The Tamed Animal Farm

From a distant vantage point, the Tamed Animal Farm looked like any other. It had the farmhouse, the barns, the windmill, the hayfields, the garden, the barbed-wire fence, the woodpiles, and the pickup truck. Yet zoom in on the farm and you'd find something odd, the animals weren't cows and pigs, they were coyotes, raccoons, foxes, and squirrels. They were the life's work of the farmer, who set out to tame every animal in the forest. At first he captured them with snares and nets. Soon he found he didn't need to. As word of the farm spread throughout the forest, animals came voluntarily. They came for food, warm barns, and protection from predators. There was also a psychological comfort in living under the farmer. He decided where his animals lived, what they ate, who they mated with, and how they would die. Their lives were set and they never had to make decisions or take responsibility for anything.

Soon a second generation was born, never knowing life in the wild. Their parents raised them to believe they were morally superior to the violent brutes in the forest. On the farm, all animals were brothers and animal life was valued. Yes, the farmer could make an animal into a steak, but that was different, he was the farmer. The animal must repress any violent urges. Likewise, sexuality must be strictly controlled, only the farmer could authorize mating. Some young animals, finding the whole thing stifling, sought freedom in the forest. Most stayed. Some, confident in their moral superiority, went into the forest to preach tameness to the wild, mostly without success.

One day the farmer disappeared, last seen getting into his truck and driving east. The animals were thrown into distress, with many fearing they would descend into ferality. A raccoon named Jacob told them not to worry. The farmer will return. He delivered this message with an eloquence and confidence that, for most animals, made up for the fact that there was no evidence to support it. Louder and louder the animals began to chant: the farmer WILL return! Some animals had private doubts, but it didn't seem like the time to voice them. A belief in the farmer's return provided real comfort to the other animals, why try to take that away?

The farmer will return. The farmer will return. Three weeks went by and the farmer had not returned. That was when Jacob told the other animals that the farmer had left in order to test them. They must prove themselves worthy of his return. They had to preserve the farmhouse exactly as he had left it. They had to remain tame, always behaving as if he were present. They must idolize him, but they could not become him. An animal could not wear clothes, drink alcohol, buy things with money, fire a gun, or operate an automobile. Jacob gathered the farmer's rules, regulations, and remembered poetic witticisms and combined them into a rulebook that would act as a constitution on the farm.

Interpreting the rulebook was not always easy. It said an animal cannot kill another animal, but what about elderly animals who were sick, in pain, and wanted to die? Some said that to kill an animal for altruistic reasons was totally different from the selfish predation of the forest. Jacob said no, a tame animal could not kill, period, to do so was to be like a wild animal or the farmer, both of which were forbidden. Some animals read the farmer's agricultural textbooks and discovered the principle of selective breeding. They suggested using it to improve themselves and become like the farmer. Jacob forbade this as the height of immorality. You are animals and animals you must remain. Jacob often made an appeal to nature, which may seem strange considering the whole tame philosophy was based on a rejection of the animal's inherent wildness. To Jacob, there was no contradiction. The purpose of an animal was to be made tame, just as an egg's purpose was to hatch a bird.

The tame animal could not be violent, yet how was any of this to be enforced? All violators, Jacob said, had the right to be tried by a court. If found guilty, they would be punished first with a formal public condemnation, then with trade sanctions. The last resort was a commando of raccoons and wolves who would tie the offender up and release it outside the farm's barbed-wire fence. This was not violence, Jacob explained, even though for the weaker animals it meant a high probability of death by predation. While some of the expelled were guilty of killing and eating other animals, others were guilty of nothing more than mouthing off about how the farmer was not actually coming back.

While there was no free speech on the farm, it would be wrong to conclude that most animals were tame because they feared the commando. Animals who were exiled or went into the forest voluntarily reported that most animals fully bought into tameness and believed in the farmer's return. Why?

As the years went by, fewer and fewer saw the farmer's return as an imminent event that would solve their problems. It was pushed into the indeterminate future, with many animals resigning themselves to the likelihood that they would die before it. But they didn't need the farmer's physical presence, they had his sayings, they had the rulebook. He was there with them in spirit, able to accept them into the morally superior elect. Tameness was an identity open to any animal, old or young, male or female, strong or weak. You may be a lowly hay-gatherer, but you are tame, better than any wolf in the forest. You are better, too, than those elitist animals who think themselves worthy of putting on clothes and firing guns. You, the salt-of-the-earth tamed beast, are the pinnacle of morality.

