Читать книгу Nature's Evil - Alexander Etkind - Страница 29

Anthropologists can’t agree about whether our ancient ancestors were omnivores or corpse eaters, or whether they preferred shellfish. It was later that people developed a taste for meat and for milk. Feeding an animal takes a lot of land, more than it takes to support a human being. But stock-rearing is less labour-intensive than arable farming. On the Mongolian steppe, two shepherds on horseback could look after a flock of 2,000 sheep. A Turkmen herdsman with an assistant could graze a herd of 800 bulls and cows. Hunting requires even less labour and, correspondingly, more land. In Europe, hunting remained a privilege of the aristocracy. The Austrian Hapsburgs were deeply attached to this strange pastime right up to the end; even during the First World War they numbered their hunting trophies in the thousands. If it is true that political power is defined by excess, a surfeit of the necessary, then collections of hunting trophies illustrate this thesis just as well as the harems of oriental sultans.