Taming the Wild: The Complex Story of Animal Domestication with Joy

The domestication of plants and animals represents one of the most profound transformations in our species' history—yet few of us understand how dramatically it has reshaped not just the organisms involved, but our entire planet's ecology. In this fascinating conversation with Joy of Zoognosis and Mimbres School, we unpack the complex biological and social dimensions of domestication that have created the world we inhabit today.

Did you know that domesticated livestock and humans together comprise 97% of all mammalian biomass on Earth, leaving just 3% for all wild mammals combined? Beyond these staggering numbers lies an even more surprising revelation: many of our assumptions about why humans began domesticating animals are likely incorrect. Archaeological evidence suggests dogs weren't initially tamed to help with hunting but were incorporated into human social groups for emotional and ritualistic purposes long before agriculture developed.

We explore the "domestication syndrome"—the collection of physical and behavioral changes that appear across domesticated species, from floppy ears in dogs to white patches in cows—and how these changes occur through selection for tameness and juvenile characteristics. Most provocatively, we examine the evidence that humans ourselves show many markers of domestication, potentially having "self-domesticated" by selecting against extreme aggression in our own species.

The conversation takes unexpected turns through the political dimensions of domestication and wildness, examining how both far-right and primitivist ideologies fetishize a return to wilderness based on misunderstandings of ecological history. We conclude by confronting the harsh realities of our industrial food system and considering how we might reimagine our relationship with domesticated species for a more sustainable future.

Whether you're fascinated by evolutionary biology, concerned about our food systems, or simply curious about why your cat behaves the way it does, this deep dive into the science and philosophy of domestication will transform how you see your place in the living world.

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Chapters

• 1:35 Introduction to Domestication
• 9:23 What is Domestication Syndrome?
• 22:58 Early Domestication of Dogs and Horses
• 35:43 Human Self-Domestication Theory
• 55:36 The Cult of Wilderness and Nazi Ideology
• 1:12:07 Industrial Agriculture and Ecological Impact
• 1:35:03 Rethinking Our Food Systems

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:48

Hello and welcome to VARM blog, and today I'm here with Joy of Zoonosis, right yeah, and relevant for our discussion today, actually, since this is geared around a specific class that you are offering through member school, also of member school. So you are offering a class on domestication through members. When is that starting?

Speaker 2: 1:18

That's starting at. Actually, I think it's June 1st, so it's going from June to kind of middle of August there.

Speaker 1: 1:26

All right, this will come out just before it. There's perfect timing. Um, and domestication is something that anyone who's ever dealt with ancient history uh, either forensic and or cultural anthropology you kind of have to deal with. Um, also, when you get into comparative biology, you realize how much we've altered animals. Just um, it's, it's, you know, it's not just. You know my basset hound, which was somehow a wolf a thousand years, uh, you know, two thousand years ago or whatever, but um, or five thousand years ago, but nonetheless.

Speaker 1: 2:13

And yet domestication is, I think, pretty broadly debated in both biological and political circles for what it means. I remember a whole lot of hay back in the primitivist anarchist days. Those people seem to have mostly gone away with the dodo, but the few that were, I think particularly Kevin Carson, a little bit. John Sarsen made a big deal out of human domestic thesis, which I've also heard. Arnold from what's his show I have forgotten. Arnold, who also talks about biology on the left, talks about human domestication thesis, domestic domestication thesis, which is interesting because and we'll come to this towards the end, because it's actually towards the end of your course, but it's always fascinated me because it's like okay, so we domesticated ourselves. What the hell does that actually mean? But what is domestication and why should we give a shit now?

Speaker 2: 3:35

Yeah, I think that's a very uh, it's a very salient question, um, for um, multiple reasons. Uh, so I think, starting off with where we're at currently, um, most of our, like the world, has been shaped radically by the domestication of plants and animals, and my research is mostly focusing on the animals. But even looking at that specifically, over 60% of all kind of mammalian biomass that's all you know lactating animals with hair is domesticated livestock, and if you add in human beings and it's debated about to what degree and how so they're domesticated that goes up to like 97%, leaving only about 3% of all mammalian biomass as being wild animals. That's all whales, cetaceans, elephants, that kind of thing. So a large proportion of the biomass of mammals today is just domesticated animals purely, and they have a huge outsized impact in land usage, carbon emissions, water usage, you name it. Basically, so, environmentally and ecologically, much of the world has been shaped by this kind of process.

Speaker 2: 4:48

It's also pretty important to understand these topics because they shape the way we talk about discourses around domination and discourses around submission and that kind of thing, especially trying to understand the way that hierarchical kinship networks work and also the place of animals in those kind of structures. So when we're talking about domestication in the name, we're already talking about the domus. We're talking about the center and the focal point of patriarchal family life, and this word domus comes from the ancient Roman word, right, and that's the kind of kinship, social unit and property relation unit that is ruled by a paterfamilias, basically a head of a household, and animals are one of the forms of subservient organisms within that. That also includes women, children and slaves, and so there's this kind of discourse that animals are like domestic servants, that they serve this kind of higher thing, and we see this in many different cultures, right, it's not just a Roman thing. And this kind of understanding that this process of how this happens socially is quite important.

