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Hello everyone, it's Daku Yi here, and welcome back to another episode of the History of Everything podcast. Yes, I am actually by myself, but I'm technically not by myself. I'm recording this in an Airbnb in Pennsylvania. We're getting ready to film another episode of the History Unhinged show that I do with Aidan Mattis of the Lore Lodge, and I was supposed to do this episode actually with Gabby, but she's not sick.
No, instead I did a stupid thing and I actually ended up forgetting the other microphone that I needed in order to be able to record this as a two-person episode. So I am doing that right now here myself, while Disney may hear her chime something in from the background when I actually talk about this because I've spent the last four hours researching and prepping things on colonial animals and pets, so
So, yeah, that's fun. But yeah, that is what has happened. That's why we are doing things the way that we are now. And hopefully come tomorrow, I will be able to go and grab an additional microphone that I'll be able to utilize for everything else that we're planning on making, like for the patron exclusive episode. But yes, as I said, we're going to be talking about colonial pets.
And in this case, again, we're being very specific with this. Pets in colonial America, these were things that were kept by colonists for, well, I mean, pretty much the same reasons that they were in Europe. You know, you had pets that were meant for being companions, like when we talk about
dogs or, you know, dogs can also be used for protection for hunting, herding and more. You could have cats, though, to be fair, in comparison to what we have for the modern day obsession with cats. Cats back then were more of a offhand workforce. They would control vermin in homes and barns until going into, well, pretty much the modern day and age where starting around the 18th century, they became more valuable as house pets than animals.
workers, if that makes sense.
Look, this is going to be covering a variety of different things. When we talk about colonial pets, the colonists back in the day, hundreds of years ago, they kept so many more things besides dogs and cats. And it would be dumb for us to just make an episode that is dedicated specifically to just dogs and cats. I mean, we are talking frogs. We are talking squirrels. We are talking birds, raccoons, horses, deer. There's so many things.
Yes, settlers who came in from the old world, from Europe, they brought their own dogs and cats and everything else. And yeah, they did tame other animals that existed there that they encountered in North America. And it really created this fascinating hodgepodge. But before we get into this, I know that a number of people are going to wonder, okay, well, hey, wait a minute, hold on. These are the Europeans coming to America. What about the Native Americans?
Well, here's the thing. Native Americans did also keep pets, though when we talk about pets, it's a little bit more complicated. Like, yes, this is primarily going to be dogs and turkeys, and maybe there is some evidence that other animals like bobcats or other things could have also been domesticated. But really, it's largely going to be based on, you know, dogs. Native Americans did have dogs, and this was for pretty much the same reason as colonists had them.
They were used for protection. They were used for hunting. They were used to transport goods via sledges that would be attached to harnesses that would be around them. And this is something that would be used as a light workforce. Early colonial accounts would describe dogs being used in these kinds of ways, but eventually the natives would end up adopting dog collars from Europeans. And after this, you'd see less harnesses being used. Now,
This is going to be very complex because the thing with dogs and the thing with pretty much any animal and we're talking about stuff for different native tribes is that it's going to vary depending upon what tribe exactly we're talking about. Because each tribe had different dog breeds that we used for different purposes in the same way that you would have different breeds of develop in Europe that would be utilized for different things. There was no single Native American dog in North America.
Colonists, on the other hand, tended to be a bit more uniform in their use of dogs and really in general pets, and the European model eventually became the standard across the country. And in the present day, pet owners still adhere to the same model that was observed in colonial America. Of course, when I talk about this, the exact timeframe of when and where dogs were first domesticated, we don't
Really? No. Like, yeah, that is something that is still debated to this day. But it is thought that they were not native to North America, but rather arrived thousands of years earlier, migrating across the land bridge that was at the Bering Strait over 14,000 years ago.
Now, the first dog to have entered North America is thought to have been some kind of dingo. Though, we don't really know this for sure. It is something that has been challenged repeatedly in different scientific circles, and it is very possible that other breeds could have arrived with human immigrants. We just don't really know. Dogs, as I said, were used for hunting. They were used for protection, for transportation, and so much more. Some tribes would keep dogs as...
