WI: Widespread Animal Slavery?

Can you ride a unicycle? I can't ride a unicycle. But I'll bet we both can build a fence. I bet apes could too under the direction of perhaps a human slave and under the close eye of a guy with a whip.

ah, but riding a Unicycle is a very simple task. It's merely Balancing and moving your feet to propel you forward.
it requires little thought.

A Fence requires more thought. You need to make sure they make everything is straight, show the Ape how certain tools need to be used, show them which way to put the Planks, Correct them when they do not preform correctly, and adapt to unexpected Problems that come up.

With Apes, Punishing it does not necessarily mean it will do the correct thing.
there are various ways to interpret what to do with a hammer if you have never seen such a thing before, and have no idea what it's used for.

The Time it would take for the Apes to learn such, is time wasted.

They did. Especially if the slave tore someone up as badly as you're saying these would. Definitely.

here is another problem that arises.
would the Death of the "Misbehaving" Ape be enough to convince the Other apes that they should not do what that ape did?
I do not believe so.

if the Ape was acting out of it's Instincts to Protect or prove it's dominance, then it's being punished for something that it can't not do.

and the Earlier point of "adoring their Masters" isn't enough to stop that.
How many times have we seen and heard News reports about Animals Mauling their Handlers?
and mind you, in many of those cases the animals aren't being forced to preform task, some of them are just out of the blue.

These slaves wouldn't replace human slavery. Just augment it.

I, of course, Disagree.
In most cases training certain animals would be a waste of Time, Resources and Effort.
With the apes, if they require at least one slave teaching them or assisting them, that's one less slave working at "maximum Efficiency", so to speak.
Rather than doing something more useful, he's being force to more-or-less Babysit.
 
Basically, you wouldn't want an ape to do skilled labour. Basically, that's complex behaviour.

On the other hand, you might be able to use an ape to do things that are in an ape's normal behavioural repertoire. For instance, picking fruit. Even sorting between immature fruit and ripe fruit as it picks them. Of course, the problem is that apes don't hoard, they eat as they harvest. So the ape would pick and eat until its not hungry. Or if you could convince it to keep picking, it might only just throw it away. So you'd have to find a behavioural tweak where the ape doesn't eat, but also hoards or deposits the fruit (or cotton or maize) where taught.

Hypothetically, you might actually do well getting apes to pick cotton or shell peanuts or pick oranges (I know, this is really not PC). But the reality of the age was that Apes during the period where this labour demand was high were largely inaccessible. The cotton fields were very far from the ape populations, a continent away literally. The apes were difficult to capture, expensive to bring over, difficult to train and breed. For the same effort and cost, slaves were a lot faster and cheaper as an economic option.

On the other side of the coin, the indigenous cultures in the region where the ape populations existed, had no particular need for any labour or behaviour/skill the apes could produce.

You could get some very complex behaviour out of apes. We get complex behaviour out of dogs - sheepdogs, retrievers, pointers, etc. But this complex behaviour is generally used in close synchronization with humans.

But overall, the match ups never happened. The cultures that were most proximate to the apes never needed them. The cultures that might potentially have found a role for ape labour weren't close to them.

If you want a hypothetical case - an intensive silviculture economy that emerged in Southeast Asia might well have had a reasonable opportunity and interest in domesticating Orangs or Gibbons. Let me throw you out a wild hypothetical. Let's suppose that there was a viable form of rubber tree in Borneo. Rubber emerges a thousand years or more ago as an extremely valuable commodity, somewhere along the value level of silk. Tapping and collecting latex is extremely labour intensive, and is a highly arboreal activity. Under those circumstances, you might have potential domestication of orangs as latex collectors. You could even see an orang based rubber industry, with a population of Orangs that would be unsustainable in the wild.
 
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Whale? I've never heard of that one.

NMMP Animals

The US navy trains Beluga, Killer Whales & Pilot Whales in addition to Dolphins.
Which brings up a question. Where do you draw the line between domestication and training? I don't think that I would consider a lion in a circus act to be domesticated no matter how well trained it is.

Beluga
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Pilot Whale
pilot_mark.jpg


Killer Whale
Orcinus.jpg
 
The US navy trains Beluga, Killer Whales & Pilot Whales in addition to Dolphins.
Which brings up a question. Where do you draw the line between domestication and training? I don't think that I would consider a lion in a circus act to be domesticated no matter how well trained it is.
Domestication affects populations (or rather, creates entirely new, distinct ones), while training is on a much smaller scale and lacks a multi-generational aspect.
 