Speaker 2: 6:01

We also have to recognize that there's a biological component to it as well. Now, there's been a lot of debate about exactly what that looks like and why that happens, but the fact is that there is quite a lot to be said about the fact that there is some sort of biological domestication that does occur. And what is so troubling about that is the idea that human beings show very similar sorts of signs, of phenotypic traits, so they show behaviors and they show morphologies in their bodies that look similar to our domesticated animals, and, of course, people have been picking up on this for thousands of years, but they've only had the language to describe this now, in the last 100, 150 years or so, and so understanding that as well, understanding well what does it mean if human beings are a domesticated animal, if you can even accurately describe it, as that does have some profound implications for how we kind of deal with each other. And also through understanding domestication, we can understand its kind of, I guess, shadow, which is that of the wilderness, of what places look like outside of direct human control, and understanding that the logic and the discourses around this are kind of linked to this. Like you said, like the primitivists and the anarchists in some cases are very hyper-focused on this sort of cult of wilderness, and that becomes a very important thing for other forms and other political ideologies, such as fascism. They're really obsessed with this idea of a pre-domesticated wilderness or a domestication that has been reversed, and this idea of humans being domesticated animals is something that is anathema to that.

Speaker 2: 7:39

So there's a lot to be understood and unpacked with those kind of discourses and trying to get to the bottom of it becomes quite tricky, not the least of which is because it's been very poorly described in both the scientific and the anthropological and archaeological literature.

Speaker 2: 7:54

It's a very scattered field and there seems to be a lot of even basic definitional struggles to understand what we're talking about. Basically, scientists aren't talking with the, you know, the biologists are not necessarily talking with the anthropologists, who are not necessarily talking with historians, are not necessarily talking with the anthropologists, who are not necessarily talking with historians, and these lines of evidence become very jumbled because a lot of this happened in deep time, right. Very few of the animal domestications that we're concerned about are, like, readily available in, even in historical sources, even in things that happened in the recent historical past, so to speak, right. So a lot of this has become jumbled by that, and that doesn't help with the discourses being so mangled and kind of controlled. So there's a lot to be learned from kind of studying these sort of relations, and there's also a lot that can be understood by kind of unpacking some of the more specific domestication episodes throughout history as well.

Speaker 1: 8:50

I mean. Well, one of the most fascinating ones, I think. Horses and wolves, aka horses and dogs for us, um, may or may not and I've read multiple sources predate agriculture, which is kind of a huge deal. The idea that we were domesticating when we were only doing permaculture and hunter gathering is in some ways wild. But it also does make sense about what we would domesticate, cause you could domesticate a horse or a, you know, an abandoned wolf or whatever to move with you in a hunter-gatherer pack, whereas we wouldn't domesticate, say, a cat, because cats are very territorial and somewhat stationary and so that domestication would have happened later.

Speaker 1: 9:48

Um, and there is some archaeological evidence for this. But you're right that I, you know, I read in history and I read in anthropology and they don't talk to each other very much about this stuff. Um, and none of them are talking to, uh, comparative biologists a lot of the time to to get what we might think we might be talking about, and sometimes we're like pulling from okay, what does domestication do to animals? Well, we got that Russian study on foxes and then we have all the stuff about wolves. That's totally wrong, because we assumed that domesticated behavior was the same Domesticated and captive and domesticating actually not even domesticated. And cap captive and domesticating actually not even domesticated behavior is the same as either domesticated behavior or wild behavior. Um, so I mean, I guess, one of the things I'm going to ask you, then what are the physical traits that we see in domesticated animals?

Speaker 2: 10:51

that's a really good question, so question. So this has been kind of debated and the extent to this has been kind of reworked, especially in the last like 15, 20 years, that kind of thing. But the classic sort of domestication syndrome, which is the title of the course that I decided to go with, was first outlined by Charles Darwin when he was writing his book Variations of Animals and Plants. Under Domestication, and typically in animals there's a series of different traits so they can kind of be lumped into three kind of baskets neoteny, fecundity and tameness. And tameness is probably the most understandable for us. There seems to be some sort of degree to which animals become more easily less aroused by stress, so they become less aggressive. They tend to be some sort of degree to which animals become more easily less aroused by stress, so they become less aggressive. They tend to be easier to control. Um, they're less, they're, you know, less stressed out by noises. They're able to withstand confinement and that kind of thing, and that's one of the one of the traits there, uh, fecundity in being, that they can reproduce, um, you know, more readily. There often is higher fertility for domesticated animals than non-domesticated animals. They often have greater milk production. They often are having larger litters, they're often having longer reproductive lifespans. These are all things that humans have either unintentionally or intentionally selected for, and there's also the kind of neotenous features and there's a whole suite of different features, everything from changes to coloration. So migration of the melanocyte stream development is guided by a series of kind of cells called the neural crest cells, and they seem to be related to all the different features of domestication syndrome to some degree. But the changes in coloration is one of the most prominent early forms, and so you often see animals with different patches of color. You typically don't see like wolves with like like that are white colored wolves and that kind of thing, although it does happen that sort of thing. But you often see different kinds of patterns of colors that are only found under these kind of domesticated sort of situations. You also find that they have changes to the skull development where they're more neotenous.

