. The relationship of humans as prey is not only represented in our early evolutionary history but continues today (albeit much less frequently; Hart and Sussman 2018). Our human ancestors also took advantage of changes to the environment created by other animals, such as scavenging the kills of other predators (Shipman 2010) and exploiting trails made by large animals (Haynes 2006). The development of tools by human ancestors was motivated at least in part by the need to process animal carcasses and to aid in the capture of animals for consumption (Shipman 2010). The importance of animals to early humans is shown by the preponderance of animal imagery in early figurative art (for more on the symbolic importance of animals, see Bishop, chapter 8, and Tomášková, chapter 11, both this volume). As human relationships with their environment became more complex, animals were relied on as sentries, as walking meat larders (Clutton-Brock 2012:35), and as living tools, as well as a source for power (Shipman 2010). While we tend to conceptualize these interactions as driven primarily by choices made by humans, the agency of animals also plays a large role in defining these relationships, particularly with reference to domestication as a clear symbiotic partnership.

Starting at least 11,000 years ago (Zeder 2012a), humans began experimenting with a strategy that involved closer relationships with animals, and some species of animals started to take advantage of closer relationships with humans. We now recognize this as the early stages of the process of domestication. Over many generations, animals that found reproductive success through these relationships manifested the evolutionary effects of this changed strategy via the physiological, behavioral, and genetic changes we associate with domestic animals (the so-called domestication syndrome; Larson and Fuller 2014; for the limitations of this concept, see Lord et al. 2020). Of the multitude of animal species co-occupying environments with humans, only a few went on to become domesticates. Is this small sample size the result of unwillingness on the part of humans to domesticate other species (lack of need) or the result of other species not having a suitable temperament for domestication?

In the process of domestication, the agency of animals to enter into a social contract with humans (giving subservience and docility in exchange for food and protection; figure 10.2) drastically altered survival strategies. For many domesticated species, this new survival strategy has resulted in much greater reproductive success compared to their wild progenitors. The domestic cow is one of the most plentiful large animals on earth, while its ancestor, the wild aurochs, is extinct (Felius et al. 2014). The same is true of the domestic horse; its wild ancestor, the tarpan, is extinct. The wild progenitors of sheep and goats, the Asiatic mouflon and Asiatic bezoar, are both listed as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN 2019).

Animal Agency

Agency relates to the ability of an organism to impact its environment by selecting among options for how to fulfill basic needs of food, shelter, and reproduction. The fields of cognitive psychology and philosophy provide a framework for thinking about animals, which can move and act autonomously, as agents. Shaun Gallagher’s (2000) attempts to reconcile philosophy and cognitive science lead him to divide the self into two levels, the more basic of which is a “minimal self.” The “minimal self” is “a consciousness of oneself as an immediate subject of experience . . . One does not have to know or be aware of this to have an experience that still counts as a self-experience” (15). The minimal self is the part of the self that understands that something is happening to you. The concept of the minimal self allows the ideas of a “sense of agency” and a “sense of ownership.” In this definition, agency is the sense of being the causative initiator of an action, whether a movement or a thought. Agency in this context is a causative phenomenon rather than a manifestation of volition, or as Stephanie Spengler and colleagues (2009:290) put it, “was it me or was it you?” Agency as a causative phenomenon is different from the sense of ownership, which refers to the sense of participation in an experience, this experience being voluntary or involuntary (sense of ownership applies when someone else moves my hand—I know it is my hand that is moving, but I did not cause the motion). In applying Gallagher’s concept to the “was it me or was it you” definition of agency, most animals are capable of meeting his definition of “minimal self” and being self-aware.

