A dramatic new interpretation of the encounter between Europe and the Americas reveals the crucial role of animals in the shaping of the modern world.

When the first European colonizers arrived in the Americas, they were utterly dependent on the dogs and horses who assisted them in military campaigns as well as the livestock who provided them with food and labor. These settlers were convinced that their use of domesticated animals made them superior to Indigenous peoples, who did not practice livestock agriculture. In The Tame and the Wild, however, Marcy Norton shows that Indigenous ways of relating to animals were as sophisticated—and consequential—as those developed by other peoples across the Atlantic.

Like Europeans, Indigenous people throughout the Caribbean, Amazonia, and Mexico hunted wild animals. Yet, instead of raising domesticated livestock, Indigenous communities engaged in familiarization: they captured and tamed wild animals—from monkeys and parrots to sloths and manatees—whom they made into kin. Familiarization not only affected Indigenous responses to the invasions but also shaped European culture by influencing natural sciences and the emergence of the modern pet.

A sweeping history of human-animal relationships in the centuries after 1492, The Tame and the Wild explains the origins of a contemporary paradox: the fact that humans continue to create enormous suffering for some animals while enjoying companionship with others.

"Relationships—between animals and humans, and between humans and other humans—are at the heart of Marcy Norton’s original and ambitious The Tame and the Wild." - London Review of Books

"[Norton] argues that biology cannot be separated from culture — a stance that allows her to reconsider why animals were treated in a certain way in the past and how they could be treated in the future… A fascinating book." - Financial Times

"A meticulous and profound reckoning with human–animal relationships. Illuminating for anthropologists, ecologists, biologists and historians alike." - Nature

"[An] erudite, interdisciplinary study…Norton rejects the anthropocentrism that separates humans from animals in the biblical myths; rather, she prefers indigenous epistemological systems in which ‘animals and plants were relations, not resources.’ More radically, she would replace the divisive European categories of ‘human’ and ‘animal’ with indigenous understandings of ‘wild and tame,’ which honor the personhood of all creatures." - Foreign Affairs

"Through historical and anthropological scholarship, including close readings of indigenous American art and writing, Norton demonstrates that indigenous modes of relating to animals, including taming wild creatures and thereby transforming them into kin, had profound ramifications for European culture." - Hedgehog Review

"[An] ambitious and absorbing exploration of Indigenous American beliefs and practices with regard to animal life before European – here exclusively Spanish – colonisation…[this] is a capacious and richly rewarding book." - History Today

"Impressive…transforms our understandings of contact and colonization in 1492 and beyond, rewriting that history as one in which differing understandings and practices of relating to animals played a key role…animal history at its best." - William and Mary Quarterly

"Offers a much-needed corrective to biological explanations of ‘conquest’ that often strip Indigenous actors of power while downplaying the role of cultural practices and systematic violence…will feed scholarship on people and animals for years to come." - H-Net Reviews

"Exemplifies grounded and mindful interdisciplinary scholarship…an important milestone in ethnohistory, Atlantic history, intellectual history, human-animal studies, and more." - H-Net Reviews

"Offers a new metaphysical account of the animals and humans that shaped encounters between the Indigenous nations of the Caribbean, Central America, and Greater Amazonia and Europeans since 1492…a remarkable theoretical achievement." - American Historical Review

"An engaging humanistic study of human-animal relationships among Indigenous societies and Spanish colonists in Mexico, the Caribbean, and lowland South America during the early modern period…Norton’s creative historical analysis moves beyond simple dichotomies of culture/nature, differing ontologies, and external views of animism and animistic practice to provide a nuanced study of how Indigenous and Spanish worldviews altered each other and the animals in their worlds." - Animal History

"Norton shows instead that human–animal relations are historically variable. No single form – least of all the kind of industrialized animal husbandry that produces modern meat – is natural, inevitable, or necessary for human flourishing. To insist otherwise is to normalize the interspecies relations that now push the planet toward anthropogenic catastrophe. The argument is clear, convincing, and timely…[this book] deserves a wide readership and deep consideration. It will surely receive both." - Isis

"A fascinating, deeply researched, and multi-layered work that contends that human-animal relationships formed the crux of key historical processes of cultural and social exchange during the sixteenth century in the globalizing early modern world…will be required reading for anyone interested in the histories of conquest and colonialism, environmental history, the history of empires and cultural change, and histories of science, ethnohistory, and human animal studies." - Colonial Latin American Review

"A powerhouse of ideas on historical transformations that are highly relevant today…an important contribution to history." - Evolutionary Anthropology

"An important reminder that the world could have been very different to the one that came to dominate in the Americas. And the current climate crisis would seem to suggest that it should be too." - International Journal of Maritime History