Speaker 2: 12:58

Now, neotenous is kind of a loaded term. It was first sort of unpacked by these German kind of comparative zoologists and embryologists, but essentially what it is is that it's the retention of juvenile characteristics into adulthood. But essentially what it is is that it's the retention of juvenile characteristics into adulthood, and so oftentimes these individuals will have more baby-like faces. So they often have larger eyes, more pushed in noses, they often have kind of more rounded skulls, that kind of thing. And this is of course one of the major changes that was identified by I guess it was the Dutch, I guess you would call them the embryologist Bolk, and that was picked up by Stephen Jay Gould in his book that was ontogeny and neoteny and the idea that human beings are actually also possessed this neotenous characteristic as well. So those are kind of the standard sort of things that we think about for domestication syndrome. You also see things like floppy ears, you see floppy tails. You see other things too, like you know, different kinds of vocalizations, losses of adult behaviors.

Speaker 2: 14:08

Dogs often have much more circumscribed behaviors than their wolf kind of counterparts. They tend to have less, you know, rigid social hierarchy sort of behaviors that wolves typically possess. Getting to kind of that point about the dogs and the wolves, it's interesting because when we often think about domestication as a process of food acquisition and securing food sources basically and that might be putting things a little bit backwards, because in many cases it seems that domestication is not about securing food at all it's actually done for these what sometimes kind of clumsily called non-utilitarian reasons. So when we think about dogs, the classic answer is that dogs helped humans hunt. They helped humans, you know, potentially acquire a large game, that sort of thing. But this isn't really supported by the archaeological data at all.

Speaker 2: 14:56

If you look at Paleolithic like wolves and that kind of thing that were transitioning to dogs, their diets are actually much more leaning towards human diets, so they're higher in starch, they're higher in fish and those kind of radioisotopes associated with that. So it doesn't seem like the dogs were actually helping us gain prey. We also see a radical reduction in body size, which is also associated with the domestication syndrome. They often are smaller and it's not until very recently, in like the last 200 years, that domesticated livestock actually got bigger than their wild counterparts due to, you know, higher demands for industrialized agriculture, that kind of thing. But these Paleolithic like dogs basically back, like you know, 14,000, 15,000 years ago, that kind of thing they often were smaller, they weren't catching much prey and we actually have archaeological evidence to suggest that human beings were taking very extensive care of them.

Speaker 2: 15:51

The, for instance, like the bone overcastle dog, which was a dog that was discovered in bone overcastle Germany um has evidence of. Um was a puppy basically that was buried alongside two human uh, adult, basically during the Mangolanian and it shows evidence of like really bad dental disease. It also shows evidence of canine distemper, infection and arthritis. This dog would have been like sick and probably having like seizures and like having difficulty breathing, unable to take care of itself. But the only reason it lived as long is because it had people giving it lots and lots of care and, like you know, cleaning up after it, feeding it, that kind of thing. It would have lived months with this very severe sort of health state.

Speaker 2: 16:34

And this can shed some light about why humans may have domesticated animals. Initially it was probably for these kind of, you know, fulfilling kinship roles, could have potentially been used as a sacrificial animal. We don't really know A lot of this is prehistoric so we don't exactly have, you know, their take on it. But it could be said that a lot of these domestications, especially before the so-called agricultural revolutions or evolution is probably a better term are probably for much more fitting animals into over-existing kinship networks and already existing sort of structures that way and they could have been useful as like gifts or as sacrificial or sacred animals or potentially even as, like you know kind of what. Do you call it Conspicuous consumption, I guess, like where you have like a very expensive kind of thing that you do, but you're an elite, so you can kind of get away with having like an animal that requires this much care and that sort of thing support from the community.

Speaker 2: 17:30

So, um, I think, yeah, getting back to the domestication syndrome, it seems like it's a collection of both skeletal, behavioral, um reproductive and um size differences compared to the wild counterparts, and we see that in pretty much all the mammalian ones and even in the birds and some of the other animals too.

Speaker 2: 17:50

Um, to take even like a wider look at it, if you look at like silkworm, silkworms are heavily show this domestication syndrome and they're very distantly related to our mammals right Silkworms the adults can't fly, they lack the coloration, so they show leucism. They're like white and compared to the native silkworm moth, basically they require the native silkworm moth. Basically they require, like indoor living spaces in order to reproduce, and they often reproduce a lot more than their wild counterparts too. So there seems to be some sort of kind of trajectory there and they're also very tame, like people can just pick them up and they don't get freaked out that sort of thing too compared to wild silkworm moths, which tend to, and their relatives which tend to be a lot more flighty and afraid of humans. So it seems like there's some interesting evolutionary things going on that way.

