Look What I Brought for Show and Tell!
September 15th, 2010 by Kay Holt
Turtle © Adam Wesierski (Used with permission)
Since we began domesticating animals, they’ve apparently shaped our evolution. I wonder how differently we might have evolved if we’d domesticated megafauna instead of wiping out the giant animals.
What sort of furniture could withstand Smilodon scratching? What sort of fence would keep a mammoth in the backyard? How step would the fees be for failing to scoop your Megatherium’s poop?
I think you might have messed up the links, they’re going to non-existent pages on this blog.
Sorry about that. It wasn’t recognizing the quotes around the URLs. Fixed now.
Why do I keep thinking, “Hey! That’s Gammera!”
In Star Trek, both Vulcan and Klingon kids have literally awesome pets!
You know, not all animals are domesticatable. Hippos and rhinos have a lot of meat on them and can potentially haul much more than an ox but are too aggressive to tame, for example.
Jared Diamond discusses domestication of animals in his book Guns, Germs, Steel. He points out there is a difference between domestication and taming; domestication means breeding for specific qualities to make them more amenable to interaction with humans. For example, elephants are frequently tamed, but haven’t been domesticated. (Mostly Indian elephants, which seem to like humans better than the African elephant.) In part this has to do with the long breeding cycle, which is also why we have never “domesticated” oaks to provide sweet acorns, in the same way we did with cereals and legumes. I expect hippos and rhinos would have the same problem, and so, unfortunately would megafauna. Many animals that we have domesticated also have herd or pack structures that we can exploit and exapt for our own purposes; we bred dogs to recognize humans as part of their pack structure. Elephants also have a social structure we might be able to exploit, only there’s the really long breeding time again, making the task more difficult. I don’t know if rhinos or hippos have the same kind of social structures we could exploit/exapt.
That books keeps popping up on my ‘recommended’ lists. I may have to pick it up. Hm…
You don’t necessarily need a pack or herd social structure to domesticate an animal. Think of the domestic cat.
In theory, any animal or plant could be domesticated, given enough time. ‘Artificial’ selection isn’t much different from natural selection, and all species are subject to that.
I, personally, wouldn’t mind a domesticated mammoth-wool sweater. Providing it was organic and raised on a sustainable, fair-trade farm.
I didn’t say one needs a pack or social structure. (I thought of the cat counterexample, naturally, and figured it was so obvious I didn’t need to mention it.) But it is true that many of the animals we’ve domesticated do have a pack/social structure we exploited; such a social structure helps a great deal. yes, in theory any animal or plant could be domesticated. In practice some are easier than others.
Elephants aren’t domesticated–at best wild elephants are tamed–so a mammoth farm, while sounds cool
might be difficult.
Also, cats have social structures — we just don’t see them because they are 1) not obvious (unlike dogs’ obvious hierarchy pyramid) and 2) need several cats to become visible, while most contemporary cat owners usually have one.
Some might argue that cats domesticated us. They noticed a lot of their prey congregating around grain stores and some people started leaving them food to further encourage them to stay, these days most cats do nothing but sleep all day and we still feed them. And of course, they have a tendency to go feral if a human doesn’t feed them.
I love the idea of of humans being manipulated by ‘lower’ animals. Humans are genrally so full of their own superiority that they can’t give the species we depend on any credit for our development, nevermind consider themselves open to being tricked into serving a technologically less sophisticated species.