Sicily’s Native Domestic Fauna. Today it is almost impossible to think of the Sicilian mountains without imagining the great role they have had and have in animal husbandry. This has not always been the case and indeed for the vast majority of the time that human beings have frequented the peaks and flanks of these mountains the fauna has been wild. It was only with the Neolithic period, in fact, that humans learned to domesticate some of the species among those they had hunted until then and developed the complicated art of animal husbandry. Paleolithic sapiens groups certainly understood the relationship that could be established with another species through the repeated and eventually deliberate “encounter-domestication” instances of wolves. As early as about 25,000 years ago, humans seem to have started breeding canids both because of the natural propensity to “rescue” pups, which in their appearance possess all the aggression-mitigating characteristics typical even of newborns, and because of the subsequent advantage of having faithful hunting companions and night watchmen at their side. An extremely fruitful relationship that would last through time until the extremely complex “cultural cospecificity” between the dog and modern man. Much later, however, is the time of the domestications of ovids, probably the first to be included in the already more complex human society of the Neolithic. Naturally quiet, ethologically inclined to group, capable up to the in verisimilitude of following the pack leader, sheep soon became complex sources of income. From them came wool capable, if processed, of providing the cover that nature had not provided for humans; in short order the use of meat was associated with that of milk, which was cheesed, thus allowing for an ever-increasing shelf life for the important animal proteins. Sheep were followed by goats, far more difficult animals, and cows. The latter today appear tame and, apart from bulls, easy to handle, but breeders of breeds that retain the more primitive characters of Bos primigenius know well how even a cow can be difficult to handle and even dangerous. Pere that in Sicily, despite the presence of wild equids such as Equus hydruntinus, the horse was not domesticated until the Bronze Age. According to some, it was the Indo-European tribes of the Siculi who brought domesticated horses to the island and were useful both for travel, as well as for transportation and warfare. Over time horse breeding became a very important prerogative of Sicily to such an extent that it is mentioned in several ancient and classical sources and in particular in the Espositio Totius Mundi et Gentes, where the superiority of the horse breeds then bred on the island is affirmed. Complicated is the story of the pig, which in central Europe is not reared before the advent (there quite late) of Neolithic societies in the fifth millennium. Probably in Sicily the same occurs earlier and could place itself around the sixth millennium B.C. but still with a semi-wild breeding condition. Rabbits, on the other hand, do not appear to have been raised until late antiquity, while chickens are placed in the human community since the Late Bronze Age. Man then, develops many other “productive” relationships with different species, among them suffice it to mention the one with honey bees that will lead to the fame of Sicilian honey and in particular the honey of the Iblei. Today, after so many “dominations,” each with its own cultural bearing and therefore with its own “habits” of animal husbandry, the Sicilian mountains seem to be, as well as the mountains of the other Mediterranean regions, the place where the memory of an ancient agro-pastoral society has been preserved, in which animal husbandry, unlike what happened in the plains and hills, was not and is not a collateral activity and, in general, complementary to cultivation, but the main activity of the same society. Just not to go far just think of the use, still present today, of referring to the Capitini as “vistiamara,” thus people who breed as an alternative to the Ceramese and the Nicosians who, in essence, are called “zappunara” because they are tied to the cultivation of the land. Over time, the wisdom of the breeders and the selecting nature meant that from the primordial species came first simpler species adapted to breeding and proximity to humans, then true breeds and varieties with all their characteristics of compatibility with the breeding environments and the needs of the breeding men. Thus while in medieval Europe horses became imposing beasts of burden and heavy mounts for armored horsemen, in the Mediterranean and Dahar al Islam, they were selected to be small, agile, very fast animals capable of making Arab cavalry the fastest ever. They had to carry a man armed exclusively with a scimitar, curved precisely to be swung from the top of the mount. This induced biodiversity today represents an indispensable preciousness for humanity and contrasts, not infrequently losing, with globalization that tends to homogenize tastes and needs in favor of more easily replicable and mass-saleable commodities.