Being self-aware is one condition for animal agency, but it is not the only requirement. The philosopher Helen Steward (2009) developed a four-point definition of agency, in which three of the points are manifestations of Gallagher’s minimal self. She suggests that animal thought may not consist of circumscribed, causation-based units of ideation in the way human thought does, but this “human” way of thinking is not necessary for the animal to possess agency. Her four-point definition of agency as it specifically applies to non-human animals is:

1. 1. An agent must be capable of independent movement. If something is unable to move, it cannot act upon other components of its environment.
2. 2. An agent must be “a centre of some form of subjectivity” (Steward 2009:226) while being self-aware as an entity—aware of a difference between itself and its environment. Without self-awareness, there can be no purpose to any movement: it is either purely reactive or random.
3. 3. An agent has at least some basic intentional state (e.g., in the shape of wanting, trying, awareness of its surroundings). In other words, the action must be toward some purpose.
4. 4. An agent has some kind of directed control over the actions it takes to cause outcomes; the motion the agent undergoes to fulfill a need is the result of internal impulse, not external stimuli or triggers—in other words, “it was me.” While this criterion is similar to (1), which only requires the agent to be able to move independently, it also requires that movement to be (a) controlled by the agent and (b) aimed at achieving a purpose.

Importantly, this definition of agency allows room for instinct to influence the animal’s needs and desires. As long as the animal selects from a number of possible actions to fulfill these instinctual imperatives, it is acting as an agent. This definition excludes actions over which no control is exerted by the animal (i.e., reflex), but it does attribute agency to some of the actions taken by wild, commensal, domesticated, and feral animals.

Below, I make use of concepts that provide an explanation of the self that does not rely on a socially constructed understanding of selfhood or free will but focuses instead on individual action, in which the agency of animals leads them to alter the landscape where they live through a process known as niche construction (cf. Lewontin 1983; Quintus et al., chapter 9, this volume). Perhaps the most striking example is the dams beavers build to create a water impoundment that supplies them with food and protection from predators (figure 10.3), although all animals engage in niche construction to some extent. Whether it is the burrow of a gopher, the nest of a bird, or the wallow of a bison, the presence of animals has an effect on their surroundings. Some effects are due to intentional action, but in other cases the actions of animals have unintended and sometimes even detrimental impacts on their environment. When a herd of elephants forages through a forest region, it creates a new environment for grasses to grow and at least temporarily replace the woody plants of the understory. This new growth is not a preferred food for elephants, instead competing with elephants’ favored shrubberies.

Another manifestation of animals’ agency is seen in the defensive mechanisms they adopt to avoid becoming prey (whether and how to flee, hide, or fight). Tactics that may have worked well as defense against four-legged predators were not always successful when facing hominids that had a different hunting strategy and a different set of weapons that replaced tooth and claw. Whether behaviors to counteract these human threats were individually learned or the result of evolutionary pressure is unknowable, but the outcome is the same—individuals and species with better defense strategies fared better than those with insufficient ones. As humans intensified their hunting behaviors over the past million years or so, prey animals’ agency led them to new defensive techniques that had a feedback loop with human hunters. Animals’ attempts to evade human hunters led to changes in hominid hunting techniques, and the natural migration of animals (both large-scale and local) forced hominid hunters to follow.

Feral Animals—a Different Kind of Agency?

Feral populations arise from the reproduction of domestic animals that have abandoned a human-based survival strategy (animals that are in the first generation to leave human control are strays, while their descendants are feral; cf. Slater 2001). While many feral populations continue to live in commensal relationships with humans, they no longer have an intimate social connection with them. Feralization, therefore, is an evolutionary trajectory that comes as a direct result of an application of agency by domestic animals: feralization is an additional stage of the process of evolution, not an undoing of domestication.