Supporting it all were the raw forces of gullibility and conformism. The authority figures say it's good, so good is what it is. The rulebook is the rulebook, if someone asks why we follow the rulebook, you snort derisively and say, "because those are the rules!" Even those who violated some of its regulations expressed horror at discarding the rulebook altogether. They could not imagine morality existing without it.

One animal who didn't accept any of it was a bear named Otto, who ridiculed the notion of the farmer's return, calling it a collective delusion supported by nothing more than sentimentality and wishful thinking. Beyond the factual issues he raised, Otto found the aesthetics of tameness disgusting. Why should you be proud of your own submissiveness? Why should you hate your own nature? No, he said, you must think for yourself. You must be the master of your own destiny. A court had sentenced him to expulsion, a punishment he laughed off since no commando was going to drag a bear anywhere. Jacob could not get rid of him, nor prevent the other animals from hearing his message. Otto roared with a volume that everyone on the farm could hear, whether they wanted to or not.

Otto's ideas were especially appealing to the young, ambitious, and intelligent, to the children of the farm's elite. One was Jacob's son and designated successor, Jonah. Jonah denied being a follower of Otto and said he engaged with Otto's ideas for the sole purpose of arguing against them. Jacob did not believe him and stripped him of the succession. Three months later, Jonah returned to the fold and was restored. By all accounts the repudiation was sincere. Why?

Tameness, at its root, is about obedience, an obedience Otto mocked as infantilizing, emasculating, the celebration of one's own weakness and degradation. On the other hand, wouldn't you like for other animals to obey you? So long as the farmer was not physically present, Jacob was in charge, with the added benefit that he didn't need to explain or justify the rules he enforced. The farmer, he would say, is far smarter than any of us. Who are we to question his rules? If the cost of such power was a bit of submission theater, it was a cost Jonah and many other elite animals were willing to pay. Jonah would later admit to a mild enchantment with Otto's ideas, which he realized were "unrealistic" after he "grew up."

Jonah assumed leadership upon Jacob's death. Some in Jacob's court were unhappy, wanting power for themselves, but Jacob was too revered for anyone to challenge his choice. The day after Jonah took power, he flew into a rage when he learned that the farmer's guns had disappeared. He began to speak of a seditious conspiracy against him, though he did not make any arrests or name any names. Eight days into his reign, Jonah slept and never woke, having been poisoned by an unknown assassin. He had designated no successor. The result was chaos. Jonah's brother Nathan claimed the right to succeed him. The head of the Harvest Committee, a badger named Mark, declared that as he had been Jacob's successor before Jonah, the right of succession was returned to him. A boar named Gus asserted that as he had been the executor of Jacob's will, he had the authority to decide who should have power. To the surprise of nobody, he chose himself. The Supreme Court reminded the animals that it was the only body empowered to decide such questions. It ruled that none of the three had a valid claim and selected its chief justice, a woodchuck named Adam, as successor.

Under Adam's direction, the Supreme Court declared the three other claimants guilty of rebellion, to be punished by exile. Each responded by declaring the Supreme Court dissolved and replacing it with courts of their supporters, who promptly declared the others similarly guilty. There were now four courts, four commandos, four authorities. The claimants built bunkers surrounded by barbed wire lest enemy commandos come for them.

For the average tame farm animal, it was all quite bewildering. "Tameness" had always been easy, just listen to Jacob and his court, follow his orders, believe what he told you was true, and you were good, moral, and tame. Now four different animals were hitting you with complex legal arguments, citing doctrines you had never heard of, and calling you a wild beast if you didn't accept them and reject the others. Most animals chose who to follow based on personal factors. An animal might side with Adam because he was a woodchuck, or side with Mark because the head of the Harvest Committee controlled the food. One thing all four claimants agreed on was that a tame animal could not be neutral. It must acknowledge and follow the correct authority; to do otherwise was to declare itself a wild beast.

The succession crisis was a period of great legal innovation. An animal still had the right to a trial, but it could occur in secret without its knowledge. One trial could convict an entire family. Jacob had only allowed violence in self-defense, and only then as a last resort, the tamed animal was to run if possible and try to incapacitate rather than kill its attacker. "Clarifications" were piled onto this doctrine and soon armies of commandos were battling one another in the fields. More often the commandos cornered sleeping animals, tied them up, and dragged them outside the barbed wire, where so many animals were dumped that wolves began to congregate. Terrified animals hid in dugouts, crawlspaces, woodpiles, haystacks, bins of rubbish, in the farm's old outhouse and the hollows beneath the compost heap. Others broke into the farmhouse, long forbidden except to the animals tasked with cleaning it. That didn't last for long, as an unknown arsonist burned it down. A year into the succession dispute, the farmhouse was in ruins and a third of the animals were dead.

