Thanks for situating this in terms of “salience.” That’s pretty interesting. Another issue I think worth noting is that “people” (not everybody, but lots of people in the urbanized, post-domestic US) engage in a willing suspension of belief when they encounter meat in a grocery store or restaurant. They have seen Food Inc, heard about the environmental hazards of factory farming, and read about the brutal conditions faced by livestock and chickens in industrial agriculture. They know at some level that the meat on their plate probably doesn’t come from happy cows on Old MacDonald’s farm. But at the same time it’s just too easy to bracket that knowledge when you’re hungry and encounter a plastic-wrapped piece of meat in a store. It’s so far removed from the animal and the context it came from that it’s incredibly easy to either not think about the back story at all or console oneself with the hope that things are probably getting better, and that you don’t really know where what you are buying came from.
Ok, I just re-read your post and think you said it best: “I might say there is an unconscious, but also partially deliberate, effort on the part of society to block thoughts that might lead to discomforting realizations about animals. Discomforting realities are interpreted as psychological threats and are usually rejected by our brains automatically.”

The issue of “elective vegetarianism” is really interesting, and I hope we talk about it more tomorrow. Tanner raises an important point stressed by some evolutionary biologists (about meat-eating being essential to the expansion of the hominid brain). But I wonder how (or if) you could ascertain that meat-eating always means bigger / better brains? Back to the point made last week about “a calorie is a calorie is a calorie” (or whatever the quote was) – Isn’t the brain-meat connection about the quality of the protein in relation to the amount of energy expended to procure and digest it? Molly’s point about our much less active contemporary lifestyles (we do not have to hunt-gather our own food) would seem to suggest that you can still have a big healthy brain even if you don’t eat meat. Also, Molly, no need to feel guilty about not eating meat! (I’ll stop now, but there’s lots, lots more to say about this…)

I agree that the “animal slaughter as holocaust” metaphor has some problems, but we should talk about it more in class. And I’m so glad you picked up on the implicit nature-nurture debate of Bulliet’s tame vs. domestic discussion. This has what has made me spend so much time recently working on Dmitry Belyaev’s fox domestication experiments (which we’ll be reading about in a couple of weeks).
But what I most appreciate about this post is your encouragement to look at what animals actually do (rather than what we think about them)…and I’ve got a huge soft spot for crows, whose tool use is pretty amazing. And it can be quite playful as well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dWw9GLcOeA

I had not heard of Internet rule #34, but shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose. It is hard to claim that the uptick in porn and simulated violence is a direct result of the shift in human-animal relations after “domesticity,” but the correlation is intriguing. I hope we take up many of the other issues raised here tomorrow as well – your post suggests how the development of contemporary ideas (about what an animal is, what meat is, and who we are) is bound up with much older and fundamental relationships between humans and animals.

I agree with Kelly about your terrific title and funny pun…and about the curious reluctance to deal with the elephant (Bull Mastiff?) in the room. You’re also likely onto something interesting in many of your concerns about Bulliet’s theories. But much of what he presents is pretty well documented (the correlation between attitudes toward violence and the removal of livestock and slaughter / butchering from public spaces, for example). It would be worth finding some evidence to support your hunches about some of this. The topic clearly has you mobilized!

Thanks, Megan, for referring us back to the reading (p. 93 of Stiner and Feeley-Harnick). There’s a quote there we might want to keep in mind as we start talking about domestication today: “Domestication, like every other aspect of hominen existence, arose out of coevolutionary relations of mutual dependence, and the process continues to change both us and our partners in domestication today.” I’m really looking forward to talking about the many good issues raised in the posts during class this afternoon!

I can’t imagine what I’ll know tomorrow – but I know it will be worth finding out! I like Kara’s point about controlling the weather. Cloud seeding is an example of a limited intervention with a specific objective, but what Kara suggests is that climate and environmental change are complex and affected by so many variables that it seems unlikely that humans will ever have complete control over them. Today I know that humans have had and continue to have a huge effect on the climate. I’m pretty sure that tomorrow I will still know that, but hope that I also know that we figured out a way to slow down the damage.

I agree with Kelly – the technical information in this post is presented in a way that is accessible to us non-specialists. Thank you! I am going to be very interested to hear what you think about Dunn’s later chapters (about the legacy of the fight-flight response). I do not think he is nostalgic about the distant past or romanticizes it as somehow “better” than contemporary society. His main point supports your discussion here of neuro-plasticity, which is that our biological beings are both products of very old relationships with our environment and other species, and the contemporary context into which we are born. So both nature and nurture have historic and biological components. Neither is a given.
We should also keep in mind the other issue both Dunn and Stiner / Feeley-Harnick address, which is that our humanity is intimately and intricately bound up with other creatures.

The title of your post highlights a central tension (and most would say shortcoming) in Diamond’s theories. Geographic / environmental determinism has always been both appealing and treacherous (think back to Montesquieu). And I think most people wish that Diamond had some training as a historian or anthropologist to complement his expertise in biology. But leaving aside the kind of over-determined and ethno-centric implications of his approach, it is still interesting to think about how the development of particular kinds of relationships between humans and other species, especially herbivores that provided labor, sustenance and fertilizer helped contour power relationships between human societies, both historically and in the contemporary world.

Thanks, Peter – I should have read this before posting the comment above. Great links to the Smithsonian site on Neanderthals!