Domestic pigs, camels, and goats are all good examples of species that have sometimes successfully abandoned their close ties with humans and developed large feral populations, mostly in regions where the domestic population’s wild precursors are absent and to which a domestic population has been introduced. An excellent example of this is the feral dromedaries of the Australian Outback. Dromedaries were initially domesticated in Arabia around 3,000 years ago (Almathen et al. 2016) and were introduced into Australia in the mid-nineteenth century for use as draft animals. The climate of the interior of Australia is well suited to camels, and approximately 20,000 of them were imported (Saalfeld and Edwards 2008). By the mid-twentieth century, motorized vehicles had made the use of camels obsolete, and many camels were released into the wild. From this initial stock of probably fewer than 10,000 individuals, the population of feral dromedaries in Australia had expanded to nearly 1 million animals by the early twenty-first century (Saalfeld and Edwards 2008). Clearly, the domestication process did not impact the dromedaries’ ability to survive without human intervention. The success of the feral camels has established them as a pest species over much of their range, where they are outcompeting native animals for food and water.

The survival strategy to abandon close contact with humans may not be the preferred option for domestic animals, but it is one they are not always evolutionarily excluded from using. If this abandonment is not a successful strategy, the population of strays will not reproduce and rear young with enough success to become a self-sustaining feral population (this failure to create a self-sustaining feral population is frequent, for example, in populations of stray and feral dogs; Zeder 2012b), so the fact that there are sustained feral populations of some species indicates at least a moderate level of success and a forward movement along the evolutionary pathway.

Conclusion

Acknowledging the importance of animal agency reorients our understanding of human cultural strategies as part of broader ecological and environmental systems. Animal agency has had an influence on many, if not all, human-animal interactions and therefore on the development of all the systems in modern human society that are reliant on those interactions. The ramifications of this agency become even clearer when exhibited by the domestic animals that share the most intimate relationship with humans. The agency exerted by domestic animals in any given situation depends not only on the human-created environment but also on the temperament of the individual animals (and eventually the predominant temperament selected for the population by the domestication process) when exposed or introduced to that environment. Some species of animals have ranges of temperament that better position them to enter into relationships with humans, and for the most part, these are the species that have continued down the various domestication pathways to the present.

The domestic animals we have today are as much a result of the agency of animals as they are of human action. While many animals could be useful as domesticates, the number of domesticated species is relatively small. The animals that have entered into a social contract with humans through the long-term evolutionary process of domestication have certainly had meaningful impacts on every facet of human life: from the nutritional impacts of having readily available sources of meat to the economic advantages of harnessing the strength of animals to providing us with clothing materials (leather, wool, silk, felt, furs) and providing companionship. While domesticated animals have thus contributed much to economic and physical health through their engagement with human-created ecological niches, they have also contributed to negative impacts when serving as vectors for zoonotic disease transmission (see Juengst et al., chapter 6, this volume).

An interrogation of the actual ramifications of these relationships reveals a much more complex ecological tapestry in which animals contribute to and shape the direction of human niche construction and human culture. Perhaps the term symbiotic more accurately reflects the nature of these relationships, suggesting a broad spectrum of possible relationships between humans and animals that for either party can be harmful, beneficial, or neutral. Aspects of the symbiosis between humans and animals can vary over time and space, even for a single individual. For animals that live in environments heavily shaped by human activity, some aspects of human niche construction may provide benefits, such as a reduction of predators or greater access to food, while other aspects simultaneously introduce new dangers, such as automobiles, pollution, and slaughter. If the net benefit of these relationships to humans and animals outweighs the harm, these relationships persist or even intensify. If the net harm to both humans and animals is greater than the benefit, these relationships diminish or end. The overall effect is generally perceived at the population level, but the benefit or harm plays out on an individual basis where agency influences the reactions taken. For individuals, behaviors vary temporally on a daily basis (night versus day), on a seasonal basis (migration or crop availability), and on the scale of a lifetime (long-term resource depletion or accretion). These same dynamics play out for domestic animals, which for certain parts of the day, year, or lifetime may have varying degrees of interaction with humans and may play a greater or lesser part in human lives. Because of this, one animal may exist in a variety of niches and experience a variety of different types of symbiosis with humans over the course of its life. The agency of individual animals is a key factor in establishing these changing relationships.

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