Barbed Wire. Reviel Netz

would go into the cow’s killing. The cow economy—as well as the cow ecology—would not have the simplicity of structure that the plains had at the times of the bison.

      This new complexity had two aspects. First, the biological dominance of cows in respect to other nonhuman species would soon be challenged: land would be used not only for the feeding of cows but directly for agriculture. Second, and related, the relationship of cows with humans was much more one-sided than bison-Indian relations had ever been. Of course, the Indians were dominant enough relative to the bison; they could kill hundreds and hundreds of them with great ease. But, after all, the bison was also the great imponderable of Indian life on the plains, the beast whose numbers and appearances were to be determined by forces beyond human control. For capitalist America, nothing was supposed to be beyond human control.

      What is control over animals? This has two senses, a human gain, and an animal deprivation. First, animals are under control as humans gain power over them—most importantly, as humans gain control over animals’ biological cycle (procreation, growth, and death). Such control transforms biological patterns into marketable commodities: this is the essence of domestication. Second, animals are under control when they are deprived of their powers of activity. To survive, an animal must develop a certain control over its environment: it can move, trace food, graze or kill. To complete the control over the animal—to reduce it to a mere passive member in a fundamentally human society—is the other side of control over animals. Where they cannot be domesticated, then—that is, when they cannot be reduced to mere passive members in an otherwise human society—animals have to be kept away or destroyed. When all animals have been either subdued or destroyed, a share of land has been cleared from animal power and brought fully under human control. The fact is, control over animals is rather like control over humans: you can either make them do what you like them to do or else get them out of the way. This is how societies are made: human societies as well as the larger, multispecies societies that humans have created.

      Now, large animals living in large social groups—the kind, that is, of most direct value to domestication—combine the considerable force of each member to create, in their herds, a powerful social organism. Thus they pose an especially difficult task in trying to bring them into human society. Facing the bison, the human problem was stark, and the solution adopted by Europeans was very simple, that of extermination.

      But even with fully domesticated animals, it takes a considerable amount of effort to set up a constant counterforce so as to keep the animals at bay. Even domesticated animals, after all, are still alive. And so they would, unless specifically controlled, go where they want, eat what they want. Hence the problem of subduing the cows on the plains. It was to solve this problem that barbed wire was invented.

2. HOW TO FENCE A COW

      All those land grants—to the homestead, to the state colleges, to the railroad—were so many Louisiana Purchases. When you got there, there was not much to it. America evolved through the experience of the Atlantic, the Gulf, the Great Lakes, the Mississippi. Farmers built their life based on the expectations of copious rainfall and its attendant vegetation. Now they got to plains that evolved through the experience of aridity—mostly less than sixteen inches of rain per year. (Boston has over forty inches; New Orleans has over sixty.) Who would live there? Grass, bovines, wolves and other predators, humans foremost among those other predators. Grass could survive on little, unpredictable precipitation; bovines could survive on grass. Wolves and humans could then survive on bovines.¹⁵

      From the point of view of the individual cattle ranger, that was just fine. The West may have been won by the North, but the immediate gain was made, once again, by Texas Southerners. As we have seen, the immediate aftermath of the killing of the bison was the herding north, from Texas, of the longhorn cow. In one respect already, this was part of capitalist America—the cow was to be killed in Chicago or further east. But in other ways, the practices of the range were simply transmitted north.

      This explains the continuity with the bison-hunting practices described in this chapter’s first section. In other words, the West now had a range, not ranch, business. Do not be confused. In contemporary agriculture—which tends to be, strictly speaking, a ranch business—the terms “range” or “open range” came to have the more narrow meaning of any animal raising that does not involve strict imprisonment inside a building. In the original sense, the distinction between “range” and “ranch” was different. A ranch is an enclosed piece of land; the range is space, unlimited. Originally, Texas cows were fed off the land and moved through it, all throughout the plains—just as the bison did. Control over parceled units of land—the essence of the land grants—was at first out of tune with the actual economy. The economic value of cows resided in their self-reliant properties—they found their own nourishment, and this meant, especially in the difficult conditions of the Great Plains, that they had to operate in open space. The profitability of animals was, at this stage, partly a result of animals acting independently, exercising their powers. A ranger has the animal not merely to be killed eventually but also to do the work for him: the ranger does not look for food and water for the cow; instead, it is the cow herself who seeks those resources. The range industry makes its profits by combining the killing of animals with their forced labor. (This, we should note, was hard labor, under very harsh conditions.) To reduce the motion of cows, then, is to reduce their labor and thus to take away from the owner’s sources of profit. The truth was, there were so few resources on the plains that settling anywhere in particular, at first, made little sense. Better to move on with your cows, finding grass and water along the way. As the Indians were being consigned to their reservations, Texans were taking up a quasi-nomadic form of existence. Life was endless motion, and human survival was impossible without the horse.

      Nor, indeed, would there be any compelling reason for an owner of cows to fence them so as to gain control over them. Not only did cows manage to survive on their own; they could also be relatively easily collected for marketing by small numbers of humans on horseback. Within the arid plains, river valleys—7 percent of the land—were the only space that mattered. The promise of an open plain actually reduced to the reality of branching rivers, on which, historically, life depended. Of course, cows might wander off, but one did not need constantly to inspect each of them individually. Control could be maintained in other ways: the river would determine the areas where cows could roam. They were boxed by the climate and geography of the plains. This way, herds would be assigned separate spaces along the banks of rivers. For practical purposes, a river’s bank does not have its space open in all directions. Inland, away from the river, thirst blocks the motion of cows; the river itself blocks motion on the other direction. The rectangle along the riverbank has therefore only its two short edges open. All you need is to patrol these two edges.

      Most important, you rely on the practices of the cow itself. This is the principle of domestication: study the habits of an animal and use them against it. The cows could become free from humans, but they were the captives of their habits. They were conditioned to protect themselves against predators by forming into close herds. Their gregarious habits are precisely what humans exploit. Cows just will not disperse. Had some herd realized in 1866 what it was up against, it could have made the rational choice and dispersed in all directions. No amount of cowboy skill would have been able to collect all the cows, and those that were left on the range would have had, at least, a sporting chance against the occasional wolf. But the cows never realized this; they kept going together, assuming that this was—as it had been thousands of years earlier—in their best interest.

      Hence moving cows over long distances is a fairly simple task. The mounted humans who controlled the herds—frightening them all the way up to Chicago—kept an eye on them not so much to prevent them from running away but rather to prevent other predators from taking away the prize. Control over the cow itself was easy; this, after all, is why the animal was domesticated in the first place. No need for fencing, then, as far as the cow itself was concerned.

      The threat of other humans was a special problem, of course, but once again, the division of land was not necessary for this purpose either. The goal for this type of economy was to establish control not over land directly but over the cows on it. Instead of marking the land,