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MEDIEVAL JAINISM: CULTURE AND ENVIRONMENT
If indeed modern technology has made it possible for man, with an ever burgeoning population, to extend his geographical dominion the same advances have made him increasingly dependent on technology for his own survival. Another price, resulting from improper use of deficient understanding of scientific advances, has thus to be paid.
While man was developing the technology to improve his life, his love for and affiliation with those animals that he had earlier managed to domesticate continued. He brought some of them along with him into his modern life. Evolving from a hunter-type subsistence to an agrarian one, he came to share with animals the same economic and social conditions. As civilization produced more comforts and an easier life for men, the life of domestic pets was likewise transformed. Thus the dog gradually changed from a work animal to a household companion and instead of hunting and surviving independently, became totally dependent upon man. When man suffers from health, social and economic deprivations, so does his companion animal.
In today's slums where people are victims of life's shortcomings-including the absence of a sanitary environment and adequate nutrition-their companion animals suffer from similar problems. Many microbiological agents of contemporary human and animal diseases are direct descendants of those that were common in olden times. Millions of years ago many parasites of animal were symbolic with man, but they developed properties pathogenic for man when the balance regulating the relationship between the two species was upset.
Trichinosis is an example. Mankind probably never contracted trichinosis until an agrarian culture was developed that led to demonetization of the once wild
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