Gun Germs and Steel (7): There are more than 100 kinds of large mammals in the world, why only 14 species have been domesticated?
1. Daily food
The efficiency with which food biomass is converted into feeder biomass is usually around 10%. So no carnivores are domesticated as food because there isn't enough meat to feed.
2, growth rate
This requirement excludes gorillas and elephants, although they are vegetarian, absolutely not picky eaters, and have more meat on their bodies. But no one would spend 15 years waiting for his herd to grow to adulthood.
3, breeding problems in captivity.
We humans don't like to have sex in full view of the public; some potentially valuable animals don't like to do that either. That is, not mating and breeding in captivity. For example, cheetahs, South American alpacas
4, sinister temperament
The tendency to kill at every turn has deprived many animals that might otherwise seem ideal as candidates for domestication. Grizzly bear, African bison, hippopotamus
5. Prone to frightening tendencies.
Those that are easy to get nervous are difficult to keep in captivity. If they are kept in the fence, they may also be frightened, either scared to death or flee to death on the fence. This is the case, for example, for gazelles.
6, social structure
1) Almost all domesticated large mammals have demonstrated that their wild ancestors had 3 common social characteristics
(1) They live in groups
(2) A well-established hierarchy of dominance is maintained among their group members
(3) These groups occupy overlapping areas of life rather than mutually exclusive
The structure of the social settlement is ideal for domestication, and humans have in fact copied this hierarchical advantage. In the camel-stuffed horse team, the horse of the cyclic Yang followed the leader, just as it usually followed the horses of the better rank.
There are similar ranks in the ancestral (wolf) groups of sheep, goats, cattle and dogs. As young animals grow up in this group, they keep in mind the animals they often see next to them. In the wild, they see members of the same species, but in captivity, the young animals in the group see the people next to them, so they remember people firmly.
This social animal is and grazing. Bring them together, instinctively follow a leader, and treat people as that leader, so they are happy to be driven away by herders or sheepdogs.
Animals that live alone cannot be grazed intensively. They are incompatible with each other, such as cats.
Cats and ferrets are the only territorial mammals that have been domesticated. Not for meat but for pets.
2) Not most social animals can be domesticated, and most cannot be domesticated for one of the following reasons
First, groups with many animals do not have overlapping living ranges, but remain exclusive areas that exclude other groups. Keeping these two groups of animals in captivity is as impossible as keeping two solitary males in captivity.
Second, many animals live in groups for part of the year, becoming territorial during mating season. This is true of most deer and antelopes. (Reindeer exception)
Again, many social animals, including most deer and antelopes, do not have a well-defined superior rank and are therefore not instinctively prepared to keep any dominant leader in mind (and therefore not to mind). As a result, while many deer and antelopes were tamed (think of all those true stories of Bambi), people have never seen the kind of domesticated deer and antelopes that graze in flocks like sheep. This problem also made the domestication of the North American and Canadian sheep halfway abandoned.
