The Power of the Herd by Linda Kohanov Page A

in the woman’s eyes as she quietly said, “We love our young animals, so we couldn’t eat them.”
    â€œShe must have thought it a strange practice,” Fijn concludes, “as she was being so careful to nurture some weak lambs that were sleeping beside the hearth in front of her. It would be counterintuitive for a herder to kill them and eat them before they had produced any young of their own, when the animals had not yet lived a full life. If a young lamb dies from weakness or illness, the herder then utilizes the hide but does not eat the meat.” This reluctance to consume what our culture considers a delicacy shows how deeply bonded Mongolian herders become through the oxytocin-boosting activities of nursing and caring for the tribe’s four-legged children.
    Adults are also treated with reverence in death, but in a different way. Strict traditions ensure that individuals are killed humanely and quietly, away from the herd, the women, and the children. It’s disrespectful to waste any part of an older animal. Only the bones, which Mongolians believe house the souls of all living creatures, are left untouched, so that the spirits of cherished herd members can be released according to their own timing, to be reincarnated. This means that dogs are prevented from chewing on bones. The Buddhist-influenced tribes that Fijn studied also believe that people sometimes reincarnate as “one of the five animals” (as horses, sheep, goats, camels, or cattle) and vice versa, lending an even deeper sense of sacrifice and communion to this symbiotic pact.
    The close interspecies relationships that herding cultures develop, regardless of differing beliefs about the afterlife, can also be glimpsed throughout the Bible. The kosher code of the Jewish faith, in which a holy man actively blesses each creature before the slaughter, is the only remnant of this impulsethat modern Western society has retained. Orthodox tradition strictly forbids cruelty to animals, outlining the specific procedures, prayers, and spiritual mind-set for mediating such a sacrifice. Interestingly, kosher laws also forbid the ingestion of blood on the grounds that this would commingle animal with human life streams. (When Christ offered his blood as well as his flesh at the Last Supper, this powerful gesture would have been readily understood as the act of merging his life stream with those of his followers.) The Even people of Siberia, who believe they are half human, half reindeer, do in fact ingest the blood of their animals, as do the Mongolian pastoralists, who are perfectly comfortable with the idea of humans and animals reincarnating across species lines.
    The close association between two-legged and four-legged members of these tribes further explains why Jesus easily moved back and forth between metaphors in which he was depicted as a shepherd and a lamb. In fact, once you reconnect with Christianity’s nomadic pastoral roots, the ritual of communion becomes a multidimensional symbolic act, designed not only to bring individuals closer to God but to keep Abel’s perspective alive whenever and wherever city dwellers try to subjugate man and nature in support of a disconnected, materialistic cult of owner-masters. In this sense, Christ’s paradigm-altering efforts to include non-Jewish people in the sacrament he created could also be seen as an attempt to balance the predation running amok in the Greco-Roman world, offering a potent transfusion of nonpredatory wisdom in the wake of increasing violence.
    Extreme carnage wasn’t just tolerated in Jesus’s era; it was cultivated. The vast Roman Empire was managed by force and intimidation, reinforced by sadistic “games” at the Coliseum: gladiator exhibitions, public executions, and “beast hunts” (in which thousands of animals were slaughtered “with the right degree of cruelty”). The Roman historian Cicero praised this brutal