Apes for picking things makes sense, a great ape should be capable of learn that picking and delivering a bagful of rubber/cotton means that it is fed. It'd probably be a good thing to do this away from the ape's natural food sources, though.
 
People have tried domesticating almost everything. Zebra, African buffalo, African elephant, cheetah, eagle, whale.... There are limitations to almost everything. I'm not going to go into it in this post (it would take about an hour), but read the relevant sections of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel for an excellent and fairly concise explanation of why some species were domesticated and others weren't.

True, but Diamond fails to take into account many potential domesticates - things that have since been demonstrated to be domesticable. While admittedly, most of these are relatively obscure plants, opportunity truly plays a major role in determining whether something will be domesticated.

For example, the Russian fox experiment. Some background: "Domestication" in placental mammals actually entails selection for the retention of infantile characteristics into adulthood. The reason for this is that one of these characteristics - ability to trust unfamiliar individuals - is desired. In every domesticated placental this results in the appearance of roughly the same selection of haplotypes. This means that essentially every placental mammal is domesticable. Now Diamond is quite right that most of the easy domesticates were domesticated. Where he's wrong is in his assumption that alternatives were not possible, rather than not likely. The Russians successfully bred foxes to be equally domesticated as modern dogs within a span of a couple (human) generations. All it took was a large-scale, scientifically organized effort and it was actually quite easy. That was with an animal that virtually never lives in large social groups and had never even approached domestication in prior history.

Now admittedly zebras (which you mention) are a strong point. They are intensely difficult to tame even to the level of an untrained stallion. Vicious creatures. Naturally, with horses, onagers, donkeys, and several types of cattle all available, no society ever put in the massive amount of effort it would have taken to domesticate the critters with pre-Scientific methods. Instead, an occasional noble or monarch on the fringes of Africa or in Rome (and later, European settlers to the continent) would try it for 20 years, expend massive money and effort to get the nicest to be vaguely usable, and give up. They're not undomesticable - they're just too hard for it to have ever been worth it.

But zebras are not an isolated exception. In fact almost no sub-Saharan mammal is "domesticable" (read: easy enough to have happened in OTL). The best guess here is that they had a million or so years to adapt to the presence of intelligent bipeds before those bipeds were organized enough to attempt taming anything. As such, while other organisms might see a large biped and react with general responses - "big, strange, run!" or "big, competitor, growl!" - those in Africa had specific hard-wired responses amounting to "if it can catch me it will definitely try to eat me," and "it doesn't have teeth so assume it's trying to kill me even if it doesn't bite." Compounding that issue, domesticates primarily developed among stable agricultural communities with large populations and pre-existing domesticates to use as models. All of these were in shorter supply in the majority of Africa than they were in Eurasia.

People have not tried "domesticating" "almost everything."

The problem with the former is that people conflate domesticating an animal with taming it. People have attempted to tame and breed those animals, and more, and failed. But taming is the work of a single generation and is at root the formation of a relationship with a single animal. Breeding is often the stumbling block for domestication, but is, again, not the same thing.

The latter is also factually wrong. Diamond's fallacy in his reseach is to extend one source beyond what it has actually shown. "Eagles" have not been attempted. Rather a couple species of eagles have been attempted, out of roughly sixty. His research was on failed domesticates, why would near misses come up in such a search? I suspect that - and the need to have a consistent narrative message for sales reasons is why critters like the Harris Hawk sailed under his radar.
 
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The African Elephant (northern variety, now extinct) actually was a semi-domesticate. That's what Hannibal rode across the alps.

In all fairness, they were different species. In fact the North African Elephant (as well as Syrian Elephant), is extinct - a victim of deforestation.

There must be a sustainable and replenishable wild population in relative proximity to a settled human culture. That's a tricky thing. Human populations will frequently hunt to extinction possible domesticates before they actually get domesticated. That's why all the big domestications - reindeer, horses, cattle, water buffalo and llama all took place on the fringes of civilization/agriculture, or had refuges where they could not be hunted effectively.

