Zooculture

The carabao, hog, chicken, and dog are the only animals domesticated by the Igorot of the Bontoc culture area.

Cattle are kept by Benguet Igorot throughout the extent of the province.  Some towns, as Kabayan, have 300 or 400 head, but the Bontoc Igorot has not yet become a cattle raiser.

In Benguet, Lepanto, and Abra there are pueblos with half a hundred brood mares.  Daklan, of Benguet, has such a bunch, and other pueblos have smaller herds.

In Bontoc Province between Bontoc pueblo and Lepanto Province a few mares have recently been brought in.  Sagada and Titipan each have half a dozen.  Near the east side of the Bontoc area there are a few bunches of horses reported among the Igorot, and in February, 1903, an American brought sixteen head from there into Bontoc.  These horses are all descendants of previous domestic animals, and an addition of half a hundred is said to have been made to the number by horses abandoned by the insurgents about three years past.  Some of the sixteen brought out in 1903 bore saddle marks and the brands common in the coastwise lands.  These eastern horses are not used by the Igorot except for food, and no property right is recognized in them, though the Igorot brands them with a battle-ax brand.  He exercises about as much protecting control over them as the Bontoc man does over the wild carabao.

Carabao

The people of Bontoc say that when Lumawig came to Bontoc they had no domestic carabaos —­ that those they now have were originally purchased, before the Spaniards came, from the Tinguian of Abra Province.

There are in the neighborhood of 400 domestic carabaos owned in Bontoc and Samoki.  Most of them run half wild in the mountains encircling the pueblos.  Such as are in the mountains receive neither herding, attention in breeding, feed, nor salt from their owners.  The young are dropped in February and March, and their owners mark them by slitting the ear, each person recognizing his own by the mark.

A herd of seventeen, consisting of animals belonging to five owners, ranges in the river bottom and among the sementeras close to Bontoc.  These animals are more tame than those of the mountains, but receive little more attention, except that they are taught to perform a certain unique labor in preparing the sementeras for rice, as has been noted in the section on agriculture.  This is the only use to which the Bontoc carabao is put as a power in industry.  He is seldom sold outside the pueblo and is raised for consumption, chiefly on various ceremonial occasions.

Four men in Bontoc own fifty carabaos each.  Three others have a herd of thirty in joint ownership.  Others own five and six each, and again a single carabao may be the joint property of two and even six individuals.  Carabaos are valued at from 40 to 70 pesos.