Are Some species just naturally domesticable or do all animal species require some degree of breeding to be submissive to man?
Is there any completely wild species that just naturally takes to domestication?
If there were, it wouldn’t be a completely wild species any more, would it?
Not sure if this is what you’re asking, but dogs went from wild to domesticated quite easily, and probably without much, if any, conscious effort on the part of H Sap. Other species range from difficult to impossible to tame, let alone domesticate.
Tame elephants in Asia are captured young and trained. There might be some captive breeding, but no selective breeding for domesticity.
And it seems to me that most breeding for domesticity didn’t happen consciously, in the sense that farmers would pick the most domestic of their stock and breed from that. It’s just that being a domestic animal is in itself a strong selective force for domesticity. Dangerous animals get culled. Annoying animals end up in the stewpot first. Ones that try to escape escape. And so on. Ones that stick around and don’t cause trouble provide the breeding stock for the next generation, even if the farmer doesn’t attempt to control which animals breed.
The argument could be made that humans didn’t breed cats for domestication, they exploited a niche that formed because of humans, and as such developed in parallel with human culture.
As humans stored grain and other rodent-attracting wares, rodents were attracted (of course!) and so were their predators, looking for easy meals. As such, humans came to look favorably on these animals.
What I mean to say with the previous example is that there’s a possibility that domestication, in itself, isn’t a singular article. There are, probably, a lot of forms of domestication, and a lot of degrees…
I can’t see a polar bear ever being fully domesticated, where I would trust me bulldogs around a child.
I would also say it matters WHY the animal is domesticated. Dogs are pack animals and easily substitute a human for another dog.
Like Zebras they say they can’t be domesticated. But if you made a really hard effort you probably could get a few that could be domesticated and those PERHAPS would have a gene that had a better temprament. Then those genes would be passed on eventually.
That length could be a determent. I’ve read that mules were developed because it was easier to cross a horse and a donkey than try to breed a horse or a donkey to do the work like a mule.
Now that could take hundreds of years to do, before you got the right genes to breed.
And then some animals may be OK for domestication for food, but not for companionship.
Are there any documented cases of animals being taken from wild to domesticated (ie, selectively bread for domestication) in historical times? I can’t think of any, other than the Russian experiment with foxes but, AFAIK, that was just an experiment and wasn’t actually put to use.
Not as of the publication of “Guns, Germs and Steel” in the mid 1990s. The author’s interpretation is that prehistoric peoples likely made the same efforts towards domesticating every wild animal they found, and succeeded with those that were feasible at the time. Those that were infeasible are still so.
There are a couple chapters in GGS that are strongly related to this question, and it’s worth looking at for those who are interested.
The paca, a large forest rodent, was successfully domesticated by Nick Smythe, a mammalogist who formerly worked here in Panama. Unfortunately the reproductive rate of the species is too low for paca farming to have caught on to any great extent.
By definition, there has to be breeding, no? I remember taking a class in college on the history of domestication, and we differentiated between an animal being “tame” (i.e., accepts humans, like elephants taken from the wild to do tasks) and an animal being “domestic,” which was defined as generations of breeding. The end result is usually quite physically different from its wild counterpart, more neotenous, etc.
That issue was scrutinized in this thread, which dealt with Zebras. There does not appear to be solid evidence (beyond speculation) that a serious attempt was made to domesticate zebras.
As far as the OP goes, the question arguably is a bit circular since the definition of “domesticated” usually includes the idea that the animal in question has been associated with and adapted to humans over many generations. So I kinda agree with Freudian Slit’s point.
Here’s another way to ask the question: Is there any animal, used domestically by humans, where the wild version is basically the same as the domesticated version? It would seem that Lemur866’s example of elephants would qualify.
I always thought that elephants counted as “tamed” rather than “domesticated” (in the technical) for pretty much this reason. They’re not bred for human use but rather humans go out into the wild and find a baby elephant, bring it back and train it to do stuff.
Going deeper, I’ve heard that a requirement for domestication is that the species has genetically changed to be advantageous to humans such as dogs, horses, cats, cattle, sheep, corn, strawberries, etc. But I don’t know if this applies in the case of (for example) camels where I believe the wild version is identical to the domestic. I was about to include llamas in there but apparently llamas have been changed from their native guanaco.
Are there remaining true wild populations of camels remaining versus feral populations?
Not so much infeasible as uneconomical.
Take zebras, for example.
As a herd animal, they could probably be domesticated like horses have been. But it would take a lot of work (and money), by you and some generations of your children, before you would have a truly domesticated bloodline of zebras.
And for what? Anything zebras can do horses can do better! Current horse breeds have been developed that meet human needs better than zebras do: Thoroughbreds run faster, Standardbreds pull carts faster, Draft breeds pull carts with heavier loads, ponies work better inside mines, Arabians can work in hotter climates, Norwegian Fjords can work in colder climates, Warmbloods jump higher, Morgans are so much more beautiful (personal bias there), etc. And even at the most desperate level, Quarterhorses provide more meat for less feed than zebras would.