A very good point. There's a big argument that the shortage of domesticates in the Americas is a direct result of the fact that most settlement occurred from Siberia and by big game hunters. They seem to have hit the megafauna much harder there than in Eurasia, where there was more opportunity for the wildlife to adapt to human presence. In the latter early settlers were mixed opportunists or dedicated fishermen; possibly some relied on scavenging in the wake of saber-toothed cats (though that's conjecture at this stage).

Based on northern europe, the cree indians of Canada could have domesticated their moose, but they simply didn't need the horsepower.

Or have a stable, organized culture to maintain those creatures. Remember, however important things like horses, camels, sheep, and goats were to nomadic societies, they all seem to have been first domesticated by settled ones.

Domestication also requires 'human tolerant' animals. Essentially, placid temperament, relative degree of docility, tolerating other animals - humans, dogs, etc. This seems to be a tricky one, some species, particularly seem much more strongly high strung.

Mostly, yes. It can be done without them, but it's so much harder that it's very unlikely for pre-modern societies.

'Toleration' may actually be a self selecting process. We have records of a number of wild animals, raccoons and rats, for instance, that are 'human tolerant' to the point of existing easily as vermin in the fringes of human society. But we see similar phenomen with some elk and deer, and we may have seen it with dogs and cats. Large animal domestication may have come about because human crop raising and land clearing was so favourable to certain animals that they just decided to keep hanging around. Today, any marijuana grower can tell you stories about deer who hang around the fringes of the crop, watching the growers and sneaking into the harvest. These stoner deer seem to be shifting towards 'human tolerant'. Similar factors may have been in play for other domestication events.

That's the current consensus for dogs, actually. Before humans practiced agriculture, they still had garbage dumps, and dogs seem to have adapted to judge human intent from their body language and tone as a protective measure before they established any cooperative relationship with humans.

The pot deer is cool. I'd be curious if anyone's studied its effect on their nervous system. Societies that planted edible intoxicants may have had a potential advantage in domesticating grazers.

Domestication needs to be economic - ie, the rewards of labour or stable meat or other resources (wool, feathers) must substantially outweigh the costs of raising and maintaining the animals, and must also substantially outweigh the costs of simply harvesting or hunting them in the wild. (The Elephants dilemma, also a problem for musk ox). This is tricky, since its hard to beat the economics of free range wild harvest... right up until the time that free range is driven into extinction (see #1).

Absolutely. In fact in the modern era we now know how to domesticate potentially any mammal or bird. It's just that the expense is not worth it. Organizing the domestication of sperm whales alone would probably require a significant restructuring of the American national budget.

Are merely a technical elaboration of economics. Therefore fast growing/fast breeding animals are preferred over slow breeders/slow growers. If you get a return on your investment in 2 years, domestication is more likely to occur than if it takes 20 years. If your animal's food supply is expensive then its more expensive to domesticate, whereas if the animal's food supply is cheap (grass, garbage, vermin, scraps) then domestication is more likely. An animal that has multiple uses: Fur/Wool/Leather, Meat/Milk, Labour/Draft/Riding, has more economic value and is a more likely candidate for domestication.

Very well put.

Some stated criteria are pretty overrated. Take 'pens', the notion that an animal is a lot harder to domesticate if you can't coop it up behind a fence. There's some truth to that. But let's face it, no one pens a water buffalo, or a camel. On the other hand, many/most animals are highly territorial, and that's a behavioural trait that can be manipulated. Many also have forms of social dominance or submission that can be manipulated to control their location. Think of sheep and sheepdogs.

I think, honestly, that this is one of the better points made against domestication. Most of the animals that could be tamed without pens went on to be domesticates. What remains (mostly) require more management - although obviously there are infinite alternatives to wooden fences. Ditches, aquariums, berms, nets, moats, and hedges all have been and can be used.

If you want a qualified (as in the sense of a qualified audit) opinion, I would say that given the existing mix of species and cultures a large proportion of the potential domesticates open in the various windows were domesticated, and the majority of these are in use today.

I agree.

But, if we hypothesize more surviving species, or peculiar survivors, or hypothetically minor biological tweaks, or other cultures, then you've got other options.

I'm also tweaking the idea of a society that somehow develops the methods the Russians were using from the '50s. Such a society would become unrecognizable if given a couple millenia to extend the practice. It's technically possible - you only need methods, not technology or theory - but admittedly I don't know how it could realistically occur. If it did - almost everything would become "domesticable."
 
In all fairness, they were different species. In fact the North African Elephant (as well as Syrian Elephant), is extinct - a victim of deforestation.

