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

When the men and women of the island of Guanahani first made contact with Christopher Columbus and his crew on October 12, 1492, the cultural differences between the two groups were vaster than the oceans that had separated them. There is perhaps no better demonstration than the divide in their respective ways of relating to animals. In The Tame and the Wild, Marcy Norton tells a new history of the colonization of the Americas, one that places wildlife and livestock at the center of the story. She reveals that the encounters between European and Native American beliefs about animal life transformed societies on both sides of the Atlantic.

Europeans’ strategies and motives for conquest were inseparable from the horses that carried them in military campaigns and the dogs they deployed to terrorize Native peoples. Even more crucial were the sheep, cattle, pigs, and chickens whose flesh became food and whose skins became valuable commodities. Yet as central as the domestication of animals was to European plans in the Americas, Native peoples’ own practices around animals proved just as crucial in shaping the world after 1492. Cultures throughout the Caribbean, Amazonia, and Mexico were deeply invested in familiarization: the practice of capturing wild animals—not only parrots and monkeys but even tapir, deer, and manatee—and turning some of them into “companion species.” These taming practices not only influenced the way Indigenous people responded to human and nonhuman intruders but also transformed European culture itself, paving the way for both zoological science and the modern pet.

"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

"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

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