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A very silly argument. Breaking some zebras for a carriage proves nothing about domestication. You know what kind of creatures hate humans, snap and bite, have
by gwern 9y ago
A very silly argument. Breaking some zebras for a carriage proves nothing about domestication.
You know what kind of creatures hate humans, snap and bite, have zero herd or group instincts, are easily agitated, are smaller than their closest comparable domesticated species, intensely paranoid because fragile, and lash out when cornered? Russian foxes.
But it took less than a human lifetime to domesticate them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_red_fox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_red_fox) and now they're sold as pets and reportedly are even friendlier than most cats.
That is what a proper breeding program, done systematically with a breeding population of hundreds or thousands, with due attention to reliable measurements, heritability, and constant stringent selection, can do over several decades. (It would be even easier now with the advent of marker-assisted selection as GWASes increasingly turn up the genetic signatures of selection for domestication in cats/dogs/rabbit/foxes/etc.) A few small-scale failures by some dilettantes back in the 1800s which aren't even described can't be considered strong evidence.
If no one is doing it, that says more about priorities and the substitution of automobiles and insecticides than about whether it is doable or not. (If maize didn't already exist, would anyone bother trying to breed teosinte into corn, rather than working more on wheat or soy or rice cultivars? The foxes were a scientific research project, after all, no one actually needed a dog replacement...) A more interesting question to discuss might be why Africans were never able to accidentally domesticate zebras as useful insect-resistant beasts of burden when Europeans/Asians/Americans were accidentally domesticating all sorts of species left and right, such as horses.
- cobbzilla 9y agoAgreed. The very title conflates taming with domestication, two totally different things.
- iamwil 9y agoYour last question was touched upon in "Guns, Germs, and Steel"--though I don't remember the book giving a reason, other than, if it was easy to domesticate [presumably compared to domesticating an alternative species, or just getting other humans to do the work], people would have done so by now.
- derefr 9y ago> even friendlier than most cats. Given that "cats are assholes" is a common aphorism, this doesn't say much. (I get that you mean that they're friendlier than cats at their best, but few cats friendly a majority of the time.) Tangent: why hasn't there been a breeding program to make domestic cats... more domesticated (i.e. friendlier)?
- tdb7893 9y agoMost of the time if they bite they aren't being malicious, generally you are doing something they don't like so they nip you to tell you to stop or most often they are just scared. If you understand how to handle them few cats are actually a problem, my wife works at an animal hospital (where the cats are generally pretty stressed out) and she's only really been bitten once
- derefr 9y agoYes, but this is true of many wild animals as well. The whole meaning of "domestication" is to change an animal's instincts to be more intuitive and easy to manipulate using human socio-tribal instincts, without knowing anything about how the animal thinks per se. Or: you don't need to do this with dogs—at least the breeds people actually keep as pets—because [those breeds of] dogs have been bred for friendliness.
- xyzzy_plugh 9y agoMy wife is a veterinarian, and gets bit by dogs more often than cats. Most popular breeds for pets bite.
- aylons 9y agoBecause it is also mostly a prejudice. Well treated cats are very friendly and attached, specially if born and raised in a good environment. Even stray cats usually responds well to good care if you know what you're doing and have the endurance, skills and resources to do so.
- 9y ago
- perl4ever 9y agoI always thought the reason why many African creatures seem undomesticable is because humans have always been in Africa and co-evolved, so anything native became fierce and untrusting gradually as hunters improved. Seems obvious, but I am not a scientist, so maybe it is more complex.
- improbable22 9y agoThe problem with this argument is that we know what happened when humans met trusting animals: we ate them to extinction. So probably the horse’s ancestors were pretty fierce.
- perl4ever 9y agoPerhaps when you're not such a good hunter, you tend more to use whatever you can catch for food. When you're an expert hunter, you start to think about other possibilities.
- jkuria 9y agoI believe Jared Diamond answers this question in Guns, Germs and Steel. Africans didn't have iron tools and were not as effective hunters, so the animals had a much longer time to adapt against their predators.
- mannykannot 9y agoThat issue is addressed by the co-evolution clause, which posits that the ancestors of modern Zebras underwent selective pressure for hostility and avoidance towards the ancestors of modern humans as the latter became more dangerous. (Note that the use of 'ancestor' here does not assume any position on whether these ancestors were a different species than their current descendants.)
- improbable22 9y agoI get that. It explains why the dodo was fearless, and all the american animals. We ate all of them when we showed up, in the american case c. 10000BC, long before iron weapons. My point is that if the wild horses we first met were similarly tame, then surely we would have eaten them too. We didn’t. So probably they weren’t. So that can’t be what stopped us domesticating african animals.
- blackbagboys 9y agoA more interesting question to discuss might be why Africans were never able to accidentally domesticate zebras as useful insect-resistant beasts of burden when Europeans/Asians/Americans were accidentally domesticating all sorts of species left and right, such as horses. What hypothesizes might you suggest?
- jkuria 9y agoI believe Jared Diamond answers this question in Guns, Germs and Steel. Africans didn't have iron tools (or acquired them relatively late) and so were not as effective hunters. The animals therefore had a much longer time to adapt against their predators.
- blackbagboys 9y agogwern rejects Diamond's hypothesis later down the thread, so I'm interested in hearing about any alternate hypothesizes he may have.
- improbable22 9y agoIf insect-resistant means tsetse fly (which was why the idea if taming zebras was briefly fasionable) then it’s worth noting that this wasn’t a problem until 1896, when the rinderpest killed all the cattle, whose grazing had kept the land grass not bush. For the owners of said cattle, one answer is like the maize: they already had cows! These farming and cow-herding people were busy replacing other african peoples. Why the others didn’t domesticate zebra... comes back to why weren’t they farming too? I don’t know if we have a great theory for why farming started when it did, anywhere: what kept the mesopotamians away from farming from 20000-10000 years ago?
- curtis 9y ago> what kept the mesopotamians away from farming from 20000-10000 years ago? Actually, this is one that we do have a good answer for: The most recent Ice Age was still well in effect during that time period.
- nootropicat 9y ago>It would be even easier now with the advent of marker-assisted selection as GWASes increasingly turn up the genetic signatures of selection for domestication in cats/dogs/rabbit/foxes/etc. Do you know if these changes are mammal-generic, or species specific? If the former, it raises a fascinating possibility of making a virus that would domesticate the offspring of an infected mammal.
- gwern 9y agoThere is some evidence that it's generic. Darwin, as I mentioned, pointed out the close commonality of domesticated animals: the floppy ears, neoteny, year-round breeding, piebalding or spotty colors etc. There's no reason to expect all the human domesticators to be selecting for stuff like floppy ears, so the repetition suggests that there's some universal domestication syndrome where those all come as a package. I think the existing GWASes tend to support this but aren't definitive? Not really an expert on the details there. (One interesting claim is that humans appear to have undergone a light form of domestication syndrome too.)
- userbinator 9y agoand now they're sold as pets and reportedly are even friendlier than most cats. Is the Wiki article just out of date? It says: As of August 2016, there are 270 tame vixens and 70 tame males on the farm.
- gwern 9y agoNot seeing the contradiction there. They certainly are sold as pets, you can look up fox videos on Youtube etc. Damn expensive though, a Redditor I was talking to about it said that his fox was going to cost like $10k all told after all the fees and importation paperwork. I'd never pay that much for a cat or a dog (although it'd make a great gift for the billionaire or oligarch in your life).
- pvaldes 9y agoFriendlier with humans, but foxes tend to be destructive with furniture. Is in its nature to recolocate things, tear apart carpets and dig lairs in the sofa.