Yep. That's true. But the whole area of elephants is kind of an interesting subset of the discussion.

A very good point. There's a big argument that the shortage of domesticates in the Americas is a direct result of the fact that most settlement occurred from Siberia and by big game hunters. They seem to have hit the megafauna much harder there than in Eurasia, where there was more opportunity for the wildlife to adapt to human presence. In the latter early settlers were mixed opportunists or dedicated fishermen; possibly some relied on scavenging in the wake of saber-toothed cats (though that's conjecture at this stage).

Nevertheless, there were viable megafauna. We know that the Reindeer is a domesticate or semi-domesticate. And an examination of historical records and legislation from the Baltic and Northern Europe, together with some fascinating Russian experiments in moose domestication persuades me that the moose was an abandoned domesticate or semi-domesticate.

So you could extrapolate from that, that their genetically and behaviourally identical American Caribou and Moose could have been domesticated. The reasons that they weren't, I'd suggest, were that there were no viable points of access for the cultures. Moose and Caribou habitat were hunter gatherer/non-agricultural societies.

In the case of Moose and Caribou, for example, their habitat overlapped strongly with Cree Indians and their relatives - Saulteaux, and rivals, Dene and Ojibwa. These were all mostly riverine cultures which meant that they were moving up and down river systems through canoes. They had an elaborate technology of transportation, which was already capable of freighting goods in reasonable volume with minimal inconvenience.

The Caribou were non-riverine, so in order to domesticate Caribou, the Cree would have had to have abandoned or severely compromised an effective lifestyle economy.

Now, the Moose were riverine animals, so potentially the Cree could have adapted and adopted them. But what for? Their canoe were more than equivalent in carrying capacity, needed less attention and maintenance and were more easily managed (comparatively). There was nothing in Cree technology or society where you could plug the moose in and gain real economic advantages.

Now, conceivably, if wild rice cultivation emerged as a genuine agricultural activity/economy, or some other cultural development, that essentially created a demand for horsepower, then Moose domestication could well have taken hold.

Hypothetically, the Inuit or Dene could have domesticated Caribou and evolved a similar lifestyle to the Laplanders. But as noted, the Dene were already committed to rivers. The Inuit were heavily committed to a seasonal rotational lifestyle which saw them relying upon seal and fisheries resources. I don't think you could transition from there to a Lapp lifestyle, not easily.

And something to consider - the Inuit had already committed to another useful domesticate, dogs. And Dogs as a domesticate may have been incompatible with Caribou.

This, by the way, seems to be what happened to Moose as a domesticated species. Basically, the domesticated moose was pushed out by competition from horses and horse based societies moving out from the south.

Or have a stable, organized culture to maintain those creatures. Remember, however important things like horses, camels, sheep, and goats were to nomadic societies, they all seem to have been first domesticated by settled ones.

Nomadic societies by nature are forced to travel light. They carry a minimal number of tools and artifacts, since there's an economic (lugging shit around) cost. For such society, domestication is generally too much of an investment - they can't afford the front end R&D of domestication, which might take anywhere from a decade or more to a couple of human generations to prove out.

Stable agricultural societies, on the other hand, have enough economic surplus, that they can make the social investment.

Of course, once a product has been proved out, the economics change. Now instead of a generation investment, you've got a product which will produce an immediate return on investment, or at most after a couple of years, and which can dramatically enhance available economic resources - ie lugging shit around capacity, convenient sources of protein, moving faster and further.

That's the current consensus for dogs, actually. Before humans practiced agriculture, they still had garbage dumps, and dogs seem to have adapted to judge human intent from their body language and tone as a protective measure before they established any cooperative relationship with humans.

My thinking is that its not just dogs. It's almost certainly the case for cats as well. And its likely that this was the case for the big ungulate domestics. Early agriculture was essentially a process of modifying habitat and promoting plant species that cows and horses liked.

I've talked to northern prairie farmers who talk about Elk as pests. Essentially, Elk tend to hang around farms, they will watch farmers, and they have demonstrated a fairly sophisticated capacity for knowing when to raid croplands. My thinking is that a version of this probably occurred with cattle and horses, and these animals may well have self selected for human tolerance before they were technically domesticated.

Now, you may be thinking this is crazy talk on my part. After all, the crops that horses and cattle eye so hungrily are crops meant for humans. So obviously, horses and cattle should be considered pests, or nearby protein.