Partially companions, but also as a food source. Their fur could be used to make things. So they were livestock as well as anything else. Either way, they were still valuable. Dogs were highly regarded by different tribes as being a gift from the gods. Though there were many different myths that would specifically talk about how dogs came to live among humans.
Like, as an example, the Cheyenne of the Midwest had the story of the dog and the great medicine. Basically, the creator god Great Medicine made human beings after creating the world and showed his people a land that was covered in fields of corn and thick with the herds of buffalo. The Cheyenne would appreciate the gifts, but they didn't have any way to follow the buffalo in order to, you know, hunt them or to transport the corn once it was harvested. They were just all on their own.
They were also sometimes attacked in the night by other tribes who would sneak up on them so that even the small amount of corner buffalo that they could get would be taken. So great medicine showed them how to capture wolves and then raise them as wolves.
Well, pets, I don't really know how else to describe this. It's basically the early form of dogs. These animals would have evolved into domesticated dogs who could warn the village of an attack, could transport goods, and help track the buffalo. They were the ultimate pool and friend. In some tribal stories, the dog is among the first creatures that were ever created. In other cases, they were created afterwards in order to be able to help people. It really just depends.
This is one of those fascinating things, because in a number of native myths, dogs were intermediaries between the, how do I even phrase this? The material world and the immaterial world, the spirit realm and our realm, if you will, that of the gods and that of the world of men.
And as a result, they were something that were almost kind of sacred, which is very interesting because if you compare that to how dogs were viewed by Europeans, it's a little bit more mixed. Interestingly enough, according to European Christians, dogs had no souls.
There was no intermediary between dogs and God because dogs, cats, or pretty much any other kind of animal, they did not have souls. As an immortal soul animated only human beings who would answer for the deeds done in life after they died and appeared before the throne of God for judgment, this meant that really only humans mattered. The dog was not really viewed as anything that was special for the afterlife, it just kind of
Now, that all being said, that doesn't mean that dogs were necessarily down a pod. No, they were cared for, of course. And the first law concerning mistreatment of dogs or really any animal in the English colonies was the regulation against tyranny or cruelty of the Massachusetts Bay Colony back in 1641. Essentially, if you were...
purposefully cruel or it's an animal, as in you just were going by in a bad mood and decided, wow, there's a dog. I'm going to beat the shit out of that dog. That is not something that you were allowed to do. And if you did this, you could be punished by a fine or sentenced in the stocks and pillories. If you've ever seen the image of someone who has their head through a board with their hands on either side of their head through that board, this is what we're talking about. If you beat a dog
you could end up in the stocks. Colonists, bred dogs, would take pride in them because this is also around the same time frame that you're seeing more breeds of dogs begin to appear, but it is not quite to the same level as what you would see in the later periods, like the 1800s. Still, this is something where there starts to be more of a distinction between lower class and upper class dogs, and we're not talking about ones that were just meant for hunting.
The thing is, if you were rich, oh, oh, this is where things get very fancy. And you oftentimes had to show off just how fancy your dog was through its clothing.
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Okay, now that that sounds right, I don't mean clothing like actual clothing. We're not talking about like colonists going and knitting sweaters and putting on powdered wigs on their animals. So to be sure, there were some that probably would do exactly that. No, I mean collars. If you were a member of the upper class and you had an animal and you wanted to denote that animal as being yours, you would apply a collar to it.
Leather collars with brass plates engraved with the dog's name, the owner's name, and sometimes some kind of design were extremely popular in Europe. And this is the same kind of thing that you would see in early colonial America.
And so because this requires something that was quite fanciful, dog ownership, at least in terms of owning a specific breed of dog for a specific purpose, that is something that became more associated with wealth. Because if you were on the frontier and you could afford to feed a dog and your family and actually support all of these entities, then this means that you were probably rich because you could afford this. And this is not like
PetSmart exists or anything else like that where you can get simple dog food. No, dog food doesn't exist yet. So you are paying in meat. You are producing significantly more food for this animal. And so that becomes a mark of status, which if you're going to do that, that means you're going to need a way to identify that dog as your own. Hence the padlock collar. Now, this is a fascinating thing right here. I want you to imagine
Similar to the name, padlock, a collar with a hinged ring of metal that is attached around a dog's neck by clasps and is fastened with a small padlock. Now, why would you do this in the first place? Well, how does it make sense? It's not like you're trying to lock up the dog anywhere. No, that padlock is supposed to indicate the owner of the animal.
