md2000:
I think it was Jared Diamond discussing domestication that mentioned if the life cycle is too long, it is difficult to select a species for domestication. IIRC, elephants for example are not domestic. the ones used for domestic purposes are typically wild ones captured and trained, or the offspring of captured wild animals. Same with whales. It would take millennia to transform them into non-wild animals.
There’s a reason humans herd domestic animals, and not wild ones. the wild ones are not docile enough. If you trapped a pod of whales in a fjord, for example, would they realize not to tangle with the net blocking their route? (There’s the story that bison are difficult to domesticate, because if they put their mind to it (or their head) they will not stop when they encounter a fence at full speed).
So essentially you want a game farm. Then you have to figure out ho to feed the darn things efficiently. We still don’t know why they beach themselves from time to time.
The biggest problem, though is the slow growth - cows are read for food in a year or two, and ready to bred by then too; so you can replace your herd - or harvest a complete herd’s worth -every few years. The turnover rate for whales appears to be much much longer.
There are a few species out there that you can see today at an intermediate stage of domestication (and that you could call ‘semidomesticated’). In certain parts of Africa, including where I lived for about three years, the guinea fowl is one:
Introduced to Western Cape, Madagascar and elsewhere.
The helmeted guineafowl (Numida meleagris) is the best known of the guineafowl bird family, Numididae, and the only member of the genus Numida. It is native to Africa, mainly south of the Sahara, and has been widely introduced, as a domesticated species, into the West Indies, North America, Colombia, Brazil, Australia and Europe.
The helmeted guineafowl was formally described by Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in 1758 in the tenth edition...
They’ve been fully domesticated in other parts of the world, including North America, but where I was the farmers hadn’t figured out how to get them to breed in captivity. Instead they would collect the eggs from the forest and raise the animals in captivity and eventually slaughter them.