Animal Husbandry

Domestic animals provided the people of prewar Buguias with ample meat, but little else. Leather strips served as ropes and whole hides as sleeping mats, but even cattle skins were often patiently chewed and swallowed. A few individuals plowed with water buffalo, and the elite sometimes rode horses, but animal power was inconsequential overall. Meat was vital, however, and people labored to fashion a landscape that could yield abundant supplies. Houselot animals, such as hogs, foraged in uncultivated areas but depended primarily on agricultural produce. Cattle, horses, and buffalo, however, subsisted solely on the fodder of the human-created and maintained savannah.

Houselot Animals: Hogs and Chickens

Hogs, raised by all families, foraged daily in the open pasturelands. At night they returned through fenced runways to their pens, situated below each house. In the grasslands and pine savannahs they rooted for worms and grubs, fungus, and wild tubers. Those in the higher reaches of Buguias could roam as far as the kalasan, or cloud forest, well-stocked with acorns, fungus, and especially earthworms. On returning each evening they were fed boiled sweet potatoes and sweet-potato peels, pounded rice hulls and bran, kitchen garbage, and human waste. Both under- and oversized tubers were relegated to the swine; in most households, well over half of the crop went to the piggery. Hogs flourished in the rainy season, but during the annual drought the earth hardened and wild foods grew scarce, and the weakened animals suffered frequently from skin diseases.

In the American period a few individuals began raising lowland hogs, valued chiefly for their ability to gain weight on the raw sweet potatoes that the so-called native hog could scarcely digest. These animals were not ritually acceptable, however, precluding them from replacing the indigenous stock. Kikuyu grass, purportedly brought to Buguias by a teacher, was also introduced in this

period. The thick stolons of this aggressive exotic, which flourished in moist microhabitats, provided a fine year-round hog feed.

Other houselot animals occupied niches similar to that of swine. The average family owned some twenty chickens, while the wealthy might possess as many as two hundred. Chickens returned each night to roost in predator-secure pens or in trees, and foraged daily in the nearby pastures. All households kept dogs, primarily for their meat, feeding them bones, scraps, and, of course, sweet potatoes. And finally, a few individuals raised pigeons, ducks, and even geese.

Pasture Animals: Cattle, Water Buffalo, and Horses

Unlike hogs and chickens, pasture animals were the responsibility of men. The average man in prewar Buguias devoted most of his labor to pasturing horses, water buffalo, and especially cattle. Water buffalo, the only ritually sanctioned pasture animal, were prestigious but not numerous. They reproduced poorly in the cool environment, and surviving calves, completely helpless for three days, often succumbed to disease or were trampled by bulls. Horses were valued primarily for their meat, although a few wealthy men kept riding mounts. But horses did not thrive as well as cattle on the Buguias grazing regime, and were thus relatively rare. Goats were raised in even smaller numbers.

Cattle, horses, and buffalo remained at pasture day and night. They subsisted largely on the native forage, supplemented occasionally with old sweet-potato vines. The few corrals generally held stock only prior to transporting or butchering. During typhoons, men herded their animals into protected areas, sometimes putting them in crude shelters built on the leeward side of hills. Otherwise livestock wandered untended, although conscientious graziers checked daily to ensure that none had wandered away or "fallen off the mountain."

Cattle were provided salt every few days, although several small herds in eastern Buguias obtained salt directly from local springs. Men could assemble their stock by blowing a water-buffalo horn, each instrument having a distinct sound that the animals could distinguish. Buguias cowboys assisted with births and watched after

the young, especially the buffalo calves. Breeding received casual attention, although healthy bulls with propitiously placed cowlicks were favored as studs. Branding occurred only at the insistence of the American authorities.^[3] Men easily recognized their own animals, and disputes arose only over calves delivered unattended in distant pastures.

