The Power of the Herd by Linda Kohanov

knows how to be at home in God’s land[,] …opening nomadic consciousness to insights unknown to peoples who worship owner-masters because they can live only within the man-made world’s make-believe boundaries….Learning to live by fitting into an ecological niche rather than by fitting into a dominance-submission hierarchy opens human awareness to another kind of society based on equal rights of creative agency for all.”
    Judeo-Christian philosophy has always been, and forever shall be, in conflict with civilization as we know it, creating a pesky incongruous feeling, a kind of nagging sandpaper of the soul, in any sincerely religious person forced to disrespect the earth by custom, circumstance, or the next paycheck. In the same book outlining the practice of the sabbatical, God makes it perfectly clear that “the land must not be sold permanently, for the land belongs to me. You are only foreigners, my tenant farmers” (Leviticus 25:23). And what landlord, after all, would knowingly lease a fine estate to a group of people planning to strip it, gut it, sell off its assets, and fill the large gaping hole with toxic waste and smoking garbage? In this sense, oddly enough, the Old Testament coincides philosophically with traditional Native American beliefs on respect fornature and the absurdity of buying and selling property, as no mortal man can truly own God’s green earth — or rocky stretch of desert, for that matter.
    It’s time for us to compromise and collaborate with the divine for a change, to find ways of consciously integrating the twin innovations of Cain and Abel, accessing the benefits and lessening the weaknesses or inconveniences of both. God, after all, didn’t execute Cain, surely seeing a stroke of genius in the eyes of that profoundly aggressive, deeply troubled soul — namely, a gift for technological and artistic advances that would have stirred a hint of hope and perhaps even pride in this vast yet compassionate intelligence.
    Made in the image of our creator, we are, after all creatures designed to create, perfectly capable at this point in our development of reinventing ourselves and our society — if, unlike Cain, enough of us are willing to look at the destructive aspects of our lifestyle and change our behavior in response.
    Adopting a nomadic pastoral lifestyle is no longer practical. Forming mutually respectful relationships with other species, on the other hand, is fully possible. Increasing research suggests that animal-assisted educational and therapeutic practices are both transformational and healing, helping people master the advanced human-development skills crucial to leadership and innovation. Translated into a twenty-first-century context, Abel’s wisdom involves recognizing that animals not only nourish and protect us physically, they help us develop psychologically and socially through brain-altering biochemical responses and mutual behavior modification. The human-animal bond is one place where science, history, and religion firmly intersect — and inform one another. As myths and spiritual texts from around the world insist, horses, dogs, cats, and other domesticated companions are gifts from a creative intelligence that has been rooting for us all along.
    We just haven’t fully unwrapped the package yet.
Fox and Hound
    Fossil records suggest that wolves were the first animals to be tamed and transformed — thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of years before other animals. Theories about how this happened abound, though everyone assumes it was a long, slow, precarious process. But a groundbreaking study at a Siberian research facility shows that the main physical and behavioral hallmarks of domestication could actually have been achieved in a single century — if a tribe of ancestral animal lovers had purposefully bred individuals who were less aggressive, less fearful, and more willing to engage with members