Speaker 1: 18:39

Well, I mean, it's interesting to bring up domestication of insects because it means that these things I remember a while back I mean I'm talking the late nineties we used to debate about an undergrad, about whether or not you would see these domestication traits and say chickens are so if they're showing up in silkworm pupa and silk moths, then it does seem pretty clear to me that yes, virginia, we would also see this in chickens. Chickens, um, so it's it. I find that, I find that fascinating and I I've thought about that, because silkworm pupa don't run from you and silkworms don't run from you even when you're eating them like um, they really don't try to escape human beings, even when we've cut them out of their silkworm cocoons and are just popping them like popcorn.

Speaker 2: 19:41

Pretty much yeah.

Speaker 1: 19:45

Americans are like, there we go. There are several species of silkworms that are also eaten for food and, in some cultures, alive. I find them pretty gross and I don't have the American bug taboo, I just silkworm pupa tastes like mud and mud, but nonetheless, people eat them. And what I find fascinating is no, you can just pick them up, you can just pop them.

Speaker 2: 20:25

What are they going to do?

Speaker 1: 20:29

They don't even really try to wriggle away. It's kind of amazing actually, but I've thought about this. It brings me to a hypothesis about human beings that I've thought about. One of the things is we always assume that we are doing stuff because it's calorie rational instead of like emotionally rational or something. But I think about something humans do that makes us a little different. Now I don't know if it makes us different from other hominids I would suspect not but it does make us different from other omnivorous great apes. Um, you know, we're known for cannibalism, just like any animal. In fact, about a fourth of us are probably descended from them. But one thing we really don't do a lot that say chimps will do, um is eat the babies of our tribe that aren't ours.

Speaker 1: 21:30

Uh excuse me, I should very soon. Human males are much, much, much, much, much from everything that we can tell, less likely to eat human babies from other people. We'll raise them and a chimp hate to tell you, but they'll uh, chimp mothers, don't let, don't let non-fathers hold other chimp babies, because then they'd be a chance it'll be a snack. So, um, and I do think that's interesting because we will eat each other in other contexts. It's not like we're above cannibalism, um, but it does seem. For whatever reason it, we have a cooperative raising system and it the reason why I think that might be relevant to domestic domesticification, because a lot of these neonatal traits and stuff are childlike, and also we tend to be raising things that are relatively like a wolf can kill us, but we're not raising on a like, we're not domestic, we probably aren't I shouldn't say that we know that, we never did, but we probably aren't domesticating adult wolves. We're domesticating puppy, uh, wolf pups, for whatever it seems to be the assumption yeah, Uh.

Speaker 2: 22:57

I mean, we don't know some that have argued that it was actually like a human wolf, like um cooperative hunting strategy, but I don't know how you get from that to like pugs, I don't know.

Speaker 1: 23:09

So so there's got to be some some degree that human beings are like raising puppies from like a very small age, basically, right, right. Well, pugs are an interesting thing, because I had always been like pugs have to be a late dog development, right? No, they're not. They're one of the oldest dog breeds and so you're like wait what like, but those things I don't even know how they're alive are one of the oldest dog breeds, like, um, I mean some of it, too, is that a lot of the traits that we associate with pugs are like recent developments to like.

Speaker 2: 23:41

People have like exaggerated some of those traits that they see in the pug for aesthetic and quality purposes, but like not by a huge amount, like definitely, like they're much more like pushed in and much more because you have to like, like, sell them on instagram or whatever. So like they're even more exaggerated, like neotenous features than even ever before, but like, not by a huge margin. Like it's just like the to its logical extent. Basically that way.

Speaker 2: 24:09

Um there's an interesting point that you made there about some about the chimpanzees and humans, because one of the key pieces of evidence is how different human beings are from chimpanzees and how much less aggressive we are, and that seems to be linked to some of the kind of morphological traits that we are different right Like if you look at a chimpanzee infant and you compare it to a human infant, they don't look very different, it's just the amount of degree of hair basically. But as human beings kind of grow up, we have a much more delayed sort of growth trajectory, but we also have a much less pronounced like lower jaw and lower face, and that seems to be linked to domestication syndrome to some degree. There's probably at least something homologous going on there. Now the question is how did humans actually domesticate themselves if that happened? Well, that is an open question and there's some kind of competing ideas about how that kind of unfolded that way.

Speaker 2: 25:04

It's also been argued that bonobos are a more domesticated version of chimps, that they self-domesticated, um, and they think that the way they probably did this was through like sex basically, like they basically bred out super aggressive males just by like, having different kinds of kind of conflict resolution strategies that use sex and kind of genital rubbing versus chimpanzees. Again, somewhat debated about exactly how that took place, but there seems to be something in kind of with regards to aggression and that kind of thing. And that's not to say bonobos don't have any aggression, they definitely do.

Speaker 1: 25:44

They'll still bite your fingers off. Was that? They'll still bite your fingers off? Yeah, they're not like pacifists.