So get this, the key would typically be kept with the owner. So if you have a valuable hunting dog and that dog gets stolen or if they lose it, if it breaks out of its kennel, if something happens and it gets found, you are able to prove that you own that dog by producing the key and unlocking the collar as necessary.
Without that key, you'd have to basically break the lock on the thing's neck, which in turn would mean like, oh, hey, this dog is stolen or you'd end up hurting the animal in the first place. There's no point in stealing it. And all this is genuinely very important. Dogs were important. They were used for guarding the home. They were used for hunting. They were used for hunting.
I mean, okay, blood sports. Dog fighting has always been a thing. Cock fighting has always been a thing. This is generally a thing that you would see with animals. So it would be...
It would be pointless if I didn't at least mention that. One of the most common things that you would actually see some of the more aggressive dogs used for is bear baiting, which is this thing in which, well, dogs are used to bait and fight bears to drive them out of their hiding places so that hunters are able to kill them.
Yeah, this is something that resulted in a lot of dead dogs too, typically, and they were bred specifically for this purpose. Breeds would include various different types of bulldogs, mastiffs, hounds, setters, pointers, spaniels, terriers, and many more. This, at least, are the dogs that we'll be talking about for use of guarding, hunting, and like that.
Yes, there were smaller dogs. There were smaller breeds that became known as comfort dogs, which, as you could probably guess, were used for comfort and companionship. Now, typically, these small and probably guess yappy dogs were typically favored more by women as well as the elderly because, well, go figure, they didn't require nearly as much care and they were oftentimes lap dogs.
It doesn't necessarily mean that men did not have companion or lap dogs either. In fact, if you were an upper class man, then not only did you probably have hunting animals, you likely also had animals with dogs that were friends. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both kept inventories of breeds, and Washington would even pride himself on his knowledge of dogs. The French general Lafayette, who was an ally of Washington during the revolution,
did know this about Washington, and he even gave him two basset hounds as a gift, which, as far as the record seems to be concerned, this is where the basset hound first comes to North America.
Now, another one of these kind of anecdotes that we would have here of animals back in the Revolutionary War is that there was a point back in 1777 after the Battle of Germantown where Washington found the dog of the enemy leader, General William Howe. And since he found this dog, he returned it to him as Washington knew it was Howe's dog because of an inscription on that animal's collar.
This is, weirdly enough, a thing that happened more often than you would think. We're not talking about just a situation in which a general gets his dog back. We're talking about as a general thing for dogs across the war.
When a dog went missing, if they didn't have identification like what you would see on the collar like a house dog, you would go and post an advertisement at perhaps your church or a tavern, something where you would offer a reward for its return, just like what you would see people do today.
In fact, in colonial Williamsburg, rewards for dogs would were offered in amounts of sometimes 20 shillings, which is nine days worth of wages for some laborers, which shows that in the case of noblemen, that was a very valuable thing that they held dear.
There were advertisements in New York City during the revolution that would have British officers posting notices asking for the return of their lost dogs offering rewards. This was something that was very near and dear to them.
My wife just asked if anyone kidnapped dogs, and the answer is yes. People would straight up kidnap dogs at different times and hold them for ransom. It was a very convenient thing back in the day, you know, when you'd have a upper class nobleman who would lose his dog conveniently. And then, oh, lo and behold, I've found this animal and now I can collect my reward, which is worth almost two weeks worth of wages. That is that is quite a lot. And that is something that people could very easily make a lucrative business out of.
This is something that if you were a wealthy member of society, you typically did care for your animals. And this was something that would oftentimes be demonstrated in paintings. Portraits of upper class gentlemen of the time would often show them with their favorite hunting dog, their favorite lap dog, depending upon what it is they have.
