Chapter 6 four reindeer

first domesticated deer ★Cultural Connotation The Finnish︱Ugric language family [Note 1] is composed of many tribes and cultures, and its distribution ranges from Siberia west to Magyars (Magyars, in Hungary), and goes north to Finland and Lapland (Lapland, [Note 2]) .They spread their devotion to witchcraft and shamanism (Shamanism), their drumming skills, complex language, and belief that everything has a soul.The reindeer has long been associated with these tribes and cultures, and they believe it also has a soul that is inseparable from its body; when a reindeer's body dies, its soul dies with it, which is why people lament reason for mourning.

[Note 1] The Finno︱Ugric language family (Finno︱Ugric) belongs to the Uralic family (Uralic family). The population of this language family is about 20 million, distributed from Scandinavia to the east, across the Ural Mountains, to the In the vast area of ​​Northwest Asia, in addition to the Finn︱Ugric language family, there is also the Samoyedic language family.The Finnish︱Ugric language family includes Finnish and Ugric, with a total of about 15 languages ​​distributed in the vast area of ​​Eurasia.The Finnish languages ​​mainly include Finnish, Estonian and Lapp; the Ugric languages ​​mainly include Hungarian, Vochak and Vogul.

[Note 2] Refers to the area inhabited by the Lapps in northwestern Europe, including the areas in the Arctic Circle in Norway, Sweden, and Finland, as well as the Kola peninsula in the Soviet Union.Lapland means that the vast majority of the living population is Lapp, but the residents like to call themselves Same.The locality was never defined as an autonomous polity or state, as the Lapps never seem to have developed administrative organization.Since their social and political structures never transcended the ethnic group level, they were always subordinate to the governments of neighboring peoples such as Scandinavians and Soviets.

In Norway, early hunters carved reindeer as a symbol of strength and power.By the Bronze Age, at Vikso in modern Denmark, the same symbol was used in the manufacture of ornate ceremonial helmets.Like the horns of a bull, the prongs of a reindeer have long been thought of as a gigantic fist gripping the hilt of a thick, broad-edged sword. The Koryaks, a northwestern branch of the Finnish/Ugric culture, named the northern constellation we call Ursa Major Elwe'kyen, which means wild male reindeer.The Kojak believe that the Creator traveled to the lands of these stars to bring back reindeer for mankind; among their possessions, the most sacred and must-have in every household is a drum made of reindeer hide.When people need a shaman, the shaman doesn't come with his own drum, he uses that family drum to drive away evil forces, whether sent by God or not.For this well-intentioned reason, the reindeer sacrificed their bodies for the manufacture of leather drums.

★Original animal The reindeer (rein|deer) raised by humans today belongs to the same species as its ancestor: reindeer (Rangifer tarandus), that is, animals that humans currently raise for meat, milk sources, and as pack animals.The lack of a name of its own is unusual, but not unique, for this domestic animal.Reindeer belong to the deer family, and due to the difference in appearance, there are about thirty-eight to forty-one species in the taxonomic classification of the deer family.Although Northern Russia is currently conducting experiments with the largest deer (this kind of deer is called European elk in Europe, American elk in North America, and the red deer in the United States should actually be called Canadian red deer. more appropriate).But the reindeer was still the first domesticated animal in the deer family.

The deer family has a wide distribution, and it may have been found in North and South America, Europe, Asia, and even the northeastern tip of the African continent, which is usually considered deer-free.They were introduced to Australia and New Zealand, but have become endemic pests, especially in New Zealand. According to historical records, the distribution range of reindeer is extremely wide: dating back to Ireland and Scotland in the Middle Ages, Scandinavia and Germany in Roman times, Poland in the sixteenth century, and Russia, Mongolia, China, Alaska, Canada, the continental United States and Greenland.In prehistoric times, its traces reached as far as Switzerland, France and Spain.Fossils of reindeer ancestors have not been found anywhere in Europe or Asia, so it has been hypothesized that reindeer may have originated in North America.In what is now North America, the species is known as the caribou.