Speaker 2: 25:55

I don't want to make that mistake of saying they're pacifists, but there's been some people that have said, yeah, they're going to like they're a lot less aggressive than the chimpanzees, and it's also kind of unknown exactly when this, if this human domestication thing happened, which seems like yeah, there might be some plausible evidence for that. When which seems like, yeah, there might be some plausible evidence for that when exactly that unfolded? The primary contender is kind of that, like last 100,000 years or so, especially as human, as modern, anatomically modern Homo sapiens start arriving in Europe and start spreading from Africa to other parts of the world. It seems that, uh, they became much less aggressive, much, uh, they tended to have much less robust skulls, and they call that gracilis, gracilization, like they're much more facile and like less robust in skeletal.

Speaker 2: 26:45

It's all very kind of like general but like uh, and it seems that there might have been some sort of selective pressure for humans to get less aggressive, less likely to eat babies and much more likely to live in this cooperative thing. There's been some. I think there was a I think it was called it was Benederick's work that was talking about that this might have been a sexual selection thing and that people were looking for more neotenous, like females, which I think I call that the waifu hypothesis. You know, it's just like they're looking for young sort of wives.

Speaker 2: 27:18

I don't know what to make of that, but there's definitely some arguments to be uh, to be sure about this kind of stuff. But I think the prominent one is that human beings just were selecting against aggressive individuals, unintentionally, potentially intentionally, in order to survive the glasglacial maximum and not starve. So there was some degree of kind of sublimation there. Of course, now human beings eat the babies of other animals in order to make up for some of this. I don't know, maybe there's something to be said that, yeah, the reason that we eat veal is because we no longer eat each other's babies. So I'll leave that as an open question at this point.

Speaker 1: 27:57

I mean it's interesting when we deal with other hominids, because we don't, because there's so much we don't know, but there's like the great debates around. What happened to Neanderthals was basically did we kill them or interbreed with them, or did we eat them or interbreed with them or did we eat them or whatever? And right now the going theory is all of the above, like we did all of it. There's evidence of Neanderthal bones that show knife markings.

Speaker 1: 28:29

Well, not really knife, but like bone and, yeah, on them, there's plenty of genetic evidence that we had a bread with them. Um, tons actually at this point, thank you. Human genome project. Uh, and when I was in college I remember because we didn't have neanderthal dna mapped out yet, we didn't know that, um, and there's all kinds of little things that you see there would. It is that timing on possible domestication, does that just? Would that just be homo sapiens or would we have seen it in other hominid species?

Speaker 2: 29:07

that is a great question, and I think that humans, homo sapiens and the modern humans are pretty unique in trying to domesticate other animals. Now it's debated about whether or not Neanderthals were able to do this or whether we're willing to actually try to domesticate it. The current theory is that, you know it used to be very strict, like in the last 12,. You know it used to be very strict like in the last 12,. You know, about 14,000 to 12,000 years ago, human beings domesticated wolves into dogs. That timeline has been pushed way back by genetic evidence and by some morphological evidence, and it seems like there was a subpopulation subpopulations, and it seems like this happened multiple times of human beings domesticating wolves. And so that does raise the question of whether or not neanderthals were participating in this practice or whether that human beings and their mutualistic relationship with wolves actually led to this development of this kind of competitive advantage over the neanderthals.

Speaker 2: 30:07

Now that's, uh, completely like there's not a lot of evidence to suggest this, and it seems like neanderthals were already kind of outcompeted in the intervals, which were never that many to begin with. That way too, there's some evidence too that suggests that people were keeping during the last ice age in in the in the paleolithic in New Guinea that there was some captive breeding of large like rat types, like cassowaries basically and cassowaries are scary birds, they're known to like disembowel people by kicking them. So it seems that there was some effort to captively breed them, and we do know that in New Guinea there was. This is one of the origins of agriculture too. This is where people started like actually cultivating taro, which becomes an important crop in Southeast Asia, but also in Polynesia that kind of thing as well. So it seems that there was also this separate sort of domestication effort for cassowaries, which never really panned out, because maybe there was just not the right sort of environmental sort of thing, or dangerous, what's that?

Speaker 1: 31:36

And they were too dangerous.

Speaker 2: 31:38

But wolves are also dangerous. That's what kind of gets me. It's like you know. It's like well, human beings, did they only domesticate the friendly animals that are nice and cute and cuddly? Well, I mean Oryx which are the ancestral versions of cattle are terrifying.

Speaker 2: 31:54

Julius Caesar was saying you know, there's these giant monsters with giant long horns that would like kill people, and they were super aggressive.

Speaker 2: 31:59

I mean, that's a cow, that's a bull basically, and human beings somehow managed to tend them up and then start within probably within a thousand years, of first acquiring them and first captively breeding them, milking them, which we think was like like a bronze age thing. But it's actually like no, no, people was basically as soon as they start domesticating ruminants, they start milking them and start drinking their milk. That kind of thing too, which terrifies me to think about, because these are very dangerous animals and you know, people still get killed by cows all the time, especially in these dairy operations, because you're in kick zone basically when you're right over by the udder there. So it seems like danger. For some reason, people can kind of either live with the danger or they can kind of mitigate it, and domestication seems to be a way of mitigating danger, of being close to animals, which being close to animals is always dangerous, no matter domesticated or not, but especially, you know, wild animals, so there's a big role in that as well.

