24 DOMESTICATED ANIMALS AND PLANTS 
wonder that hunting men starved periodically, when it took, as 
estimated, forty acres of good hunting ground to sustain one 
individual. 
It was inevitable that the time should come when man must 
take better care of the wild animals or give up animal food. 
The first step was to hunt and destroy the wild animals that 
preyed upon those that were of value to man,1 and the next was 
to spare the finest males and all females with young.? Thus 
were the first steps in domestication and the beginning of im- 
provement instituted at substantially the same time. 
The next step was to provide food for this increasing stock 
of valuable semidomesticated animals. This was done in two 
ways. The easy way was to herd and drive the bunch to fresh 
pastures where there was good water. This required a consider- 
able force of men and horses, not only to herd the animals but 
to protect them from robbers, because these herds were none too 
plenty and the feeding lands none too extensive.? 
The other plan of providing food was to supply it directly 
from cultivated plants, confining the animals more and more as 
natural feeding grounds became exhausted. This is the more 
laborious of the two methods, but it is the one followed when 
natural feeding grounds (plains) are not extensive, and it is the 
one necessarily followed wherever lands become valuable. Thus 
did man save to his own use and preserve from extinction not 
only the dog and the horse, but all the animals good for food, 
and thus, in a measure, has he become their servant and care- 
taker in consideration of what they can do for him. 
1 To the knowledge of the writer a wolf hunt occurred in Illinois as late as 
the very close of the last century, — I am quite sure in 1898. 
? At the discovery of South America the Peruvian Indians, orAztecs, were 
found to have already instituted an annual hunt by which all the animals of 
a great region were rounded up in some mountain valley, driven to close 
quarters, the worthless and dangerous beasts of prey systematically killed, and 
the supply of meat taken not from the best, but from the common animals, 
being careful to release the best for breeding purposes in order that the quality 
of the supply should not deteriorate. 
3 Read again the story of Abraham and Lot, Genesis xiii, 7-11. 