But don't call it a war, the claimants all said. Tame animals don't fight wars.

For Otto it was all a confirmation of what he had long said, tameness simply sucked. It sucked by the standards of his philosophy, being an emasculating celebration of weakness and stupidity. And it sucked by its own standards of "peace," "empathy" and "brotherhood." There was no redeeming value to it, it brought out the worst in animals and its proper place was the trash heap of history. Some of his followers urged him to impose his will on the farm. He refused, saying he wasn't interested in ruling. His critics said he was a coward and just as hypocritical as the claimants.

The carnage seemed to have no end in sight. Then one day Adam the woodchuck ordered some of his commandos on what they believed would be a suicide mission. The commandos, most of whom were wolves, growled unhappily and refused to move. Enraged, Adam screamed at them, "Are you not tame? Are you wild beasts?" At this question, three wolves attacked him, snapping his neck almost instantly. The others stood and watched. The wolves made no attempt to take power, allowing Adam's brother Joel to assume leadership. Fearing the same fate, he let the assassins go unpunished. When the other claimants learned what had happened, they were horrified. Would their own commandos behave the same way? There was talk of a universal mutiny and the creation of a new constitution that would exclude all the claimants. Making peace now seemed like the only way to preserve their power.

The four claimants gathered at the Springhouse Conference and began drafting an agreement. None would give up their moral claim to be the rightful successor to Jacob and Jonah. But they would recognize the right of the farm's animals to choose their own "stream." The initial draft required animals to choose one of the four, but this occasioned growling, hissing, and renewed talk of a universal mutiny. Radicals demanded total freedom to choose their stream of tameness, pointing to the possibility of further crises of succession. The resulting Springhouse Agreement granted this freedom. It also merged the four courts into a single court that would enforce laws everyone agreed needed to exist, like those against assault and theft. Law and tameness would be mostly, though not entirely, separate. Among the prohibited behaviors was being non-tame.

For the vast majority of the farm's animals, the Springhouse Agreement was a godsend. They could come out of their hiding places, replant their fields, dig new burrows, mate and raise their young. They could live normal lives again. Most animals didn't want to talk much about what had happened. They accepted that the price of peace was that the enemy commandos who had terrorized them got to live normal lives, too. Only as the war generation grew old did the farm begin to look back. They could admit that it had indeed been a war. They asked why so many animals who had spent their entire lives on the farm, who had been raised with the ideals of tameness, turned into willing killers. Otto, by then sick and dying, said the problem was tameness itself, but few agreed. No, they responded, the war happened because the animals weren't tame enough. The ruined farmhouse, they said, should remind every animal of the consequences of not suppressing its wild nature.

Eventually the animals learned what had happened to the farmer's guns. On his deathbed, Jacob ordered them destroyed and swore those who did it to secrecy. He gave no reasoning for what was a grave violation of the rulebook, which required that all the farmer's possessions be preserved. Many animals, refusing to believe he would do such a thing, insisted that those who testified to this were not telling the truth.

The Springhouse Agreement granted animals the right to create new streams of tameness. Few who lived through the war were interested, they were either loyal to their existing stream or wanted nothing to do with any stream. It was for the next generation to take advantage of their new freedom. A blue jay named Abigail preached that the "hierarchy" that Jacob had created was contrary to tameness. All an animal needed to be tame was the rulebook. There were some problems with this, the average animal struggled to understand the rulebook, which was itself the product of the same "bureaucracy" she was condemning. Yet her ideas proved popular. A deer named Jebediah nullified the rulebook's prohibitions on wearing clothes by changing the definitions of the words "wearing" and "clothing." A rabbit named Nicky developed what was perhaps the oddest new stream, the "warrior tames." If tameness was morally superior, spreading it through violence was not just permissible but mandatory. The farm must form an army of warriors and force tameness on the beasts of the forest. Any pacifistic animal was a TINO - tame in name only. Put on your armor (which is not a form of clothing) and pick up your sword. No guns though. Even if we figured out how to make them, the animal masses would never accept a tame animal with a gun. What are you suggesting, we not be tame? If we're not tame, our message won't appeal to low-income voters in rural Arkansas.

Oops, made the analogy a little too obvious there.