Speaker 1: 33:00

Yeah, well, I was actually thinking about that when I was thinking about what we domesticated, except from horses, which are, well, they can kick us to death too, but in the wild they're not. Particularly now I don't know what ancient horses death too, but in the wild they're not. Particularly Now I don't know what ancient horses were like, maybe more like zebras, but in the wild even wild horses are not particularly a threat to humans. Everything else I think we domesticated, except for cats, which seem to follow a different domestication process actually, than most animals, um, uh, can kill us pretty easily. I mean, it's, it's something I think a lot about.

Speaker 1: 33:39

Yeah, because I remember the first time I read what an aurochs was and I was like, so it's a giant, super mean cow with bigger horns and it's aggressive as hell and it's opportunistic and also probably ate more of a wide variety of stuff than we think it does. Because, you know, rumen mints will occasionally eat birds, which I think baffles people when they find that out. But I'm like, oh yeah, the, the herbivores. They're not always herbivores, um, uh, but um, nonetheless. You just I find this, I find this kind of interesting about us as an animal set, and I also find I find it interesting how late the neonatal traits show up, if we think, uh, a corresponding thing happened with bonobos, because that happened a very long time ago.

Speaker 1: 34:34

Uh, we're talking about like back when you know, I think one of the wildest things I remember learning uh, right, cause this was discovered white after I left undergrad and kind of moved away from anthropology, but like um, that we not us H, homo sapiens, but hominids, one of our ancestors, reintegrated and rebred with chimps multiple times in our history, back when we were still uh, we're still could produce viable offspring, and that fascinates me, that it happened, that it wasn't just like we split off it's, you know, around Lucy or whatever, from the other great apes. No, we, we have gone in and out of of of being able to interbreed with them until we were until relatively late in hominid development, breed with them until we were until relatively late in hominid development, which means that some of these traits are fascinatingly weird to develop out of that context. And bonobos, being ridiculously genetically close to us, do kind of indicate that maybe there's a similar process going on between the two species. But ours is more like, way more like we gave up a ton um to be able to do what we do.

Speaker 1: 36:03

I mean, like, when you compare us to all the other great apes, we are physical weaklings, not just chimps, which are insane murder machines, but even compared to relatively docile gray apes like orang things, we are way, way weaker and our ability to out-compete them is actually somewhat. I mean. It's one of those things that like, if you're a socialist or you know, it could sort of make sense. But it's like, oh yeah, we corroborate better, but it really does matter, because otherwise we don't make a, we're not an animal. That makes a lot of biological sense, like what weapons do we got?

Speaker 2: 36:50

Right, that's not doing much yeah, yeah, I mean it's, it's, it's fascinating because, like well, I mean you talked about physical strength, like, uh, you know human beings and we look at our, like you know, um, temporalis muscles, like the other great apes, it's just they're puny, we can't crush any nuts with them, we can't break open any bones, anything like that. It seems like that was a sacrifice that human beings, as they were evolving, made in order to have larger brains and potentially have abilities to speak and and do other kinds of things. So a divestment from this kind of individual strength towards more of a community-based structure. And it seems that you know, you would think that if you were a large, dangerous animal, you were going to stand a very good chance to survive after the last collacial maximum, but that doesn't seem to be the case. In fact, the only megafauna that seems to be doing well right now, a megafauna larger than like 45 kilograms, 100 pounds, that kind of thing, um, is the cow, because the cow is domesticated. It's the aurochs that was brought in by human beings and was made not as dangerous. In fact, we've actually bred them to have. You know, some of them are pulled so they actually never develop horns, um, and you know, there's a fact that human beings have made the world a lot safer and a lot friendlier for themselves and for each other, which has been a hugely competitive advantage. The other animals, the wild animals that are used to exist throughout the world, are basically extinct.

Speaker 2: 38:24

Right Like at the end of the Pleistocene, beginning of the Holocene, there was a massive extinction event that went across the world. You can't attribute it all to climate. A lot of it must have been human beings hunting these megafauna, especially like elephants and that kind of thing and mammoths. Um, there's only two species of elephants well, three if you count the forest elephants but only like a handful of species of elephants left, and the rest of them were completely wiped out by human hunters. So it seems that the human being urge to domesticate is a great survival strategy for a lot of these animals, because you know, otherwise they would just have been wiped out completely by human beings simply hunting them to extinction and not hunting them in a way that most animals are well adapted for.

Speaker 2: 39:11

Most animals can, you know, defend against an attack, right, and that kind of thing, but not from projectile weapons, not from like traps, not from like group hunting strategies. These are things that no animal species has ever had to deal with basically before, compared to like neanderthals, where there was, like you know, they basically and you know I'm drawing from some of my anthropological knowledge, but they would basically just like the idea is that they basically body tackled them and used like blunt weapons and like spears to like stab them. Human beings use ranged weapons where they can kind of stand from a distance and deal with that, not to mention that the the cumulative effects of the domestications of animals have made a huge difference, right, um, the partnership that human beings develop with horses, camels and other kind of large riding animals has meant that they can basically hunt down whatever they want. This has drastically changed the way that human beings cover space but also like interact with other species.

