page_title: Animal husbandry
section_title: In culture
hierarchical_section_title: Animal husbandry / Effects / In culture
caption_attribution_description: English: pg 13 of The Tale of Pigling Bland.
context_page_description: Animal husbandry is the branch of agriculture concerned with animals that are raised for meat, fibre, milk, eggs, or other products. It includes day-to-day care, selective breeding and the raising of livestock.
  Husbandry has a long history, starting with the Neolithic revolution when animals were first domesticated, from around 13,000 BC onwards, antedating farming of the first crops. By the time of early civilisations such as ancient Egypt, cattle, sheep, goats and pigs were being raised on farms.
  Major changes took place in the Columbian Exchange when Old World livestock were brought to the New World, and then in the British Agricultural Revolution of the 18th century, when livestock breeds like the Dishley Longhorn cattle and Lincoln Longwool sheep were rapidly improved by agriculturalists such as Robert Bakewell to yield more meat, milk, and wool.
  A wide range of other species such as horse, water buffalo, llama, rabbit and guinea pig are used as livestock in some parts of the world. Insect farming, as well as aquaculture of fish, molluscs, and crustaceans, is widespread.
  Modern animal husbandry relies on production systems adapted to the type of land available.
context_section_description: Since the 18th century, the farmer John Bull has represented English national identity, first in John Arbuthnot's political satires, and soon afterwards in cartoons by James Gillray and others including John Tenniel. He likes food, beer, dogs, horses, and country sports; he is practical and down to earth, and anti-intellectual.
  Farm animals are widespread in books and songs for children; the reality of animal husbandry is often distorted, softened, or idealized, giving children an almost entirely fictitious account of farm life. The books often depict happy animals free to roam in attractive countryside, a picture completely at odds with the realities of the impersonal, mechanized activities involved in modern intensive farming.
  Pigs, for example, appear in several of Beatrix Potter's "little books", as Piglet in A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh stories, and somewhat more darkly (with a hint of animals going to slaughter) as Babe in Dick King-Smith's The Sheep-Pig, and as Wilbur in E. B. White's Charlotte's Web. Pigs tend to be "bearers of cheerfulness, good humour and innocence". Many of these books are completely anthropomorphic, dressing farm animals in clothes and having them walk on two legs, live in houses, and perform human activities. The children's song "Old MacDonald Had a Farm" describes a farmer named MacDonald and the various animals he keeps, celebrating the noises they each make.
  Many urban children experience animal husbandry for the first time at a petting farm; in Britain, some five million people a year visit a farm of some kind. This presents some risk of infection, especially if children handle animals and then fail to wash their hands; a strain of E. coli infected 93 people who had visited a British interactive farm in an outbreak in 2009. Historic farms such as those in the United States offer farmstays and "a carefully curated version of farming to those willing to pay for it", sometimes giving visitors a romanticised image of a pastoral idyll from an unspecified time in the pre-industrial past.
caption: Dressed pigs in Beatrix Potter's 1913 The Tale of Pigling Bland
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