22. When Jefferson Stood Up for the Honor of America’s Animals
Thomas Jefferson was often a prickly man. Few things brought out his prickly side when he served as US ambassador to France than slights, real or imagined, directed towards America. Count Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon, a prominent eighteenth century French naturalist and author of Historie Naturelle, a science encyclopedia, rubbed Jefferson the wrong way. The Frenchman came up with the Theory of New World Degeneration, which held that North America was a marshy continent that had recently emerged from the sea.
As the count claimed, North America’s excessive moisture supposedly made the continent’s plants and wildlife inferior to, smaller, and more delicate than those of Europe. Moreover, if plants or animals were transported from Europe to America, Buffon argued, the poor environment would cause them to degenerate into a pitiable and less virile size. Buffon’s was a dumb and nutty take by a man who had never been to the New World. It should have elicited nor more than a scornful chuckle and a shrug. However, as seen below, that’s not how Jefferson handled it.