In fact, this is something that around the 1700s, you would start to see more and more and more with family portraits. The expanding love for humans that had for canines, this is something that you started to see being endorsed by different philosophers of the 18th century, playwrights, poets, and more. Voltaire would say, and I quote, the best thing about man is the dog, which is honestly something a lot of us could probably agree with.
Alexander Pope would say that histories are more full of examples of fidelity of dogs than of friends, which again, I think is also something we could agree with. Robert Burns would write that the dog puts the Christian to shame. That connection between Christianity and protection of animals, that is something that began to develop somewhat around this time.
An Anglican clergyman by the name of Humphrey Primmett would write in 1776 what was basically a declaration of independence for beasts in a, quote, dissertation on the duty of mercy and sin of cruelty to animals.
Now, I'm going to need to clarify this. In this dissertation that he wrote, he would say, and I quote, See that no brute of any kind suffer thy neglect or abuse. Let no views of profit, no compliance of custom, no fear of ridicule of the world ever tempt thee to the least act of cruelty or injustice to any creature whatsoever.
Now, that obviously is very fanciful speaking for many of us that are probably looking back and trying to understand what he's talking about. Essentially, that
You shouldn't abuse creatures. You shouldn't engage in violence for profit. This would be something like in the case of dogfighting. You should not, out of fear of someone mocking you for being weak, go and beat an animal for no reason. That you should not be tempted to cruelty or injustice. Which, there is a key reason for this. Around this time, there were very different types of baiting, as I said.
Bear baiting was one such thing that was done for hunting, but bull baiting was done as well, where dogs were used to bait bulls. And this is something that was done in order to fight them.
Cruel owners would even engage in animal experimentation in the name of, well, advancing science. In fact, one of the most acclaimed surgeons at the time, a man by the name of Dr. John Hunter, would conduct research in 1755 on artificial respiration in the hopes that he'd be able to find a way to revive people who had drowned.
So his experiments involved using bellows to repeatedly resuscitate a dog and would cut its sternum open in order to see how its lungs and heart responding. Now, this is something that very obviously is quite disturbing. Yeah, it was done in the name of science. And this is something you'd see time and time again for different animal experiments. And obviously not everyone was for it.
In England in the late 18th and early 19th century, one of the leaders of the movement to safeguard animals was an Irish Protestant who would campaign in Parliament for Catholic emancipation and the care of animals. His name? Richard Martin. He was born in 1754 and was nicknamed, and I kid you not, this is actually his nickname, Trigger Dick. That is, like, it sounds like I'm making this up. No, his actual nickname was Trigger Dick.
And the reason he got that nickname was because of his duels. And on one occasion, this happened. He engaged in a duel because someone shot a dog and he took offense to that. Now, Martin would later become known as Humanity Dick, which again, the name for his efforts on behalf of farm animals, which led to not only laws, but the founding of the Royal Society of the Prevention of Cruelty of Animals, which is impressive. The thing is,
Dogs were not the only domesticated animal that would enjoy a greater degree of status over the course of the 18th century. They weren't the only ones to develop a better reputation. Cats also became more highly valued as companions, whereas previously they had been just more of tools to control pests.
The Age of Enlightenment would encourage people to question many of the beliefs that they had of the past. And among these was the belief in many different locations that cats were a necessary evil. Now, you may be confused by that. What do I mean by evil? Well, in many different cultures, cats were associated with pagan rituals. And it is even noted, are not mentioned at all in the Bible, which make them a little bit suspicious.
Yes, they were useful to control populations of vermin and whatnot, but besides that, they were tolerated and in many societies were even used as scapegoats.
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We're not going to go into extensive detail about that necessarily, but that is a whole element that I've actually discussed here before, where there was a whole tradition. What was it? The Netherlands, I believe, that involved cats basically getting tortured every single year as part of a festival. That's a whole other thing. Either way.
During the 18th century, as time went on, the cat started to lose a lot of this stigma and instead began to develop more of its hampered reputation that we kind of associate with today. Family portraits as well as single figure pieces would frequently feature a person's or family's cat, and they began to appear more in literature and painting and poetry and whatnot.
The cat would slowly, with time, begin to lose more of the stigma that was associated with it, with witches and other things of the supernatural nature, as time went on and people became more enlightened, we will say. Now, these are the standard animals. Of course, I naturally had to be able to go over them, but besides that, there are some very interesting ones.
