Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

by Jon Mooallem

Jefferson was trying to debunk the Theory of American Degeneracy, which had been worked up several years earlier by the revered Enlightenment writer and natural historian, Count Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon. Count Buffon argued that the animal life of the New World was smaller, weaker, and less spectacular than that of the Old World. Not only were there fewer species in America—less of a diversity of life—but individual animals there were smaller than their counterparts in Europe: they were “degenerate” versions. Buffon himself had never been to America, it turns out, so he plucked measurements to support his claims from the accounts of travelers, who weren’t always reliable. (At one point in his book Natural History, Buffon repeats a claim that the region around Hudson Bay was populated by pygmies, winged serpents, and savages with backward-bending knees.) The degeneracy theory turned on a question of climate. Buffon believed that species could attain their ideal forms only in a warm climate. He imagined America as a humid stew of swamps and uncultivated wildness; he believed its landmass had only recently emerged from under the sea and was still drying out. The continent, he wrote, is “crisscrossed by old trees laden with parasitic plants, lichens, [and] fungi, the impure fruits of corruption.” Eventually, Buffon concluded that even lines of domesticated animals brought to America from Europe gradually shrank and degenerated. The dogs in America were “absolutely dumb.” T...