In the mid-seventeenth century, some Native Americans in colonial New England started to keep and manage livestock for the first time, doing so according to their own cultural priorities and interests. Several factors influenced their decision to keep animals, including threats to their land base and to the productivity of their hunting. It might appear that animal husbandry as practiced by Europeans would have posed an insurmountable sociocultural challenge for Indians. Scholars studying the issue have argued that livestock would have compromised the mobility needed for winter hunting, destroyed crops, competed with wild game for resources, and violated prevailing conceptions of property and of human-animal interconnectedness. Such obstacles were indeed difficult, but creative ways to overcome them were found.