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ANIMALS & SOCIETY IN BRAZIL
From the XVIth to the XIXth Century
ANA LUCIA CAMPHORA, PhD Social Science
Abstract
RUGENDAS, W.M.,1835.

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A contemporary approach to historic facts
Whales harpooned at the Guanabara Bay. Monkeys, parrots and macaws shipped off to Europe… in the thousands. Oxen
shot down on pasturelands. Humming birds’ feathers used to adorn hats and gowns at the Portuguese Court. A
slaughterhouse ran, out in the open, at Santa Luzia Beach, downtown Rio de Janeiro. Cattle moved water and sugar cane
mills. Donkey pulled streetcars and coaches crossed the city. Ants and monkeys offered as meals. Snake tail powder
advised for toothache and roasted opossum tail prescribed for kidney stone treatment.
Feeding, medicating, moving, dressing, amusing or composing the Indigenous spiritual pantheon. Animals participated,
directly or not, in the complex formative processes of the Brazilian society, since the first Portuguese sailors arrived on its
coasts. Narratives produced along the first four hundred years of Brazilian history, reveal how animals had been involved
in function that Indigenous, European and African peoples assigned to them.
Livestock, food, objects or sensitive beings capable of expressing human like feelings. Sources for spiritual power, healing
factors, resources for the Portuguese Treasure or a general menace to humans’ lives and material possessions.
Innumerous practices, capabilities and knowledge showed various modes by which animals and society interacted in the
contexts of colonial and postcolonial Brazil.
Each historic period distinguishes itself by a specific context that defines it along time. Historic literature assure to Humans
a representation of their own, exclusively social, following a narrative scheme arisen from the isolation between natural
facts – built and legitimated by the scientific representation of natural processes, and political facts – exclusively legitimated
by social forces. Such ‘mainstream vision’, that characterizes the modern world representation system, settled the
naturalization of differences between humans and non-humans, legitimating the non-humanity of nature and the humanity
of the social – thus regarded as obvious categories.
Therefore, the modern worldview disconnects from all other views of the world, designated as primitive, pre-modern or
traditional, which are immerse in ‘nature-cultures’ and, bounded by the conditioning aspects of culture, ‘fated’ to a an
imprecise knowledge about nature. But how could one deny recognition to the crescent erosion of such human assigned
competences, as subjects of all action, in opposition to an external nature, field of passive objects? Jared Diamond, in his
Pulitzer winning book Guns, Germes and Steel, describes the role played by lethal microbial entities in the European
conquests and the wiping out of New World’s native people? Epidemy transmissions turned out to be faster and more
effective killers than armed battles were.
Goals and context
This book means to rescue non-human animal species from the segregation that Social Sciences have long bestowed
upon them, giving visibility to perceptions and attitudes toward certain species, cultural values related to them and to their
roles in the Brazilian Society development process. The cultural and social reflexes of such development comprise a hybrid
net of representations, where nature and society mingle, undermining the restrictive worldview that keeps animals in the
periphery of the historic fact.
This hidden chapter of our social-environmental history, not only strengthens our convictions concerning the share of
fundamental rights with such beings, but also suggests a review of the attributes that constitute our interpretative system,
as we consider the protagonism of other species in the socio-cultural formative process of the Brazilian society.