Speaker 2: 40:09

So I think that the way that human beings have navigated the ecosystem through friendliness versus, uh, you know, brute force has been a huge boon for them and it's and basically changed the entire shape of the ecology of our planet, and maybe probably not for the better, if you, if you look at it from a from an environmentalist sort of thing, there's there's this argument that it was a trap.

Speaker 2: 40:33

You know, it's like you know that the agricultural revolution was a kind of trap or a bad deal basically. But you know, I mean I'm living in it, right. I mean there's 7 billion people living on the planet now raise large amounts of plants and large amounts of animals and transform the world from wild, thriving ecosystems into farmland and to turn it into pastures and that kind of thing. So I feel that the human ability to domesticate has been a huge boon for themselves, but it's also had come at some enormous sort of trade-offs there, and I think that's kind of worth noting there, especially with talking about, like, how they've managed to deal with the physical danger and that sort of thing from other animals that way too yeah, I mean, you know it.

Speaker 1: 41:23

It seems like we even went so far as like, okay, we're gonna just this animal type that we can't control, we're just going to breed them into something different. So I mean, like it's just. And when people you know, I know this is like a common thing where people like, oh, genetic, we've been messing with animal genes like way longer than we had any idea of what genes were Like, I mean, we figured this out somehow without the science to to really, you know that we, we didn't understand the mechanisms of how we were doing it, but we knew what we were doing like before we figured out writing, I mean, and and it and it's convergent. I think that's something we need that needs to be pointed out. One of the things about the quote agricultural revolution and you know I love a good revolution, but that I actually do warn about thinking about it in revolutionary terms is like we see humans develop agriculture in places that are completely non-contiguous with each other, so they didn't learn it from people copying mesopotamians or egyptians or whatever, like no, we know that that people will do this kind of based off of what we do, I think, with um, um, what we do even before we develop agriculture with pomaculture, because we we even as hunter gatherers, we would encourage things to breed in ways in our, in our favor, and we're not the only animal that does that, although weirdly and this is where the weird social biology people come from and they were always comparing us to bugs, because the most obvious animals that do this are actually social bugs, which is sort of weird with like I'm like okay, in every other way these animals have very little relationship to us in the grand scheme of animals, but I guess on this you got something.

Speaker 1: 43:34

But one of the other things that makes um hominids particularly interesting is that, while we have evidence of human status and a lot of groups going all the way back, we're a relatively low status species. Um, meaning I mean we're not after the domestication of agriculture. That that is a change. But like before that um leadership is pretty provisional. We really aren't like like the strongest.

Speaker 1: 44:12

The difference between the strongest man and like a standard able-bodied man actually in the scheme of animals is not really that different, whereas you see some animals where the differences of their capacity is like insane and you know you just like that's that didn't even seem like the same species, whereas like, okay, that guy can lift 400 pounds and I can lift 200 pounds.

Speaker 1: 44:35

I mean that's a big difference to us, but, like, when you compare it even to some bugs, you're just like that's nothing like relative to body mass, um, which is an interesting thing to think about. And it does seem that, um, people I mean Marxists say labor. Everyone else tries to say I don't know what they try to say Communication our thumb, or the fact that we go upright as a big difference between us and other animals and why we're developed our brain capacity, although that once you study elephants and dolphins and and all that, you even realize that they have culture. Um, and so you're just like well, never mind. Uh, like learning that that like whales have culture was one of those things that kind of blew, even blew my mind I'm like and how do we know?

Speaker 1: 45:31

they have culture because they sleep differently, like the same species will sleep differently when they encounter each other, and they have different like, taught behaviors, and you're just like, oh okay, well, well, I guess that's not unique to us either, and what we discover, it's less and less unique to us, um, from other animals. But the combination of things we do is kind of unique and it does seem to be based off this social thing that we're talking about, which would tie it to the self-domestication thesis. But I guess my thought is like we think about domestication in terms of hierarchy, patriarchy or mastery of other animals, but self-domestication would actually indicate the opposite, that we did this to get out of that, which is an interesting thing to think about, because we think about what we do to like, when we domesticate animals, we are lording over them, or at least that's the way we tend to explain it to ourselves now. But if, if you're, if, like, some of the theories about why we started domesticating wolves and stuff are right, which it's not about food and it was a relative, it's some kind of we found them cute, um, uh, you know which. I don't put it past it that that actually could be the reason.

Speaker 1: 46:58

Um, that really messes up a lot of assumptions about why we do what we do, and that it was always about this clear domination of nature, although that is I don't want to make.

Speaker 1: 47:09

I don't want to sound hippy dippy about this either um, we are totally willing to eat things and to slaughter things and wipe whole species out that you know like, and also we're we're even, compared to a lot of other animals, really willing to kill our own in ways that other animals don't, but maybe because they can't, as I've always actually thought about that like like I don't, but maybe because they can't. I've always actually thought about that like like I don't know. I've seen the way, like bands of chimps and stuff will react to each other. Maybe if they could wipe each other out, they might. Um, so I don't know, but, um, I just just there's like a almost a paradox there about like, oh yeah, we're the, we're the most murderous animal, but kind of because we're bad at murder and we just figured out how to, how do you like invert things and do it in a different way?

