Let's pretend a bee has thoughts. She flies from flower to flower collecting sweet sweet nectar. She essentially farms them. She thinks she's got it good: all this free food out there. If she's religious she'd say such benevolence is proof the Great Queen Bee In the Sky must exist. From a certain perspective she's right (she does have it pretty good).
From another perspective it's bullshit. The bee's not in control at all! She's a dupe of the flower who's really the one pulling the strings. The nectar is just bait. A tiny wage for the much bigger job: helping one flower mate with another. More on the plant's eye view of the world in this great video.
I've just read The Covenant of the Wild which makes a similar case for domestic animals. We've definitely contributed to their reproductive success (1.3 billion cows in existence can't be wrong!). But there's a deeper claim made by the book: the animals we've domesticated escaped extinction by getting us to domesticate them.
The book argues persuasively that the assumption that domestication was solely due to our efforts (or hegemony) is false. In body and behaviour, domestic animals resemble babies of their wild cousins (eg. adult dogs are more like wolf cubs than adult wolves). This is called neoteny and is common in the animal kingdom. Of course humans played a major role in domestication, but it was co-evolution. These animals were probably neotenous before we could start selectively breeding them. The alternative makes no sense: why would hunter-gatherers want to approach wild wolves "just to see what happens in a few generations"? (Interestingly we ourselves are domesticated and neotenous, resembling baby apes).
From an evolutionary perspective, getting domesticated was the best thing that happened to 18 lucky mammal species. Unlike most mammals they're in no danger of extinction. In fact we clear land for them (a stupid amount), feed them (ahead of of millions of people) and spend billions curing their diseases. The problems with our current use of animals are gigantic, and we've taken a huge toll on ecosystems. But the idea that evil-cancerous-humans-are-ruining-pristine-stable-&-romantic-nature is human-centric, incoherent & false. If we have any chance in hell of fixing things we need to change to a more even-handed and correct perspective.
4 comments ↓
Oh damn. I read the first paragraph of this post and immediately thought … but, what about the POLLEN?! Bees don’t just collect nectar, you know, they’re dependent on pollen as their sole protein source. And now I’ve started obsessing about the evolutionary origin of this behaviour - how did they come to eat pollen instead of protein of animal origin?
All of which is beside the point of your post, which is a good one that I gleefully make when people lament over the poor animals we keep caged up. Not that I condone cruelty to animals, of course…
Nice blog, btw. I shall return!
PeTA holds the position that it is wrong to have animals as pets. I wonder if they ever think about this aspect of domestication.
So southern white rhinos and tasmanian devils are working on getting us to domesticate them. Those sneaky (but adorable) bastards.
Thanks for commenting everyone. Just a quick note on the animal rights issue — I actually don’t think these things necessarily undermine animal rights. For instance you could make the case that even though domestic animals benefit from us farming them it would still be wrong. All this does is undermine the idea (used by people both within and outside the animal rights movement) that domestic animals are somehow better off “in nature”
Alan — if the white rhino was easy to mass-produce into a steak there’d be millions by now! Plus everything would be made of ivory much like lots now is made of leather.
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