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domestication
3 Sep 06
Last night I went to a party at a friend’s house just outside of Merlin, Ontario. Merlin is more or less a little town on a road to nowhere. My friends live fairly nearby in an old one-room school house that was converted to a house recently enough (I think they said 1967) that many of their neighbours went to school there. Come to think of it, I guess their neighbours are kinda old.
What they do there, among other things, is raise chickens. Their operation is very small, free-range (truly), and entirely unauthorized by any governmental inspection standards. So they can’t really sell the abundance of eggs or the occasional surplus chicken, but they can and do barter, and have a reputation for showing up at people’s door with a basket of eggy goodness to give away.
For dinner, we had chicken stew made from a cock that they had raised and killed. I had to confess that, as a city kid, I couldn’t really relish the idea of killing my own meat, especially meat that might have had a name and whose close relatives I had just been admiring for their beauty (yes, chickens can be beautiful). You’d be correct if you guess that I cried when I read Charlotte’s Web, and it was as much a release of the pent up tension worrying about whether Wilbur would become sausage as it was about Charlotte’s peaceful death. Of course, my friends grew up city kids too, and they’ve come to terms with killing and eating the same chickens who run around in their yard. Then today (funny how these things happen), I ran across this:
Domestication of both plants and animals occurred without any farseeing intention or invention on the part of the stewards of the seeds and studs. But what a stroke of good fortune for those lineages that became domesticated! All that remains of the ancestors of today’s grains are small scattered patches of wild-grass cousins, and the nearest surviving relatives of all the domesticated animals could be carried off in a few arks. How clever of wild sheep to have acquired that most versatile adaptation, the shepherd! By forming a symbiotic alliance with Homo sapiens, sheep could outsource their chief survival tasks: food finding and predator avoidance. They even got shelter and emergency care thrown in as a bonus. The price they paid—losing the freedom of mate selection and being slaughtered instead of being killed by predators (if that is a cost)—was a pittance compared with the gain in offspring survival it purchased. (Dennett 169-70)
And it became clear to me that my friends’ chickens are at least lucky enough to live happy, well cared for lives until slaughtered by people who care that it is done quickly and humanely. This should have been clear enough, but sometimes city kids’ brains take a while to figure these things out. Here, just for interest’s sake, is the rest of Dennett’s paragraph:
But of course it wasn’t their cleverness that explains the good bargain. It was the blind, foresightless cleverness of Mother Nature, evolution, which ratified the free-floating rationale of this arrangement. Sheep and other domesticated animals are, in fact, significantly more stupid than their wild relatives—because they can be. Their brains are smaller (relative to body size and weight), and this is not just due to their having been bred for muscle mass (meat). Since both the domesticated animals and their domesticators have enjoyed huge population explosions. . . there can be no doubt that this symbiosis was mutualistic—fitness-enhancing to both parties. (70)
Works Cited
Dennett, Daniel C. Breaking the Spell: Religion as Natural Phenomenon. New York: Viking, 2006.
White, E. B. Charlotte’s Web. New York: Harper and Row, 1952.
Posted by pzed on September 3, 2006 at 4.01pm
Categories: fragments, scripture, selfComments on "domestication"
Scary to think that we’ve made them stupider, but not surprising considering all of the other changes we’ve made, through breeding, to suit our own needs. If you’ve ever had to chase a young bull that’s gotten out of its pen, you’d wonder how on earth such a stupid animal could ever survive on its own.
I’d like to know more about what happened to the grains, though, whether these species might still be thriving were it not for the intervention of humans. It would be a little bit dishonest to say that animals were smart (or lucky) to have become domesticated to humans because their natural foods have disappeared, if in fact it’s humans who have brought about that disappearance.
As you know, I grew up in a small town with an extended family in the farming community; although my family raised swine for meat, I couldn’t bring myself to kill either, and have long been repulsed by the killing of swine in particular. So it’s not just city kids who are squeamish.
Posted by jodi on September 3, 2006 at 7.21pm :: link
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