What a great post! I am also a big fan of Christian the lion. (Isn’t everybody?). The issue you raise about genetics/environment vis-a-vis Belyaev’s experiments and the other readings is so important and intriguing. Belyaev selected SOLELY for docility and interest in humans (as manifested by behavior) in order to isolate the genetic components of domestication. Your point about the docility of sheep and cattle being a function of their environment (including the circumstances under which each individual is raised) is important. But it isn’t “just” nurture that makes them the way they are. If it were, then by extension one could take any ungulate (say the Pronghorn), raise them around people and voila, they would be “domesticated” and lose much of their fight-flight response. Ironically (and inadvertently), what Belyaev proved is that both nature and nurture matter. In other words, domestication is a process, and a relationship between species that is conditioned both by genetics / biology and behavior/culture. Cool, but complicated!

I looked into meanings of the term artificial, and I think one version avoids the “everything is natural” paradigm. Artificial, meaning the result of deliberate human action, can be applied to part or all of the process of domestication, certainly in the foxes case.

On the subject of unexpected predations, there are spiders the size of dinner plates that eat birds. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klHDzIIrsjY

I think it comes down to the individual and the situation in determining which response will be triggered, fight or flight, and both are similar in the release of adrenaline. Prey will likely specialize in either fight or flight, gazelles fly while a hippo may fight. Humans are interesting because individually we are prey, but as a group we are pack hunters. Depending on the situation we can run for our lives or attack in an adrenaline fueled frenzy.

The two things you hit on, giving birth at night and the fight or flight response were two of the more interesting ideas expressed in the reading to me. I think that the general instinct of some animals to protect their young is amazing, this including the notion to create the safest environment to give birth in which seems like something uncontrollable. The fight or flight response is interesting when applied to humans because I don’t feel particularly successful at either when faced against a predator. I already know that in any sort of dangerous situation I would choose flight simply because I have no ability to defend myself but this is a choice for others. Do animals already have a predisposed notion to fight or flight? Or, are some able to calculate the potential threat and decide between the two?

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I love this insight, Tanner! I think any time we can interrogate our assumptions about the universality and validity of our perceptions we’re more likely to appreciate the nuances of reality and discover some truly extraordinary things about human-animal (and human-human) relationships.

I felt the exact same way as you about Animals as Domesticates. I really appreciated getting some scientific background that was easy for me to digest as a person who has no understanding of domestication. I think your discussion of culture is very interesting. As you mentioned your time in Barcelona, I began to think about when I visited Nicaragua last year. Almost totally contrary to your experience, there were stray dogs absolutely everywhere. Most people just ignored them, and they seemed to understand that they should go unnoticed. Stray dogs are a huge problem in Nicaragua, and most have diseases, fleas, ticks, and are very malnourished. It makes me wonder about the history of the culture as compared to your example. Was the dog introduced and then forgotten when the people realized they had no use for it? Does the poverty level contribute to a difference in the domestication of the dog? I’m sure there must be some kind of correlation here.

I totally agree with the way that this section of Bulliet was much better than the first. He seemed to really begin to dig into the subject of domestication, which I thought would have served as a great background to some of his bold claims from the first several chapters. I was also interested by his assessment of Jared Diamond. I didn’t notice when I watched the video, but he does seem to skim over some really important facts when laying out his theory. One example was the Peccary that Bulliet discusses, and explains the way that none of Diamond’s explanations about why domestication could fail for certain animals applied to the Peccary. I believe we also mentioned several things in class that Diamond grazes over, including dogs. It seems to me that Bulliet is kind of picking up on Diamond’s unsound theories, which is one of the first things I’ve enjoyed about Bulliet.

I think it’s very possible that animals have the potential to develop their own culture. In a class I took on animal behavior, we studied the research of a group of scientists who observed behaviors in natural populations of chimpanzees across Africa. They found that certain behaviors had developed in some groups, while not in others, and vice-versa. For example, some populations participated in extensive communal grooming, while in other populations grooming only occured in small family groups. I was skeptical while reading this and thought perhaps there were more substantial reasons to different behaviors developing in different groups, such as different benefits depending on habitat and resources, however the article we read went on to describe many specific behaviors which had the same probability of being equally useful to two different groups of chimps, and yet only developing in one. It would be interesting to learn what would happen if the scientists “taught” one group of chimps the behaviors of another; would they reject the new culture, even though it might be useful, or accept it? It might yield new insights into the psychology behind historical dissensions in human society based solely on cultural differences.

I completely agree with you that domesticated animals have in a sense co-evolved with human society. It’s interesting to note, however, that this co-evolution is different from others we might find in the natural world. For one thing,(as tanneraustin has already pointed out), since humans were pretty much evolved physically and genetically by the time they got around to domesticating animals, the evolution on our side of the spectrum was mostly in terms of society and perhaps intelligence. Another important difference between this type of co-evolution and others is that usually co-evolution is a sort-of arms race between two competing species- either predator and prey, or parasite and host, etc. In this case, humans are augmenting the process of evolution in domestic animals by selectively diversifying their species and ensuring their continued existence. Not to say that co-evolution is never in other instances for the benefit of mutualistic relationships, it’s just more uncommon. It would be interesting to think about where some of these species might be had humans not had such a large hand in their evolution- it’s pretty obvious (at least according to Jared Diamond) where we would be without them!