Deer were also featured in portraits and, weirdly enough, became one of the most highly sought after and popular pets of all colonial America. Now, why the hell is that, you may wonder? Well, nobility. Deer could be trained to wear collars and would be walked on leashes. And based on the depiction in paintings, they could even live in the family home just in the same way as a cat or a dog or something else could.
Deer were frequently domesticated and let loose in the gardens of colonial estates, which would amuse guests at parties because, oh look, here is this thing that we would go and normally have to chase down and hunt in the wild, but now there is a whole little herd of them that are just walking amongst us at dinner.
In fact, one example of this is a Dr. Benjamin Jones of Virginia who went and trained over a hundred deer on his property for exactly this purpose. He would do it so that the deer would hang around the parties and his family could go out and enjoy them. Portraits of deer would show them in poses like that of dogs where they are obediently following with their own brass colored collars right on them.
Another pet which was frequently featured in portraits was the squirrel. Which, yeah, I know a lot of people are probably going to look at this and go, okay, that sounds kind of obvious as people may have heard in different rural locations where people have kept squirrels as pets or other kind of rodents. And yeah, this is actually, believe it or not, one of the most popular pets that you possibly could have had in the colonial period. In fact, squirrels
were way more popular than puppies or kittens with children at the time. If you had a kid and that kid was begging for a pet year 1705, he or she was probably going to beg for a squirrel. People would rob squirrel nests so they're young, they would domesticate them and sell them in the marketplace as house pets.
Those would then be colored, they'd be leashed, they could be trained to be walked just as small dogs were. In fact, not only was this done, but certain breeds of squirrels were incredibly more valuable. In fact, flying squirrels were especially popular with young boys who would train them to sit on their shoulders as they walked through town and maybe if they had a little leash on it, allow it to jump and fly around and then go right back to them.
Of course, this is not something that would last forever. The popularity of squirrels as pets is something that was not necessarily appreciated by the very different wives and mothers at the time who would complain that these, well, semi-wild rodents
Would chew through basically everything. Clothing, linen, anything that you had on hand. They were kind of like goats. They would end up chewing through it. And if you tried to contain them in some way, like to basket or something else to keep them around, they would get through that.
The squirrels were capable of chewing through their wooden boxes, their cages, and more, which meant that tinsmiths had to come in and start creating little metal cages with their own exercise wheels and other items on the inside so that the squirrel could still be entertained but would not actually break free.
Of course, this is something that didn't work all the time, as I'm sure many people have been aware of when they had their own small little furry rodent escape out of its cage. But hey, you know, it still was worth a shot. In 1766, the famous American painter John Singleton Coakley would paint a portrait of his half-brother, Henry, playing with his pet flying squirrel, which I'm telling you this right now. I would advise any of you listening to this episode, go and look that up because it's such a cool little picture.
On December 31st, 1798, Philadelphia resident Elizabeth Drinker would note in her diary that her son William had, and I quote, bought a flying squirrel in the market, brought it home to please the children, and added ruefully, I should have been better pleased if it had remained in the woods. In other words, ah yes, this is so cute. It's such a nice little squirrel. How lovely. Man, I really wish that he had let this thing out in the woods or had kept it there. He didn't want, she didn't want him to bring it home.
Of course, this is something that was typically very popular among young boys.
Domesticated birds were especially popular with young girls and women who would keep cardinals and other kinds of songbirds in elaborate cages in their drawing room. And one of the reasons they did this is because it was believed that they would be able to teach these different birds music by repeating little tunes. So you have these small flutes called flagellates, which became very popular among bird owners.
The basic idea of this is that you would have the owner go and make a simple tune on an instrument, just a couple keys, and they would repeat this over and over and over again throughout the day. And it was thought that with time, the bird would learn to sing it. This is something that was practiced. However, there really isn't much of a record of this practice actually working.
