I’m glad Kara hasn’t seen Frozen because I was worried I was the only person around who had missed it! There are so many good ideas in this post. I agree that the caribou / reindeer /domestication triad is really interesting. The piece that intrigues me the most is the presence of both wild and domestic reindeer in the same place and the liminality of domestication in this context. I’ve read this book several times, and still can’t quite get my head around the Eveni’s use of domestic reindeer to hunt wild reindeer. BTW, Sven needs to get a handle on the plural of reindeer.

When trying to make sense of Bayani and the concept of animals “delivering themselves” I find it helpful to look back at Ingold’s article, “From Trust to Domination” which talks about how hunter gatherers understand their relationship with prey animals (and how domestication changes that understanding).

I agree with Megan about how much ground this post covers and really appreciate your thoughts about pastoralism and the alphabet. Kessler’s discussion of the development of written language and its roots in the pictograms of pastoralism is one of my favorite parts of the book. As for the “which domesticate is most important” debate, I think you can both be right. Which animal played the most significant role depended on cultural context and geography. I’m thinking that the camel and the horse were incredibly important – but not at the same time in the same place.

What a terrific post! It can be difficult for us to appreciate how the shift in human-animal relations that came with domestication informed and was shaped by the emergence of economic relationships and attitudes that remain salient today. I really appreciate how you read contemporary attitudes toward food animals back into the emergence of the commodity and capitalism. And I agree that we need to do a better job of living up to the bargain we’ve made with the domesticates we use as food.

The gaze-following study is really interesting and raises all kinds of questions about how that aptitude developed. Thanks for posting the link to the abstract!

Please tell me how you found this video! I wonder how many times Buttermilk gets away with jumping on top of the black goat? Love it.

What a great post! There’s so much here to talk about – including the ways in which we (still/always) want to invoke “harmony” and “natural” as positive descriptors of an ideal and idealized past, when it stand to reason that if things are not perfect now, they likely weren’t then either! Tanner’s point is a good one as well – people probably did experiment with seeds or become “accidental farmers” just for the heck of it – sometimes. But at other times, and probably lots of other times, it seems quite plausible that cultivating / domesticating had overtones of desperation. And of course what we most easily forget (with our focus on “western civilization” that began in the middle east), is that the vast majority of early people were nomadic pastoralists rather than agriculturalists.

Don’t fret the werms. Let’s talk cows in class.

Oh I love this post because it ties two of my main interests — the human-animal relationship and the power of the internet together so well. Thank you! I can’t wait to talk about this more in class but just wanted to throw in a couple of things here: 1) the computer-internet is a technology but one of a fundamentally different sort than a “tool” (whether used by animal or human — and I loved the dolphin fishing article!). The internet puts the wisdom (and wisecracks) of a global network at your fingertips and makes any one individual “smarter” than their unplugged selves. 2) the relationship between brain size and intelligence is complicated (thankfully). Although I definitely support the humans as domesticates project, we need to be careful about making unilateral assertions about the brain size / intelligence issue. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/how-think-neanderthal/201309/does-brain-size-matter

The cow-human relationship is pretty intriguing! As for dogs and the broader question you pose about where domesticates would be without humans, what happens when you turn it around? Since we have co-evolved with our domesticates for such a long time, where would we be without them? What insight does Dunn offer as to how they have changed us?