European Animals- The Major Pa

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they were people who practiced mixed farming with a heavy emphasis on herding and because they saw only very few domesticated animals in the new land, the Europeans began the action of importing Old World domesticated animals, such as the pig, cow, and horse. This action could most definitely be described as "the greatest biological revolution in the Americas since the end of the Pleistocene era." The Europeans had no idea as to what they unleashed upon the New World when they introduced their domesticated animals. Many of these animals flourished in the new environment beyond the wildest hopes of their European masters. The animals and their diseases "moved through the virgin lands of America faster than did the people who had brought them to the New World." By surpassing their masters, the animals became unstoppable, and their destruction was unfortunately boundless. Pigs, for example, existed as one among the many animal groups that played such a significant role in the changes ...

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These animals, much like the pigs, thrived in their new environment and bred at unbelievable rates. In a report to his king, Alonzo de Zuazo wrote that the cows "were breeding two and three times a year in the salubrious environment of the New World [and] if thirty or forty cattle stray away… they will grow to three or four hundred in three or four years." While this cow population increased, they began to stray from Peru to Chile and from Paraguay to Tucuman; they strayed wherever "the grass was plentiful." The cow population, being as large and widespread as it was, began to cause a decline in vegetation due to their large consumption of the flora. Huge tracts of land were stripped ...

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