Husbandry – A Definition

Once, an authority figure asked me if I knew my ass from my elbow, which was a metaphorical way to point out that I had no idea about the task I was doing at the time.  My wife likes to point out that “boys are dumb”.  I used to argue with her that this was not the case.  But, after watching many of my friends have marriages that crash and burn or are continuously rocky, I am compelled to agree with my wife.  Many a man indeed does not know his ass from his elbow when it comes to women and family formation.

With that in mind, I am starting at the very simplest basics.  Here is the dictionary definition of “husbandry”:

1. a. The act or practice of cultivating crops and breeding and raising livestock; agriculture.
1. b. The application of scientific principles to agriculture, especially to animal breeding.
2. Careful management or conservation of resources; economy.

(from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009.)

From the three parts of the definition above, we can get the sense that husbandry is the active, ordered, creative process by which the husband causes those living things around him to “be fruitful and multiply”.  Husbandry is not something that just happens to the husband while he is playing video games or rock climbing, but it is something that he does.  He grabs the jugular of the world around him and manipulates that world for both his and it’s own benefit.  Husbandry is not something that is done with only the minimum of effort, because then it is not husbandry – because then it is not the careful conservation of resources.