But think about this. In the domestication zones, winter is a real phenomenon. Winter comes, forage goes right down. Horses have to dig up frozen grass with their hooves. In the wild, well, you can make a living. But if there's a harvested farmer's field around.... well, from the point of view of a horse or cow in the winter, its an all you can eat buffet. So in fact, there's very good reasons for horse or cattle to habituate themselves to humans, because even with hunting and hostility, there's more eating opportunities.

Basically, horses and cattle started out as effectively giant fucking raccoons.


The pot deer is cool. I'd be curious if anyone's studied its effect on their nervous system. Societies that planted edible intoxicants may have had a potential advantage in domesticating grazers.

Most of what I know on the subject comes from talking to people who had backwoods grow operations, or through secondhand contacts. At first, it was just a wacky story, but it came up often enough that it seemed to me something was going on there. Given the illicit nature of the enterprise, I'm pretty much certain that no one has studied nervous system effects.

But there is a fair amount of literature which suggests deer and other large animals will actively seek out intoxicants. I've heard some interesting stories about drunken bears.

Overall, we shouldn't make the mistake that herbivores are unsophisticated feeders. They actively select among a variety of plant species, and they display marked preferences among plant species.

Absolutely. In fact in the modern era we now know how to domesticate potentially any mammal or bird. It's just that the expense is not worth it. Organizing the domestication of sperm whales alone would probably require a significant restructuring of the American national budget.

Interesting notion. I think though that the really big nut you'd have to beat with Sperm Whales is their longevity and slow reproduction. Literally, even if you could domesticate within three to ten generations, you've exceeded the current lifespan of the United States. If your domestication process takes longer than your civilization.... problem.

The other obstacle is the economic utility. What benefit could we get from a domesticated sperm whale that would exceed (a) the cost of raising and managing the things; (b) the free value of harvesting free range.

Fascinating notion though. I imagine the sort of culture that ends up domesticating sperm whales is one that has very few options available.

I'm also tweaking the idea of a society that somehow develops the methods the Russians were using from the '50s. Such a society would become unrecognizable if given a couple millenia to extend the practice. It's technically possible - you only need methods, not technology or theory - but admittedly I don't know how it could realistically occur. If it did - almost everything would become "domesticable."

Well, it seems to me that the key would be finding an economic utility.

Also, some domesticates would probably shut the door on others.

Once you domesticate cattle.... well, between leather, meat, milk, pulling plows, carrying loads and hauling wagons or sleds.... that's a diversity of resources and tasks, a combination of meat and horsepower that's just hard to beat.

The other big domesticates that come along later all show up in marginal environments. The horse, the camel, the reindeer, water buffalo, Llama and moose. Camel and Reindeer are popular current domesticates by thriving in environments that kill cattle. Water buffalo also do well, habituated to an environment where they outperform cattle. Llama were able to be established as a domesticate long before cattle showed up, and hold on strongest in hill country where cattle have trouble. Moose and Horses? Well, Horses won and Moose lost.

On another thread, it was suggested that Ostrich were a missed domesticate. I concurr. But I think that this is because, when the domestication opportunities showed up, that cattle and horses essentially had Ostrich so thoroughly outperformed that it just wasn't worth it.

A cattle or horse provided more meat, could carry larger burdens, provided more horsepower and overall gave a better return on investment. So there's no real incentive to domesticate Ostrich.

Conceivably, its possible that Ostrich were actually domesticated at some point by some cultures, and that this domestication was abandoned when the culture got its hands on economically superior critters. I'm blowing smoke here. So far as I know, there's no archeological or historical records to support that.

For the Ostrich to survive as a viable domesticate, it would need an economic (as with horses) or habitat (as with camel and reindeer) niche that would give it at least a local economic advantage.

And remember that there are two phases to the economics of domestication. The 'R&D cost' - ie, the process of domesticating an animal and learning how to maximize its exploitation, is significantly more expensive than the 'operating cost' - ie, the expense or investment once the domestication is worked out and you've learned to maximize exploitation.

So, let me add yet another criteria: Lack of competitors.

My suggestion is that a society would never go through the process of domesticating ostriches, if it already has an alternative like cattle or horses or camels readily available and to hand.

We wouldn't domesticate guineau pigs or turkey as a meat animal, if we already had chickens.