Reindeer are the only deer with prongs, both male and female.Although the shape and size of the prongs vary from place to place, reindeer are all the same species.Males shed their antlers by November or December, females until spring, and young reindeer don't shed their antlers until summer. There are two types of reindeer, tundra reindeer and woodland reindeer. The latter may have more abundant food, so generally speaking, they are larger, weighing about 700 pounds (about 318 kilograms).As their name suggests, the reindeer's habitat stretches from the open tundra to the adjoining boreal forest.

Reindeer are the most gregarious of all deer.They gather in herds, sometimes as many as 20,000 reindeer per square kilometer.This is especially true for tundra reindeer. In North America alone, at least 30 herds of tundra and woodland reindeer combined have been identified, and each herd can contain up to 200,000 reindeer.In 1917, in Canada, it is said that there was a herd consisting of 25 million reindeer. These deer herds are like undulating aggregates.They gather separately by sex in groups, merge together when migrating and breeding, and by May or June, females give birth out of the group after 228 days of pregnancy.Afterwards, the deer herd gathered again briefly, dispersed according to sex in summer, merged and migrated again soon, and dispersed again in winter.Fawns are precocious; they follow their mothers around within hours of birth, and some are weaned after a month.

The eating habits of reindeer are very unique.The biota in their range is not rich, but they are very picky eaters.They feed on seagrass if they live on shore, and fungi if they live in woodland.They eat leaves and some kinds of grass, but not others; they eat some kinds of twigs and flowers, but not others; they like cranberries, but hate heather; They are not too keen on the needle-like leaves of evergreen trees, but are very fond of lichens, especially the several-foot-thick variety called caribou moss.However, they only eat real moss when they are extremely hungry. Reindeer can convert these unpalatable but cellulose-rich plants into carbohydrates, fats and proteins, providing the meat, milk, leather, deer hair and labor needed by humans.They are large animals that must fend for themselves in harsh environments, and they adapt well.Perhaps the strangest characteristic of reindeer is that they have a more carnivorous diet than other ruminants; they will eat fish and meat discarded by humans, and even hunt after lemmings. It is especially common when lichen production is reduced.

Clearly, for large, energy-hungry animals like reindeer to survive in their habitat, they must have a complex set of chemical messages reminding them of what their bodies need.These messages change their behavior and sense of taste and allow them to seek out what they need in response to their needs.One of the most peculiar needs of reindeer is a mania for human urine; they drink dog urine, have no particular preference for the urine of their own kind, but have an almost crazy love for human urine. (They even eat snow stained with urine.) Hunters and herders use this desire as bait, and thus gain some control over the herd.In addition to their special preference for human urine, reindeer have another well-known hobby: Although they are not very receptive to human feeding, they will not stop licking human sweaty hands.These special tastes may be due to the lack of salt in the food they ingest.