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Iconographic testimony
The iconography produced in Colonial and Post Colonial period, along the XVIIIth to
XIXth Century, is the main testimony of animal presence in Brazilian society, with a
distinguished perspective regarding animal presence in the socio-cultural context. The
rich collections produced by European artists show the diversity of relationship between
humans and non-humans whom lived in the new territory, revealing a range of interests
and association with animals established by Europeans, indigenous people and African
slaves.
In drawings, prints and paintings – nature, culture, economy and environment
overlapped. Visual records exposed aspects rarely framed by written reports like the
cohabitation with domestic animals in the given period. I found very few texts written
that. Yet, these animals appear in uncountable illustrations, of hunting scenes, street
markets, homes, urban and rural landscapes.
Just as in verbal language, socio-cultural influences imbricated in visual representations
are evident. European Artists arrived in Brazil anxious to discover new species and
capture the complexity of the tropical nature. They brought along a representation
system proper to their backgrounds and socially conditioned motivations. Quite often, the artist’s eye was renderd better
visions of the sensible world, its shapes, colors, sounds and movements. Such perceptions not always find words to
convey their synesthetic content. So, as importantly as the literary records, access such ‘materiality’ of image brings us
close to whatever the painter’s eye had actually seen. It breaks the distance of inexact references and amplifies our
understanding of a past bound by historic records and narratives.
Structure of Chapters
I – THE LAND’s NATURAL RESOURCES - It focuses on the initial and most basic levels of interaction: animals as
food to sustain the newly arrived European conquerors. Adopting the indigenous “cuisine”, tasting delightful new kinds of
meat, worrying at the discovery of new animal species… were steps involved in the recognition of the new territory. Hell
and paradise descriptions casted the native fauna in mythic representations of the conquered lands. Much of those first
time impressions endured to become part of the Brazilian way of life, until the late XIXth century.
II – IN HEALTH AND IN SICKNESS - It gathers reports associations between certain species and healing procedures for
common diseases. Up until the XIXth Century, physicians were rare in Brazil and there was no medical school.
Surprisingly, much of the available literature about health conditions in colonial times underline co-relations between the
principles of Western medicine and indigenous healing practices. A deeper approach reveals them to be, at the most,
merely superficial.
III - HUNTERS AND WHALE HARPOONERS - Examines hunting techniques used by native Brazilians and colonizers.
The first plantation and small towns rose hunters to a prestigious social level, as their killing skills helped human settlements
to get rid of ferocious predators and other undesired wild animals. Whale fishing, a lucrative monopoly of the Portuguese
Crown, became an important economic activity with direct impact on the colonial life for almost three hundred years.
IV – ANIMALS THAT LANDED IN BRAZIL – LIVESTOCK - The arrival of cattle from Europe and their adaptation to the
new environment, in the different Brazilian regions. The first livestock farms introduced new landscape, cowboy culture
and a new form of development local based.

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V – ANIMALS THAT LANDED IN BRAZIL – MULES AND HORSES - Horses and mules arrived from Europe in XVIth
Century, as well as cattle. Mules were the main transportation aid for both, people and cargo, although they would fully
replace Indigenous labor, around mid XVIIIth century only.
VI – PILLORIES AND SLAUGHTERHOUSES, THE CITY OF XIXth’s CENTURY - Colonial cities expressed the isolation
and delay from the emergence of humanist though in Europe. At the same time was where the Court became more
present and exercised a greater control. In this context, comparisons between the condition of the slave and the animal
was common.
VII – A TIMELINE - The last chapter follows a timeline across four centuries, as animals condition becomes a non-
detachable part of historic facts. A proposed scenery highlights the contingency of a country laid aside of the humanist
debates that, in the XVIIIth Century, set basis for animal protection discussions, more specifically, in Germany and England.
The author
In a large measure, certain kinds of environmental activism spring from the world-view of those who refuse the
mainstream division, of human and non-human beings. For these souls, childhood sceneries prevail, populated by talkative
animals. Perhaps, understanding the paths we walk later through adulthood, which highlight causes, merging career and
personal ideals, could be easier if one remains native to this common ground, where the human spirit lays deep roots.
Moreover, when facing, from time to time, the flopped outcomes of socially imposed life choices. Accordingly, this book
realizes a hybrid road, each step forward responding also to an inner call, unavoidably branded on the skin of life. I hope
it may successfully express my effort to deem coherently an intellectual, personal and reflexive search for multi-streamed
visions between two worlds, conveniently set apart. Nowadays, I simply believe that sharing welfare security rights with
other animal species, translates as an oxygenating venue for the creativity of human existence.
Ana Lucia Camphora, Brazilian, 51, is Social Science PhD (Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, 2008), Master
Degree in Communities Psychosociology and Social Ecology (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, 2003) and Psychologist.
March, 2015