There isn’t any human need that zebras can meet better than current breeds of horses, so why spend the money and generations of work domesticating them? Possibly zebra-skin rugs would look better on your library floor than horsehide ones, but there likely isn’t enough demand for that to be worth the effort of domesticating zebras.
I believe the same holds true for other wild species. The only serious efforts that I know of to domesticate wild animals are both related to economics: the work in North Dakota on Bison herds, and work on producing a domesticated breed of ostriches. Both are based on an economic demand: the attempt to produce a better (more healthy) line of meat at a lower cost.
I think you are probably correct here. Lemur866 put it like this in the Zebra thread:
I’m not buying the part of that quoted post that says that the first domesticated horses were too small to ride and that they were only used for pulling chariots. There are a number of hypothesis about the domestication of the horse, once of which is that it was a food source first, and was used as a draft or riding animal later. Plus, we really don’t know if horses were ridden first or hooked up to chariots.
Unless someone has a definitive cite, that is…
A google search reveals a few sources which make the claim without any citation.
I realize that’s not definitive, but it’s a start.
A start to what?
Common practice, even now, is that horses that are to be used for both riding and driving are trained first for driving, hooked up to carts (instead of chariots), then later trained as riding animals. This is because horse trainers have found that to be the easiest, most effective training procedure. (Basically, untrained horses are more willing to accept pulling a weight behind them than to accept a weight upon their back.)
But I doubt that a definitive cite will ever be available – the domestication of horses occurred before the invention of writing, I believe.
Yes. Horses were domesticated by 3500 BC, as a rough estimate.
That doesn’t seem to gel with the archaeological or the ethological evidence. Wolves and dogs are quite different behaviourally and phenotypically, and while dog bones show up commonly in archaeological sites in widespread locations simultaneously, wolf bones are very rare. Which suggests that the domestication of wolves was quite difficult, took a prolonged period and probably only happened once in the Middle east and that once dogs were created from wolves the individuals were traded far and wide.
That’s quite different to your claim that it was easy and that it took little effort which should have resulted in multiple domestications.
As for the amount of effort or its deliberateness, that’s impossible to judge. It’s very likely that as with most domestic animals dogs started out as commensals, with humans and wolves hunting alongside each other and stealing the game that each other flushed, much as hawks hunt alongside badgers. Over time people would have killed any wolf that showed signs of being agressive, especially to children. Simultaneously any wolves that pointed out prey hidden in hollow logs or up trees that the wolves themselves couldn’t get to would gain survival advantage, either through delibertate human reward or simply through the scraps left behind. So the wolves would evolve to become both less agressive and less independent.
Humans tribes would also develop relationships with preferred wolf packs, and would very likely help preferred packs extend their range through offering protection. AFter all if I’m going to be hunitng alongside a commmensal pack it might as well be the pack that offers me the most food. So when I cross a pack’s border my pack can follow because I’ll protect it by chasing off more agressive and independent packs.
That wasn’t deliberate in the sense that humans had a set outcome in mind, however they almost certainly were deliberately removing wolves with charteristics they didn’t want, so to that extent is was deliberate.
I suspect that most domestication was of that kind. People followed herds of migratory animals such as reindeer or cattle and protected them from other predators while selectively killing or driving off the most agressive or skittish individuals. Over millenia that results in something like what we see with the Laps and their herds: wild animals that are dependent on humans for protection and quite tame enough for individuals to be led away from the herd and quietly slaughtered. The line between a domesticated cow or reindeer and a wild individual was never sharp and distinct. It happened slowly and almost imperceptibly as the quieter animals prospered due to human protection and the more agressive or skittish animals were culled or driven off to be eaten by wolves.
And that probably answers the OP: they all require some degree of breeding, but that breeding can take many forms. If humans preferentially kill the more agressive and independent individuals, or drive them off so they breed less frequently or lose the protection of their herd, that is selective breeding. It’s not deliberate breeding in the sense that people had a desired outcome, it was probably accidental insofar as people preferentially cull the most troublesome animals. But it was breeding nonethless.
By the time people were ready to try settling down as sedentary farmers, or to try riding these animals, they had already been unwittingly breeding for dometsic traits, like tractability and dependence on humans as herd leaders, for millenia. Their candiate animals were already far different genetically and behaviourally from the original wild stock.
Yes but as far as this discussion goes it’s totally circular and as such totally irrelevant. It only applies when the horses are going to be used for established carts and for riding, which of course the first transport horses can not have been.
In contrast when wild horses are wanted just as mounts they are never trained for harness first, they are simply broken to the saddle.
I find it far easier to believe that someone tried sitting on their tame horse and discovered that it was effective than to believe that some neolithic woman hooked up a horse to her very valuable and totally unsuitable handcart and to risk it being kicked to pieces.
Added to that, we know that in North America people domesticated horses exclusively for riding without ever neding to hitch them to carts.