★Characters in the Stone Age For Paleolithic hunters 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, reindeer were an important source of meat, hide, tendon, and bone.It is suspected that it had a similar relationship with humans at that time, but this is only speculation and cannot be confirmed. Regardless of when this relationship originated, we can now understand the pastoral history of this species from subsequent relationships that survive to this day.In the earliest stages of humans' relationship with reindeer, humans hunted reindeer just as they hunted other animals in other regions.In other regions and other cultures, because humans and animals migrated together, there should have been a certain degree of livestock breeding at that time. As for complete livestock breeding, the relationship was developed later. At this time, reindeer secrete milk for human production. Cheese, pull sleds, carry goods like other pull animals, be saddled for humans to drive, and some provide humans with meat and hides.At present, about 3 million reindeer are domesticated as livestock, most of which are concentrated in the former Soviet Union, where 32,000 metric tons of meat and 650,000 pieces of hide are obtained from reindeer every year.Domesticated reindeer were also introduced to Iceland, the Orkney Islands (in Britain), Scotland, the Kerguelen Islands (French, in the Indian Ocean), South Georgia Island, Alaska, Canada and Greenland, and the forty-eight states of the United States. The earliest breeders of reindeer were primitive tribes scattered over vast lands with harsh climatic conditions.As might be expected, the remains of these tribes were either inexplicable or not recorded at all.The bones of wild and domesticated reindeer don't differ much, so it's impossible to decipher any meaningful records.Reindeer herders routinely castrate their bucks (by chewing them off in an ancient way), and intact reindeer do have differences in their horns from castrated reindeer.Since the horns of many castrated reindeer have been found in small areas, we can speculate that reindeer were indeed herded. We know that herders in Siberia began to drink reindeer milk as early as 500 BC, and even earlier, herders and children sucked milk directly from the teats of doe.Milking seems to have been developed in two regions: Scandinavia and North Asia; cheesemaking is a modern product. The reindeer was not used as a pack animal until the first millennium AD; it was used for riding, carrying heavy loads, and pulling sleds, perhaps after the horse and ox preceded it.However, some researchers believe that the earliest husbandry of reindeer may date back to 12,000 BC, due to attempts by Paleolithic humans and their somewhat successful control of migration. ★grazing Once we understand the type of migration involved in reindeer, it is not difficult to see how caribou hunters became deer herders.Reindeer can move up to fifty-five miles per hour in an emergency, and about thirty-five miles per day in normal times; no matter what speed, their moving distance can be extended to a distance of 700 miles.Instead of trotting endlessly across the frozen wastes, one might Rather let everything go slower and keep all the benefits.The paths of reindeer across rivers are predictable, but other times humans and wolves must try to catch up with them and predict new routes that the herd will take, and it is often humans or even wolves that change the path of reindeer. Unexpected.In a harsh environment, human beings may be exhausted in order to obtain all his needs.Even the most primitive form of herding seems like a much-needed improvement for humans.For humans, a feast that can be driven and a migratory reindeer are two completely different things. Clues to the longstanding relationship between humans and the reindeer herds they control can be found in the difficult Lapp language.The Lapps have no other domestic animals to eat, so language-wise, they have all their eggs in one basket, with more than fifty words describing reindeer color and brindle.Likewise, there are many words used to describe the antlers, and many more words used to distinguish the age and sex of the deer.With so many different characteristics, herders can then identify each one among hundreds or even thousands of reindeer.As far as I know, no other livestock in the world can match the reindeer. [Note] Lapp is the language used by the Lapp people and belongs to the Finnish︱Ugric language family. Reindeer culture may be key to a subsistence economy in one place, and more than that in others.Caribou meat is of excellent quality and sufficient production is available for the market in many places, including Alaska.Castrated stags are extremely easy to manage, and even without migration they can reproduce to decent numbers on the food the land provides.They have always been important animals to people living in the high latitudes of northern Eurasia; although the use of reindeer meat may remain limited to its natural range except on Christmas Eve, it should be more for the extension. I thought not many people in our world south of the Arctic had tasted reindeer, but it was a common diet for other peoples who were at least as highly developed as we are.In a restaurant in Helsinki where the waiters wear black suits and can speak at least four languages, all I see on the menu are roasted reindeer, stewed reindeer tongue, reindeer sausage, and other various reindeer meals. Without being there, the menu is unbelievable.Reindeer may not mean much to us; in fact, we might be taken aback if we saw reindeer meat on the menu in New York or Los Angeles in the morning.For others, however, the use of the reindeer, including its domestication by humans, was an important cultural achievement and economically significant. It is worth noting that although the Inuit (Inuit, [Note]), an extremely northern ethnic group in Alaska, hunted reindeer, they did not domesticate them.In contrast to the northern tip of Europe, these diverse uses of animals (meat, fat, leather, milk, horns and bones) and fisheries together contributed to the local composite culture and promoted local progress.These cultures are relatively remote, so it is not an exaggeration to say that the Lapps did not have much impact on European history.However, in such isolation and with only reindeer, it is quite an achievement for the Lapps to survive unscathed. 【Note】American Eskimos. A few domestic animals have encountered similar geographic restrictions, but most episodes end up spreading outward, and reindeer are one of them.No matter how well people use it, or how complicatedly it is managed, it may always be just an animal with its own unique world at the top of the world.