“We were
wild animals for seven million years. We learned a lot of lessons. We should be
careful not to lose them.”-Lee Child
Let’s keep that quote in mind as we compare a
couple of definitions, the first—
Domesticated or Domestication, (from the Latin domesticus: "of the home") is
the cultivating or taming of a population of organisms in order to accentuate
traits that are desirable to the cultivator or tamer.
For today’s lesson it is
important that we hew closely to the scientific definition of this word. Merely
finding a baby squirrel and keeping it as a pet is not by strict definition “domesticating”
that animal, you are merely acculturating it to abnormal surroundings and there
is a high probability that this “taming” will not survive sexual maturity. This
is a lesson hard learned by chimpanzee and big cat owners, often what begins as
an exercise in cuteness ends in the animal being what it is-wild. By the way,
never the animal’s fault, it is merely being what it is despite our selfish
wishes.
Domestication by strict
definition is a process of thousands of years or hundreds of bred-for generations
to render a species more docile or yielding to human wishes.
A poetic but stark
definition of domestication is “the breaking
of a species’ spirit over time to make us, the owner, happy. “
The second word to be defined
is Civilization.
We are not using the word
in the broad sense of the combined progress and adaptation of social man to his
environment, but rather, again, in a clinical sense. Man is not a domesticated
animal in the strict sense of the word, as he was not purposely bred for
tameness, as we have done with wolves to give us cute puppies, or predatory big
cats that we have bred to be lazy window-sill nappers.
Man has never been
subject to this strict purposeful breeding program so we are not domesticated,
but voluntarily choose to be tame, or civilized. In this light, to be civilized
is to voluntarily assume the mantle of a domesticated animal.
Man, in theory, can do
what a dog or cat cannot do, we can revert to our wild state by choice. Yes,
dogs can attack and cats can claw but no one will mistake their attempts at
“wildness” for that of their ancestors. Man, on the other hand, can be just as
wild as his primitive forebears as in essence he still walks around with the
same body and the same brain that walked the savanna millions of years ago.
The same can’t be said
for the Pekinese or Siamese at your feet begging for treats.
That bit of “Yeah, I’m a bad-ass caveman but I choose to
be civilized and go all primal when I need to” may make some of us feel
pretty fine, indeed.
But is the choice of civilizing
ourselves just a few shades off from domestication?
Just how quickly can we
lose our primal abilities?
Let’s look outside our
own species for a moment to another species, a highly intelligent one at that.
Let’s see what happens when we remove it from the wild, attempt to tame it, and
then do an about-face and attempt to free it back into the wild.
The below is from dolphin
trainer Tom Foster’s account of trying to re-wild two wild dolphin, Tom and
Misha, to prepare them for their release. [The following is from the excellent
article “Born to Be Wild” by Tim Zimmerman in National Geographic 6/2015, pages 68-69.]
[Keep in mind the
following account regards two wild animals that were born in the wild, captured
and kept in captivity for a few years. These animals were not born in
captivity.]
“…Foster didn’t see how he could restore Tom and
Misha to the Olympic level of fitness they would need to survive in the ocean
if he didn’t put them through a regimen of fast swims, jumps, and tail walks
that would build muscle and stamina. ‘The only way is to train them so you can
untrain them, he says.”
‘High-energy workouts require calories, so the first
job was to overcome Tom and Misha’s picky eating habits and reacquaint them
with the fish they would likely encounter in the Aegean, such as mullet,
anchovies, and sardines. The strategy was to offer them a local fish species.
If they ate it, they were rewarded with mackerel, a fish they developed a taste
for in captivity. To mimic the unpredictability of food in the wild, Foster varied
the amount and frequency of their meals. ‘When you bring them into captivity, everything
from feeding to shows is very structured,’ he says. They develop a built-in
clock and can tell exactly when they are going to get fed. We have to turn that
around, because we know that in the wild they will eat more one day than
another.’”
Now, I’m sure you’re way ahead
of me by this point. A wild species that got fat and lazy due to a lack of
exercise, regular meals, and finicky eating habits. Hmm? What species are we
talking about?
OK, back to Tom and Misha
two “civilized” dolphins, a species of high intelligence with a remarkable cranial
capacity (just like another species we know.)
“Foster also wanted to wake up their highly capable dolphin brains. He
dropped into the pen things they may not have seen for years, like an octopus
or a jellyfish or a crab. He cut holes along the length of a PVC tube, stuffed
it full of dead fish, and then plunked it into the water. Tom and Misha had to
figure out how to manipulate the tube so that the fish would pop out of the holes.
‘In captivity we train the animals not to think on their own, to shut down
their brains and to do what we ask them to do,’ Foster explains. ‘What we are
trying to do when we release them into the wild is get them off autopilot and thinking
again.’”
Hmm? Brains on autopilot.
Atrophied ability to think for themselves without predictable structure. We are
talking about dolphins, right?
Allow me to call our
attention again to Foster’s comment on how to “civilize” a wild animal: “In
captivity we train the animals not to think on their own, to shut down their
brains and to do what we ask them to do.”
So, to be clear, it is absolutely
possible to take a wild animal, even one as hyper-intelligent as a dolphin and
to atrophy its physical and mental prowess with as little as a few years of
captivity.
No, this is not
domestication, not in the strict sense of the word…but the level of training required
to wean a wild animal off of its civilization and to make it fit to be wild
again is indeed food for thought.
A few years of
civilization atrophied these animals’ natural abilities. What might a lifetime
of civilization do? Generations?
Does voluntary
civilization, and generations of it at that as opposed to one generation of
catch and capture, compound the atrophy problem?
To be clear, this essay
is not an anti-civilization and all its attendant benefits screed. No, instead
it is intended as food for thought to an audience of individuals who consider
honing self-protection skills, survival ability, self-reliance, independent
thinking, and overall fitness as valuable.
With that intention in
mind I ask us to pause and reflect to what extent have we ourselves possibly
chosen voluntary domestication? And at what costs?
A key question at this
point might be, is there a biological mechanism that points to us being able to
lose physical and cognitive abilities
Without such a concrete
mechanism this discussion is just philosophical piffle, or just another opinion
piece.
So, is there such a
biological driver?
It turns out there is.
And this also comes from animal studies and we just may not like the animal
that most resembles us in our current state.
We’ll cover that in Part
2. The Mechanism of Civilizing a Wild Animal.
Until then, have a second
read of that quote:
“We were
wild animals for seven million years. We learned a lot of lessons. We should be
careful not to lose them.”-Lee Child
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