Comments on: Domestic Animals Tamed Us

By: michael

michael — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 10:04:40 +0000

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.

By: Alan Kellogg

Alan Kellogg — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 09:15:12 +0000

So southern white rhinos and tasmanian devils are working on getting us to domesticate them. Those sneaky (but adorable) bastards.

By: Mike Haubrich, FCD

Mike Haubrich, FCD — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 08:07:04 +0000

PeTA holds the position that it is wrong to have animals as pets. I wonder if they ever think about this aspect of domestication.

By: Felicia Gilljam

Felicia Gilljam — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 19:40:37 +0000

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!