As a self-described magus, Giovanni Battista della Porta (1535 – 1615) was convinced of his power to manipulate nature. Given proper conditions, the Neapolitan scholar believed that dogs could be made to degenerate from four-footed creatures to two-footed ones. Porta wrote that by amputating dogs across successive generations and compelling the amputees to reproduce, one could compel “nature to produce bipedal canines.” Surgery combined with controlled breeding yielded an entirely new so-called race (razza) of animals in a few short years, he alleged.
While Porta’s bipedal canine experiment would not have been as effective as he reported, highly bureaucratized animal breeding projects across Europe and its territories around the world generated vast numbers of animals. Theories of inheritance reciprocally influenced breeding practices that took place on stud farms and courts to fashion horses, dogs, and other creatures. Using genealogical trees and multi-generational charts, experts selected livestock and companion animals and paired them in carefully orchestrated unions with the hopes of shaping their offspring as much as possible through the combined effects of imagination, environment, and parentage.
By combining archival and bio-archeological evidence, this paper evaluates both how effective Renaissance husbandmen believed themselves to be when it came to influencing bodies through breeding, and how effective their methods actually were in producing new variations of animals. This paper uses a “quotient of malleability” to compare case studies from breeding experiments in sixteenth-century Italy, Spain, and New Spain, reading beyond the experts’ self-validating rhetoric—like that employed by Porta.
