Air Pollution and Domestic Animals

The Neolithic revolution, which began some 12,000 years ago in Turkey and in other parts of the Fertile Crescent, caused man to adopt a sedentary lifestyle, which on its turn speeded up the process of domestication of animals. The dog was already domesticated before this revolution and had served man as help in hunting. During hunting, man probably figured out that a few of the hunted species could be tamed easily, so subsequently other species such as the chicken, the duck, the goose, the sheep, the goat, the cow, the pig and the camel were domesticated. This implicated for these animals a life closely to their masters, many of them in stalls or in corrals. In ancient farm types, man and animals shared the same airspace, especially during winter. Alternatively, in some regions herd animals guided by shepherds were still allowed to be in the fields in relative freedom, some of them, however, only for a part of the year. Interestingly, the horse was not domesticated by the sedentary peoples in the Middle East or those around the Mediterranean See, but from the nomadic people of the Eurasian steppes. Recent excavations in Kazakhstan showed that horses were ridden 5,500 years ago by the Botai people (Outram et al., 2009). About 1000 to 1500 BC the horse then enters the Near, Middle and Far East, mainly as a war animal. In those days, the horse was already an expensive animal that had to be well cared for and therefore was kept in stables. Some of these were really large, such as for example the one Pharaoh Ramses II had built for 460 horses at Piramesse 3300 years ago. According to Xenophon horses had to be stabled always. With the current knowledge this was not really smart from a veterinary point of view. Compared to horses, cat and dog share much more indoor atmosphere with man, whereby these species become more exposed to harmful events like man. Swine, poultry and to a lesser extend cattle are exposed to natural, man-made and self-made air pollution. Furthermore, they may share their environment with their care takers for a part of the day. Therefore, studying diseases of animals living close with humans, or even sharing the same rooms, could bring clues for better understanding risk factors for human health and the pathophysiology caused by poor air quality.