Basically, existing domesticates in a society amount to a barrier to the process of developing further domesticates. Doesn't make it impossible, but it makes it a shitload harder.

Of course, once a domesticate is available, it can find its way into a society that already has domesticates, if it can establish a special niche. In this sense, Turkeys managed a strategic masterstroke against their Chicken nemesis, when they invented thanksgiving (yeah, I know. I'm deliberately phrasing it weird, but the underlying point is sound. Just go with it.)

So, theoretically, we could have had a domesticated Ostrich. What would be required would be an isolated stable agricultural society with reasonable proximity to wild ostrich populations, but with no actual major domesticates of its own (conceivably, it might have had enough contact with other societies to have acquired the idea, but not enough contact to acquire the animals themselves).

That being the case, ten or twenty generations of selective breeding might have produced an Ostrich which was sturdy enough to carry heavy loads, had some reasonable utility as a riding animal, produced valuable down, and laid eggs with the same frequency as a chicken. An animal like that might have had enough entrenched or niche economic utility (Ostrich do well in fairly marginal environments as well) that it might well have survived the introduction of cattle or horses.

I guess my point is that conceivably, we might have a lot of potential domesticates out there, but there were barriers. In a way, figuring out why potential domestications didn't happen or were abandoned, or trying to sketch out cultural criteria for a particular potential domestication is a fascinating exercise.
 
Basically, you wouldn't want an ape to do skilled labour. Basically, that's complex behaviour.

On the other hand, you might be able to use an ape to do things that are in an ape's normal behavioural repertoire. For instance, picking fruit. Even sorting between immature fruit and ripe fruit as it picks them. Of course, the problem is that apes don't hoard, they eat as they harvest. So the ape would pick and eat until its not hungry. Or if you could convince it to keep picking, it might only just throw it away. So you'd have to find a behavioural tweak where the ape doesn't eat, but also hoards or deposits the fruit (or cotton or maize) where taught.

Well, they also will feed their young. Get all the females out in the field with a satchel that sits on them like a clinging infant. If you've got them domesticated in the first place, you could probably get 'em to fill it.

Natural hoarders would be more useful, obviously. Squirrels could probably have been used in this way, given the time and effort. They just weren't for a variety of reasons that made sense at the time, and because they didn't cohabit with societies that were capable.

If you want a hypothetical case - an intensive silviculture economy that emerged in Southeast Asia might well have had a reasonable opportunity and interest in domesticating Orangs or Gibbons. Let me throw you out a wild hypothetical. Let's suppose that there was a viable form of rubber tree in Borneo. Rubber emerges a thousand years or more ago as an extremely valuable commodity, somewhere along the value level of silk. Tapping and collecting latex is extremely labour intensive, and is a highly arboreal activity. Under those circumstances, you might have potential domestication of orangs as latex collectors. You could even see an orang based rubber industry, with a population of Orangs that would be unsustainable in the wild.

But how do we start it? The return on investment for such a domestication attempt would be generations away, and the scale of the "herding" and breeding program would have been prohibitively expensive for the states that inhabited the place for most of its history.
 
Well, they also will feed their young. Get all the females out in the field with a satchel that sits on them like a clinging infant. If you've got them domesticated in the first place, you could probably get 'em to fill it.

Interesting, and takes advantage of natural behavioural wiring. Clever.

Natural hoarders would be more useful, obviously. Squirrels could probably have been used in this way, given the time and effort. They just weren't for a variety of reasons that made sense at the time, and because they didn't cohabit with societies that were capable.

Yeah, I was actually thinking that natural hoarders could have been usefully domesticated. Basically, its like bees, critters that range widely to feed and bring it all back to a central larder. There's a woodpecker species that does the same thing. Interesting to play with.

Maybe squirrels weren't big enough? Or maybe their harvesting was too highly seasonal? Possibly their harvest/hoarding wasn't tuned to human edibles?

Conceivably, squirrel domestication would have occurred in parallel with the domestication and widespread cultivation of nut or hard seed trees or bushes. You might have seen a very interesting niche here.


But how do we start it? The return on investment for such a domestication attempt would be generations away, and the scale of the "herding" and breeding program would have been prohibitively expensive for the states that inhabited the place for most of its history.

