Jeff Corwin was just on Fox News and said Elephants were domesticated. He is an animal expert...
Congratulations, we have another idiot who doesn't know the difference between "tame," and "domesticated."
Abaddon said:
I believe it is moot, as we domesticate to fill a need, we perhaps would have domesticated something else to provide us with milk, or eggs, etc.. but we only need so many different niches to be filled to supply our diet
No. Humans are omnivores. They will eat whatever they deem edible. There is no end to the niches we can have, it's simply a question of how many we can
fill.
Just because one person has the wim to have such an animal, it bears no relation that humans are going to as a collective try and breed such animals, such would the infrequency of keeping a pet be, I can fully see how few would become domesticated. There has to be a strong desire/need to domesticate something, and a "pet" does not supply that.
Cheetahs were tamed by the thousands. Asian elephants by the hundreds to thousands. These others, during the peak, likely by the hundreds. That's a sufficient population to begin to attempt domestication, and domestication
does start at a minimal level. You yourself just said that domestication is not a coordinated effort. Therefore it will always begin with random, low-intensity incidents--pets.
So now you've gone and contradicted yourself to boot. Which is it? It's organized, or it isn't? Make up your mind.
And despite that, it hasn't worked. Leading to:
What I am essentially saying is that some animals were more suitable for domestication, and once they were.. where was the drive to domesticate others? Gone! that is the main reason there is not innumeral domesticated animals. NOT at the foremost the difficulty in doing so, or unsuitability.
You're totally right, Abaddon. Why would anyone possibly want more meat, or milk, or skins, or eggs? Humans are so gosh-darn egalitarian and totally non-materialistic... and by golly, everybody wants the same things! Not variety, no!
So when the creature kills its handlers repeatedly, that isn't a problem. When it beats itself to death against its confines because it can't handle enclosed spaces, that isn't a problem. When it absolutely refuses to mate while in captivity, that isn't a problem. When its social structure is that of a loner, and it physically cannot recognize a superior entity and work with it, that isn't a problem.
None of these completely unsolvable issues are problems whatsoever. How could I be so blind.
No, other animals that do exist on this planet. The ones that sit there now, yet undomesticated. My sentence obviously means this.. are oyu really stooping as to try and misunderstand me?
I don't have to, since you don't seem to recognize that certain attributes make working with an animal virtually impossible, which is the real reason they weren't domesticated. There is no such thing as "too much" when humanity is involved. Which is why we have tried--and failed--to domesticate just about everything on the planet.
It doesn't work because it doesn't work, not because we haven't tried.
There exist animals that potentially could have been domesticated had there been the incination and effort/pressue.
No, there aren't. There was this thing called the Ice Age. You might have heard of it. Killed off the vast majority of megafauna in North America--including Horses.
Why do you have to change the animal in any way, and stop being fixated on the elephant! I mean choose a different animal to the elephant, and take the leap of faith that this time round (in the alt) humans attempted to domesticate animal X.
CONGRATULATIONS, YOU HAVE FINALLY GRASPED MY ARGUMENT.
WE HAVE.
Name an animal. It's been tried. It probably failed.
So the only way it works, for an alternate group of people in an alternate history, is if the
animal is different, because if it's the same, you'll get the same result. Success is dependent upon the animal, not the people trying to domesticate it. If you don't change the animal, guess what? Same result: failure.
I meant though our knowledge, not our technologies. What I meant was simply to provide the pressure to result in a domestication. Once man had the basic needs through the first few domestications.. what need was there to expand upon it?
A COMPLETE ONE.
Maybe you're
unaware of this but for most of history livestock has been exceptionally expensive and meat has been a luxury for the rich. So, if you could figure out how to domesticate all those other animals why, you'd be able to grow food in new ecological niches, have a greater and more flexible variety of resources, and generally have a better standard of living.
Or, as I said, nobody ever
chose to live in squalor and deprivation by not trying to figure out how to use something. Leading us to...
Why does not domesticating something equal death? Many groups of humans did very well without domesticating animals.
WRONG! Most of them were conquered by the Europeans and died from a hideous cocktail of diseases that were carried along by them. More food yields more people. More people yields a need for centralized states. Centralized states yield an environment in which technology develops, along with disease resistance.
All the people who didn't have animals basically got screwed, and although human tribal societies have their perks, they are prone to ecological failure and also have problems when confronted by technologically advanced neighbors. There's a reason the West rules the world, and it starts with food, plant and animal. Those who didn't have the plants needed the animals, and more often than not,
they didn't get them.
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The crux of your argument appears to revolve around the idea humans are mysteriously not greedy, and were for some reason or another contented with the animals they did domesticate, and so never bothered with any others.
Despite all the evidence that they did. And the fact that humans are never content at settling for anything unless they absolutely have to.
Pretty awesome line of reasoning there, dude. What's the name of the university you went to? I increasingly want to see this diploma.