Pasture Management

The so-called native cow of Benguet is a small, slowly maturing animal, optimally butchered at four years of age. Like the native hog, it is a fussy eater; several forbs unpalatable to the natives are readily eaten by introduced zebu crosses and so-called mestizo hybrids. But the Buguias pastoralists carefully managed their pastures to provide the grasses on which their stock thrived.

Themeda triandra (red oat grass), usually in association with Andropogon annulatus and Imperata cylindrica , dominated the savannah landscape of prewar Buguias (see Penafiel 1979). On the higher slopes and ridges scattered pines crowned the pastures, but only the more remote upper canyons supported trees thick enough to shade out the grass. Western range managers consider Themeda a mediocre if not poor feed, but to the Buguias pastoralists it was ideal.^[4]Themeda responds well to fire (Crowder and Chheda 1982: 297), their primary range-management tool, and withstands reasonably heavy and continual grazing.

Buguias pastures grew lush in the wet season, but produced a watery low-protein forage. As protein increased in the early dry season, cattle fattened. December thus marked the optimum time for butchering and selling. Forage quality again diminished as pastures desiccated in February and March; fires might then be lit to stimulate new growth. In the late dry season many small springs would lapse, depriving cattle of several pasture zones. By March stock sometimes had to be hand-fed with cane-grass leaves, brought in from inaccessible ravines and slopes.

The savannah landscape of prewar Buguias was an anthropogenic environment, created and maintained by human intervention. Only continual labor could prevent reversion to woody growth. As burning allowed easy management, many pastures were annually torched, and even the more remote pine woods were occasionally

singed. But fire alone would not eliminate all undesired plants; in intensively managed pastures the Buguias people dug weeds by hand. Weed infestations intensified after the invasion, circa 1916, of the Mexican composite Eupatorium adenophorum.^[5]Eupatorium , thriving in all microhabitats from dry, rocky slopes to boggy seeps, soon ranked as the foremost pest. Each plant had to be uprooted and burned, a task performed in prime pastures once or twice every year.

Grazing pressure itself helped maintain the savannah. In areas too steep for cattle but still occasionally burned, the cane grass Miscanthus sinensis dominated. Miscanthus decreases quickly if continually grazed, as its highly placed growth nodes are easily destroyed (Numata 1974:135). Cane swards could still survive, however, in remote and seldom-grazed pastures.

Although most pastures were held in common, few were overgrazed. Buguias men knew well the carrying capacities of their prime pastures, and if these were exceeded community pressure fell on the offending individual. Some persons believed in naturally—or supernaturally—enforced stocking limits. One story recounted how the ancestors had established the limit of a certain pasture at ten animals; after a greedy man added two more, the correct ratio was restored when the new animals simply "fell off the mountain." Carrying capacity estimations in prime pastures were made for roughly discrete areas, separated by natural barriers (steep slopes and ravines) and sometimes by fences. Distant grazing lands were more loosely monitored. Cattle could not even reach certain remote grasslands unless trails were first cut across intervening slopes. This was risky, as well as labor-consuming, since animals periodically slipped from even the best-graded passages. But stock could sometimes range far from central Buguias, finding greener fields perhaps, but also adding to the cowboys' burdens.

An elaborate fence network marked off cultivated areas from the open pastures. Cattle, hogs, and water buffalo continually threatened and occasionally devastated umas, pond fields, and dooryard gardens. Even chickens could destroy rice-seed beds. Old men remember that making fences and maintaining them were their most arduous tasks. The kind of fence chosen for a given field depended on the materials at hand, the desired level of permanence, and the specific animal threat. Durable stone walls were fa-

vored for larger home gardens, more intensively cultivated umas, and rice terraces. For most dry fields, pine fences, sometimes reinforced with hardwood brush, sufficed. Owing to wet-season rot, such fences demanded constant repair. Where wood was not easily accessible, Buguias men usually built sod walls with facing ditches. On the steepest slopes, living fences of agave functioned well with little maintenance. Complex fence networks of pine, stone, and bamboo protected houselot gardens, especially vulnerable to residential swine.