EXARC Journal (Aug 2023)
Book Review: Draft Animals in the Past, Present and Future by Claus Kropp and Lena Zoll (eds)
Abstract
The domestication and subsequent training of strong animals to pull vehicles was a game changer for humans. Just like the first person who jumped onto a horse and hung on as they veered giddily towards a new horizon, driving and draft meant that humans got places faster – goods could be stored in a vehicle for longer journeys, trade goods became more than what a human could carry on their backs, and land could be ploughed faster and further. Horses, donkeys and oxen have literally hauled humanity into economically successful societies. Nor is the draft animal a creature of the past: developing nations employ animals in the same way as earlier societies (Davis 2021). For those of us interested in human and animal relationships of the past this text, which is the proceedings of a digital world conference in 2021, is a welcome addition to the small corpus of work on the practicalities of domestic working animals.
