Meat, dairy and the milk gene, eggs, hides and leather, fiber, feathers and down, dung, and power: each linked to its animals and to the shop.
| Use | From | See the animals | In the shop |
|---|---|---|---|
| Meat | Pigs, cattle, sheep, goats, poultry, fish | Pigs · Cattle · Poultry · Fish | museum only |
| Lard, soap and candles | Pigs (lard), cattle and sheep (tallow) | Pigs · Cattle | museum only |
| Dairy | Cattle, goats, sheep, water buffalo, yak, camels | Cattle · Goats · Camels | museum only |
| Eggs | Chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys | Poultry | museum only |
| Hides, leather and pigskin | Cattle, goats, sheep, pigs | Cattle · Pigs · Goats | Shop → |
| Wool | Sheep | Sheep | Shop → |
| Mohair and cashmere | Angora and cashmere goats | Goats | Shop → |
| Alpaca, llama and vicuña | Andean camelids | Camels and cousins | Shop → |
| Silk | The silkworm | Bees and silkworms | Shop → |
| Bristles | Pigs (brushes, before nylon) | Pigs | museum only |
| Feathers and down | Ducks and geese | Poultry | museum only |
| Honey and wax | Honeybees | Bees and silkworms | museum only |
| Truffle hunting | Pigs (and now dogs) | Pigs · Dogs | museum only |
| Dung: fuel and fertilizer | Cattle, yak, camels, horses | Animal power | museum only |
| Power | Oxen, horses, donkeys, mules, camels, elephants | Animal power · Horses | museum only |
The shop sells products only; how each is sourced is shown on every listing. The museum tells the story.
Pigs were raised almost only for meat; sheep, goats, cattle, poultry and fish give meat alongside other products. Salting, smoking and curing let meat travel and keep: ham, bacon, salt cod and jerky all began as ways to store a harvest.
Which preserved meats in your kitchen began as a way to survive winter?
Farmers were processing milk into cheese and yogurt about 9,000 years ago, before most adults could digest it. The gene variant that keeps lactase working in adults spread later, most strongly in Europe and among some herding peoples of Africa and Arabia, a clear case of people and their animals changing each other.
How can a farm animal change human genes?
Chickens, ducks, geese, quail and turkeys all lay eggs, but the chicken won the market. Eggs are one of the cheapest complete proteins in the world, and the egg became a measure of food prices; see the market basket on our Market Watch page.
Why did the chicken egg beat the duck egg?
Tanning turns a hide into lasting leather. Vegetable tanning with tree bark tannins is thousands of years old; chrome tanning, introduced in the late 1800s, takes days instead of months and now makes most of the world's leather, but its chromium waste must be treated with care.
What is the trade-off between a fast tan and a clean river?
Wool comes from sheep; mohair from Angora goats; cashmere from the down of cashmere goats; alpaca, llama and vicuña from the camels of the Andes; angora from rabbits; and silk from the silkworm. Each fiber has its own warmth, shine and price.
Match each fiber to its animal, then find it in the yarn shop.
The soft under-feathers of ducks and geese trap air better than almost anything made. Down fills quilts and coats; flight feathers made quill pens for more than a thousand years.
Why is down still hard to replace with a synthetic?
Animal dung fertilized fields for thousands of years and is still burned for cooking and heat where wood is scarce, from the Tibetan Plateau to rural South Asia. In the 1800s, cities sold their horse manure to nearby farms.
Why was manure once a city's export?
For most of history the strongest engine on a farm was an animal. See the Animal power gallery for the plow, the collar, the canal and the horse city.
What jobs did animals do that machines do now?
Swipe, then tap to play. Captions are switched on where the maker provides them. Each film plays from its maker's channel.
Tap a picture to enlarge it. Every picture is public domain or openly licensed, credited below, and kept on our own server.