Maybe in the case of some of the more intelligent ones that specifically would mimic others, like in the case of a mockingbird. But in general, it didn't really work out all that well, it seems. In fact, my friends, when I go and describe all this, one of the key sources that goes and describes the different animals that were encountered during colonial period actually comes from Peter Kamm.
who was a Swedish-Finnish explorer and naturalist who traveled throughout North America from 1748 through 1751. So Calm would publish an account of his travels in a journal that was called Inressitilnora America, which was translated into German, French, Dutch, and English.
He would note that turkeys, wild geese, pigeons, partridges were often tamed to the extent that, and I quote, when they were let out in the morning, they returned in the evening. He went on to note various other mammals were also tamed with their own respective little quirks and problems that were associated with them. Because go figure, half the animals that we're talking about here were either almost entirely or at least mostly still wild. One of which was beavers.
He would say, and I quote, beavers have been tamed to such an extent that they have brought home what they caught by fishing to their masters. This is often the case with otters, of which I have seen some that were as tame as dogs and followed their master wherever he went. If he went out on a boat, the otter went with him, jumped into the water, and after a while came up with a fish. He would also describe a raccoon. The raccoon can in time be made so tame as to run around the streets like a domestic animal.
But, this is an important thing to note here, it is impossible to make it leave off its habit of stealing. In the dark, it creeps to the poultry and kills a whole flock in one night. Sugar and other sweet things must be carefully hidden, for if the chests and boxes are not always locked, it gets into them and eats the sugar with its paw. The ladies, therefore, have some complaint against it every day.
Yes. In the same way as people would go and domesticate raccoons that end up being a little bit silly, they did have a habit of getting raccoons and then the raccoons would go and raid the pantry.
Another one that he would note here, as I already mentioned, was deer. Quote, Which I gotta say here right now on that note. Um...
The idea of releasing an actual deer as a decoy to draw in other deer is just devious. With time, other animals such as snakes and small monkeys and other things, these were also popular, but they still did have their own problems. Snakes, as you can guess, were particularly unpopular for the most part of women, although women and girls were the primary owners of monkeys who were
I'm not sure if anyone has ever owned a monkey or at least has been around them. They tend to be far more chaotic in trying to maintain, especially when you want a neat and tidy house. Another animal that was especially popular among young girls was the lamb, which was oftentimes depicted in paintings wearing ribbons around its neck and in general was something that was seen as a very cute creature. You could have other domestic animals from farms like chickens and
pigs and whatnot but for the most part these were things that were typically seen as farm animals with really the lamb only getting the special treatment at least while it was younger with time things as you could probably guess change changes in pet ownership especially with the type of animals that have would keep on evolving as things within the united states would change itself
The Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th century would completely turn everything up on its head. The introduction of textile mills would end up being very profitable for many businessmen and would encourage the development of more labor-saving technology, which with time would lead to rapid urbanization. As more and more people moved to the cities for work, it meant that all the varying different half-wild animals that were commonly kept as pets, the squirrels, the deer, and more,
These were things that you couldn't really bring into an apartment in the city. As industrialization and urbanization increased, things became significantly more restrictive. You couldn't exactly have a horse inside of one of these things. Those in rural areas would still keep these varying different animals that we've talked about as pets, but they weren't really prominent in the same way they were in the 17th and 18th century in comparison to what we would see later in the 19th century.
Squirrels would be one of those things that went from one of the most popular pets to have to de facto just a pest. As time went on, colonization, westward expansion, and more immigration would change the overall view within the United States as to what animals were suitable to keep as pets. Deer would go back to being hunted primarily as food, which yes, they were still primarily hunted as food in the beginning, but they were no longer kept as pets.
Natural habitats began to shrink for many of these animals. Fever populations were hunted to fractions of what they previously were. Raccoons were no longer kept, at least not in any kind of reasonable setting. And in general, you would see a great decline. The exotic pet would begin to fall to the wayside as dogs and cats began to dominate everything. So it is that that is the story of colonial pets.
Thank you, my friends, very much for listening. I appreciate all of you. I know this was a little bit kind of all over the place, but I thought it was a kind of interesting topic. I thought this was a fascinating thing. And don't worry. Next episode that I'm going to be doing here with my wife is divorce. I'm going to leave you on that note. Goodbye, my friends. I'll see you next time. Incoming transmission.
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