Although I enjoyed both Brantz and Darwin, I’d like to focus more on Brantz’s topics of analysis in my blog post, as it’s a more unfamiliar field to me. That being said, Darwin’s work and the depth of his study has always intrigued me. I can only imagine how difficult it must have been to study different varieties of honey bee, and yet he sounds almost disappointed that he can’t do more to artificially control their breeding! He couldn’t have known the near-impossibility of obtaining any usable data from an experiment like this anyway, considering the way bees reproduce, but I wonder what we would have discovered sooner about genetics if he had found a way to do it?
Anyway, on to Brantz. Other than his comment about the dog days of summer (I’m pretty sure they’re named after the prominence of the Dog Star during those particular weeks of summer, not brutality to stray dogs, but correct me if I’m wrong), I liked his analysis. I thought it was similar to the very first reading we did on post-domestication relationships between humans and domestic animals. The part that most fascinated me, however, was the acclimatization section.
While under most circumstances I would consider the ability to acclimate and adapt to new situations as a good thing, in reading Brantz’s chapter on domestication I saw nothing but the downsides to the whole process. Brantz briefly mentions the failings of acclimatization, but I don’t think the spin he puts on this really makes the reader aware of the devastating effects acclimatization and domestication of foreign animals had. In class we’ve discussed how some animals are better for domestication than others simply due to genetic predisposition, however the major problem with acclimatization wasn’t that some animals just can’t be domesticated, it was that you can’t displace hundreds of animals to a completely new climate and expect everything to be ok, either for them or for the people already living there.
Brantz does mention the “rabbit plague” of Australia, but here’s a little more background on the story for those of you who may not be familiar with it: Some guy in England moved to Australia and decided he wanted to continue rabbit-hunting there, only Australia didn’t have any native rabbits. I don’t know much about him, but I’m guessing he looked like this:
So he shipped less than 20 over from Europe to fuel his hobby, thinking it couldn’t possibly do any harm. The rabbits bred like, well, rabbits, and the population exploded and covered the entire country, devastating the ecosystem. I’m surprised a horror movie hasn’t been made of out the story. The government tried increasingly drastic methods to exterminate the rabbits, eventually hitting on one that worked in the latter half of the 20th century, more than 100 years after they had been introduced. The method was basically biological warfare on the rabbits- a virus called myxoma was introduced to the population. Other biological control methods had been tried before, but myxoma was the first to actually work- it reduced the population to less than 20% of what it had been. However, the effects didn’t last. The remaining resistant rabbits bred, and the population grew again. Finally, a different virus was found that worked in the 1990s. (Funnily enough, it escaped by accident from a research facility where they were testing its efficacy, but it still worked.)
All this mess because some guy wanted to hunt rabbits. The many reasons anyone could possible have for acclimatization and domestication of foreign animals are far outweighed by the risks involved. We’ve only mentioned ecological damage, which is bad enough, but there are health risks too. Rabbits are reservoirs for diseases that not only affect them, but other animals and people as well. I don’t even need to mention the risk that wild rats and birds pose. It’s fascinating to me how these downsides did nothing to stop the fad of acclimatization and bringing over of foreign animals to “civilized” countries- all for a bit of entertainment and (probably mostly) profit. I can’t imagine how many new diseases were brought over as well.
This has been a pretty one-sided blog post, so I welcome any differences of opinion- it wasn’t intended to be a rant about the folly of invasive species ecology. Pretty much all of my opinions are probably skewed just because of my current studies, but I mention them because I wish Brantz had spent a little more time on that aspect of the acclimatization movement and its impact.
April 22, 2014 @ 11:49 am
I like how this post touches on the (sometimes subtle) distinctions between acclimatization efforts and the unintended introduction of species that become invasive — rabbits in Australia, feral pigs in Hawaii, the cane toad, gypsy moth, kudzu, Burmese python, etc. in the US. Nineteenth-century acclimatization projects were deliberate efforts to help particular animals adapt to new environments at time when the mechanism of evolution (and its underlying premises) were still much debated. Most invasive species, on the other hand, are an accidental by-product or unintended consequence of human activity.
April 22, 2014 @ 8:51 am
I agree that your post isn’t one-sided. I was really interested to read this story. In my opinion, the most devastating part of the story is that all those rabbits had to be brutally killed simply for existing in a place they didn’t belong. I don’t mean to sound like a hippie here, because it’s certainly true that the risk to human health by diseases carried in rabbits is certainly an issue, but I think if animal welfare could be considered a little more in decisions like the one this hunter made to bring the rabbits with him, it could have saved a lot of trouble. I think this story demonstrates the problem with our culture, which is that animal welfare is hardly considered until human welfare is first taken care of. Maybe the mutual benefit that has been missing in domestication for a long time could be introduced to our actions towards wild animals as well.
April 21, 2014 @ 7:02 pm
I really like that you pointed out that ultimately, some animals just cannot and should not be domesticated. I think Brantz tip-toed around this point, without explicitly stating it.
I trust your judgement on the matter because you have participated in a variety of animal studies, and I agree that some animals just are meant to be exploited by humans. I feel that Brantz came a little closer to that point than you seem to, but I understand why you feel she did not give the reader insight into just how vast the impact really is. I feel she did not want to it into a comment on modern downfalls of agriculture, but rather, wanted to include a wide array of cultural history as impacted by domestication.
April 20, 2014 @ 5:41 pm
I don’t think you’re opinions are too one-sided. In the case of the rabbits they certainly were an invasive species and had a huge impact on Australian ecology. The bit about the viruses as a biological warfare agent against rabbits is really cool, I remember learning about that in virology. The more modern version is called calicivirus. Interestingly it was found that in areas that already had a version of the calicivirus the rabbits were essentially vaccinated against the more deadly man made form and so its effect was reduced.