Quotes About Domestication

Blessed are the ones who have become spiritually domesticated; the ones who have tamed the wild animal energy within them, the passions and compulsions of our lower nature.

Dogs are in many ways a human construct. We have co-evolved with them for so long that they are now attuned to human behavior, language, and emotion.

Apparently, when conditions were right, peoples of all world regions were quite capable of transforming wild plants into domesticated crops—a good point to keep in mind when next you hear someone claim that some cultures (usually their own) are more inventive or creative than others.

cats swore that they had pretended to be domesticated to protect themselves—any cat who lived with a human did so under duress, and all cats escaped whenever they could.

Cats, unlike dogs, are independent creatures. They do not need walking and are content to be alone all day, providing they are fed.

Man is woman's last domestic animal

Domesticated males aren't much use for adventure.

The table gives major crops, of five crop classes, from early agricultural sites in various parts of the world. Square brackets enclose names of crops first domesticated elsewhere; names not enclosed in brackets refer to local domesticates. Omitted are crops that arrived or became important only later, such as bananas in Africa, corn and beans in the eastern United States, and sweet potato in New Guinea. Cottons are four species of the genus

By selecting and growing those few species of plants and animals that we can eat, so that they constitute 90 percent rather than 0.1 percent of the biomass on an acre of land, we obtain far more edible calories per acre. As a result, one acre can feed many more herders and farmers—typically, 10 to 100 times more—than hunter-gatherers. That strength of brute numbers was the first of many military advantages that food-producing tribes gained over hunter-gatherer tribes.

Problems of Captive Breeding. We humans don't like to have sex under the watchful eyes of others; some potentially valuable animal species don't like to, either. That's what derailed attempts to domesticate cheetahs, the swiftest of all land animals, despite our strong motivation to do so for thousands of years.

In Africa as elsewhere in the world, some peoples were much "luckier" than others, in the suites of domesticable wild plant and animal species that they inherited from their environment.

Plant domestication may be defined as growing a plant and thereby, consciously or unconsciously, causing it to change genetically from its wild ancestor in ways making it more useful to human consumers.

Lima beans, watermelons, potatoes, eggplants, and cabbages are among the many other familiar crops whose wild ancestors were bitter or poisonous, and

plant domestication is not a matter of hunter-gatherers' domesticating a single plant and otherwise carrying on unchanged with their nomadic lifestyle.

Those extinctions eliminated all the large wild animals that might otherwise have been candidates for domestication, and left native Australians and New Guineans with not a single native domestic animal.

The UCLA historian Christopher Ehret has applied this linguistic approach to determining the sequence in which domestic plants and animals became utilized by the people of each African language family. By a method termed glotto-chronology, based on calculations of how rapidly words tend to change over historical time, comparative linguistics can even yield estimated dates for domestications or crop arrivals.

big domestic mammals were crucial to those human societies possessing them. Most notably, they provided meat, milk products, fertilizer, land transport, leather, military assault vehicles, plow traction, and wool, as well as germs that killed previously unexposed peoples.

If one defines "big" as "weighing over 100 pounds," then only 14 such species were domesticated before the twentieth century

This very unequal distribution of wild ancestral species among the continents became an important reason why Eurasians, rather than peoples of other continents, were the ones to end up with guns, germs, and steel.

But big mammal domestication virtually ended 4,500 years ago. By then, all of the world's 148 candidate big species must have been tested innumerable times, with the result that only a few passed the test and no other suitable ones remained.

IN ALL, OF the world's 148 big wild terrestrial herbivorous mammals—the candidates for domestication—only 14 passed the test. Why did the other 134 species fail? To which conditions was Francis Galton referring, when he spoke of those other species as "destined to perpetual wildness"?

we can recognize at least six groups of reasons for failed domestication.

these differences between the Fertile Crescent, New Guinea, and the eastern United States followed straightforwardly from the differing suites of wild plant and animal species available for domestication, not from limitations of the peoples themselves.

DOMESTICABLE ANIMALS ARE ALL ALIKE; EVERY UNDOMESTICABLE animal is undomesticable in its own way.