Not so sure about that. I mean, its an entirely hypothetical situation. I would assume that latex harvesting would start as a human labour intensive activity, and would involve shifting to tamed animals. Orangs are pretty intelligent, so I think the issue would be motivating the animal within its behavioural parameters.

As I understand Orangs, they're solitary animals, but that solitary aspect is driven by their frugivore lifestyle. Given the opportunity, they're fairly gregarious. My impression of them is that they're both social and relatively socially tolerant of humans. They're relatively territorial.

So basically, control a food supply, and offer a task that's within the animal's behavioural range, and you could probably get it done.

The problem is that in the case of Orangs, the task they're best suited for is fruit picking and harvesting. Which is their food source. So its hard to motivate or manipulate their behaviour. All you'd get is an animal that's eating its fill of your crop and is not highly motivated to work hard to share it with you.

So key to Orang domestication would be a harvestable commodity (ie, a task that it can usefully perform) that it can't eat, and then basically manipulate it through food and shelter.

Thinking out loud, I figure that you'd have to have an extremely high value commodity to justify the investment. Something on the order of chinese silk, or rubber.

So.... let's say that a latex sap bearing tree species developed in Borneo or Sumatra, its applications are discovered and it becomes an extremely lucrative trade good.... then in a situation like that, I could see a society undertaking the effort at domestication.

By the way, here's an interesting series of pictures:

http://www.messybeast.com/history/working.htm
 
There are exceptions. One of the more interesting is a type of hawk from the North American northwest that hunts in flocks. They're extremely social birds, which makes them ludicrously easy to use in hawking - they actually like you. Had there been an overlapping civilization with domesticates for a thousand years or so, and had they practiced hawking, I've no doubt the human race would have domesticated hawks today.
I think you mean the Harris's Hawk of the North American Southwest... They are a favorite of modern falconers/hawkers in the US, but Falconry laws in the US could pose a problem for any attempts of domestication, rather than mere taming...

Basically, horses and cattle started out as effectively giant fucking raccoons.




Interesting notion. I think though that the really big nut you'd have to beat with Sperm Whales is their longevity and slow reproduction. Literally, even if you could domesticate within three to ten generations, you've exceeded the current lifespan of the United States. If your domestication process takes longer than your civilization.... problem.

The other obstacle is the economic utility. What benefit could we get from a domesticated sperm whale that would exceed (a) the cost of raising and managing the things; (b) the free value of harvesting free range.

Fascinating notion though. I imagine the sort of culture that ends up domesticating sperm whales is one that has very few options available.




So, let me add yet another criteria: Lack of competitors.

My suggestion is that a society would never go through the process of domesticating ostriches, if it already has an alternative like cattle or horses or camels readily available and to hand.

We wouldn't domesticate guineau pigs or turkey as a meat animal, if we already had chickens.

Basically, existing domesticates in a society amount to a barrier to the process of developing further domesticates. Doesn't make it impossible, but it makes it a shitload harder.

Of course, once a domesticate is available, it can find its way into a society that already has domesticates, if it can establish a special niche. In this sense, Turkeys managed a strategic masterstroke against their Chicken nemesis, when they invented thanksgiving (yeah, I know. I'm deliberately phrasing it weird, but the underlying point is sound. Just go with it.)
That first section of what I've kept is sig worthy, as is the bolded section, if the sig allows enough characters to give an idea of the context...

A coulture that domesticated the sperm whale could be interesting... The other kind of culture that colud do it is one with an average life span much closer to that of the whales, but that's getting into the ASB territory...

There's a woodpecker species that does the same thing. Interesting to play with.

Maybe squirrels weren't big enough? Or maybe their harvesting was too highly seasonal? Possibly their harvest/hoarding wasn't tuned to human edibles?

Conceivably, squirrel domestication would have occurred in parallel with the domestication and widespread cultivation of nut or hard seed trees or bushes. You might have seen a very interesting niche here.

The Acorn Woodpecker? I take it you've never eaten an acorn, if your suggesting domesticating them... You'd get much more utility frome eating the woodpecker than you would from a years supply of acorns...

The problem with squirels is finding their catches... IIRC, the squirels fail to find something like 25% of their catches, it will be hard for a human, who wasn'tthe one that hid them in the first place to find the catches...
 
I was aware of that. You'd have to tune up squirrels a bit to make it viable. But it still has potential. The problem is that there's no adjacent crop/plant that really makes this viable. Your point about acorns is well taken.
 
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