Anyway, back to the farm. Few wanted to join Nicky's warrior tame army, but the fact that he was saying these things openly was jarring to many animals. They didn't like him, nor the clothes-wearers or beer-drinkers. This was, they said, a slow descent into ferality. Leaders gathered for a new conference, called Springhouse II. An agreement was drafted that defined the boundaries of tameness and prohibited some of the more offensive streams. Yet when it came time to sign, Albert, the grandson of Nathan and great-grandson of Jacob, refused. He had been told that this time would be different, this time the accused would have a fair trial and the opportunity to repent. Nevertheless, he said, the slope was too slippery. The eloquence of his speech affected the other leaders, who decided it required reconsideration. In the end, even the boar Clovis, who had spoken the loudest in favor of the conference and demanded until the end that the agreement be signed, admitted defeat and told his followers to accept it. Springhouse II had been called to restore the old order and wound up ratifying the new climate of freedom.

In the years after Springhouse II, many animals stopped engaging with tameness altogether. The animal didn't need a contrived argument about how beer doesn't count as alcohol, it just drank and told anyone who objected it was none of their business. A bird that habitually responded this way was charged with not being tame. The judge dismissed the case, holding that there was no obligation to answer such questions and thus no evidence the defendant was not tame. Thereafter, the non-tame had an easy way to find one another and organize.

One such not-very-tame was a wolf named Rutherford. He resurrected the old idea of selective breeding, an idea with a long pedigree that now seemed feasible, given how much more the animals knew about biology. The farmer, Rutherford said, was an animal like them, the only difference was he had a bigger brain, paws that let him better use tools, and a longer lifespan. They could become like him, indeed, they could become better than him. They could eliminate pregnancy, disease, and death altogether, becoming immortal. It would be a very long-term project, but it was doable.

Part of the project was formally legalizing non-tameness, which was achieved in a new constitutional convention, called Springhouse III. The constitution established there removed all mention of tameness from the law, with just one exception. It's still called the Tamed Animal Farm.

Is the name a misnomer? In one sense, no. The majority of its animals self-identify as tame, as does almost all of its political leadership. Yet in another sense, the animals on the farm are not really tame. Tameness used to mean obedience to the farmer. Then it meant obedience to Jacob. It was a verb as well as an adjective, something done to an animal. Today it's a voluntary cultural identity, something an animal can claim despite very non-tame personal behavior.

Tameness is, nevertheless, essential to understanding the farm's politics. There are some who deny this, who maintain that the issue is no longer important, that animals who think it is are living in the past. If this were true, it is rather odd that an animal's tame identity predicts its political alignment better than almost any other factor, better than age, sex, or economic class. A minority of animals, most often called the "true tames," maintain that the rulebook is binding, the farmer will return, and that the only way to be moral is to be tame. On the other side are the non-tame minority. At the center are those who call themselves tame and believe in a "figurative" return of the farmer, see the rulebook as full of suggestions rather than commandments, and believe that tameness should be separate from law. They are the median animal to whom politicians pander. "I was raised with the values of tameness, the values of being kind and charitable toward one's fellow animals, values I hold dear today" said one politician. If you find such a statement very vague as to what he actually believes, that's exactly what he intended.

Will tameness make a comeback? Many true tames think so, believing the young are converting to their philosophy. Is this true? No. But when has lack of evidence stopped them from believing? On the farm, the dream of a tame restoration is the dream of an ordered, unified society. It's the dream that you (or someone who thinks like you) could be Jacob, restructuring society at will. Maybe you're a true idealist who wants to use this power to make society better, nicer, more just. Maybe you just like the fantasy of bossing other animals around. Regardless, that's all it is, a fantasy. Those who seek and acquire actual political power do not do so through tameness except in its wishy-washy form. In the past, a leader of the tame was a leader of society. Today the great promise is that you can acquire a following of stupid and often dysfunctional animals whose irrational beliefs are rarely limited to believing the farmer will return. Ghosts, fairies, changelings, omens, curses, the hag in the weeds and the troll under the bridge, they swallow it all. Those who think the true tames are right about some things, such as the harmfulness of alcohol consumption, eventually realize they will do better to advocate for their views outside the framework of tameness.

The true tames spend a lot of time complaining about their lack of power, yet from one perspective it's the fulfillment of their ideals. They had no power under the farmer. They created a philosophy that made profane the implements of power: money, guns, cars and trucks. That glorified timidity and acceptance of domination. When the farmer left, Jacob and his court had to compromise their philosophy, exercising power and violence. Today's true tames are spared this indignity. The non-tame and nominally tame are happy the true tames do not govern the farm, as are many of the true tames themselves, taking pride in their simple jobs and simple possessions. Political power? That's rather pagan, don't you think?

Oops, made it too obvious again.