Speaker 2: 48:07

yeah, there's something very paradoxical about it because, like you said, it's this domestication is very in line with this idea of patriarchy, about hierarchical civilization, about class and about, like, all these different kinds of ways of misogyny and that kind of thing and all these structures that have been used to to control people, right. Right, and we often see that domestication, you know, animal husbandry sort of things are used in terms of, like, controlling human behavior and controlling ways that people kind of live their lives, right. I think the most obvious example of that in the ancient Near East and in other societies is castration and through eunuchs, right, and the creation of eunuchs is seems to be very closely linked to these kind of animal husbandry sort of cultures. Um, there's actually it was quite interesting I was reading about um castration practices in like um, like china and in other countries, and it's interesting because in japan they never really practiced, like you know, castration and kind of like uh, using the eunuchs in like the in the court and that kind of thing. And one of the reasons why is they just weren't familiar with that technology because they didn't raise large numbers of animals. A lot of their proteins was from fish and they were doing a lot more plant agriculture, they weren't as familiar with the animal side of it.

Speaker 2: 49:28

And it seems that the technology of animal castration was used in ancient Near East in order to produce a class of units, and this seems to be related to forms of sheep herding where they use what's called a guide weather. It's basically a castrated male ram, that's basically castrated young, and it's used as a trained animal to guide the other sheep and so they can guide the flock using this kind of very, this castrated animal, and the castration does more than just prevent them from reproducing. It also produces the amount of testosterone and also uses that to reduce the aggression. So this is actually a technology that human beings learn from animals potentially and then apply to other human beings. So this technology of animal husbandry is used as a form of domination and you know, we can see that in the more of kind of like gross modern examples. I guess you can think about the way that human beings dehumanize each other and use like barbed wire to make prison camps and that kind of thing right. But there's also this ancient technology and the way that human beings have used that in order to, you know, oppress each other that way.

Speaker 2: 50:34

But there's also something to be said about human beings. If they are a self-domesticated species, they're using that in order to prevent some form of kind of underlying substratum of like I guess what you might call I guess what Freud might call, like the, you know, the primitive order, you know, with the primeval father and that kind of thing, and trying to restructure things on a more egalitarian basis, at least, having kind of a less baby murdering sort of society, which is what it seems to be in the chimpanzees and some of the other great apes. Infanticide is the primary sort of form of reproductive control, basically, and using domestication, using kindness and social bonding, and that kind of thing can also be a very ruinous strategy if you're on the outside of it, right, if you're subject to it. Um, there's also this kind of misconception too, and I think this is a very prominent thing in the literature, but also a subconscious part of it like, yeah, domestication has this connotation of like control, of like trying to bring animals into your property, into your submission, and then, you know, molding them and crafting them for your purposes. But there's also something to be said that it can be a very advantageous thing for the domesticate right. This is a way of getting secure resources. This is the way for them to prosper, even as human beings are taking over the landscape and changing it for their own ends. You kind of want to be on the good side of that, basically. So there's nothing to be said about that.

Speaker 2: 52:03

It's also the fact that human beings spend vast amounts of resources to take care of large numbers of animals that don't do anything, and this is the reason I have a job right now, because I wasn't okay, so I'm a veterinarian in my day job, basically. And when I was in vet school, covid-19 hit and one of the things we were worried about, like are we going to have a job in like a year, basically when we get out of school? And it's as it turns out we did, because everyone decided to get puppies at the exact same time. To deal with this mass trauma and this mass grief. They wanted to adopt a small animal that they could keep and that they could raise themselves and feed and integrate them into their social network.

Speaker 2: 52:46

So there are ways that human beings are using animals that we don't really quite understand. We might understand it implicitly, like yeah, they're cute. Like of course we have these animals, but like the amount of money that goes into, like through vet clinics, the amount of money that goes through these food companies. They're like hundreds of billions of dollars. They're big businesses and they're a major source of, like carbon emissions and that kind of thing. So the amount of resources people are pumping into just taking care of these small animals, um, I mean to put it on a more personal basis.

Speaker 2: 53:16

One of my I I keep I have rabbits.

Speaker 2: 53:18

They're like rescues or whatever, and one of them stopped eating.

Speaker 2: 53:21

So I put like hundreds of dollars of my own money down to like save this little rabbit dude, like mouth surgery on her and like get her back to health, and that kind of thing, which is hugely emotionally stressful, took a lot of time, money, resources, energy and like this rabbit does nothing but sit and poop and eat.

Speaker 2: 53:38

She barely lets me pet her. So, like I'm, you know, there's something in the human psyche that wants to have these animals in our lives and they're fulfilling some sort of psychological need. And the keeping of pets isn't just like a modern phenomenon. We like to think of it as like okay, well, you know, like you know, if you were living a hundred years ago, would you still have pets? Like probably. I mean you look at other societies that kept wild animals as pets and it's not unusual. There's quite a lot of variability in what human beings have done and continue to do, but there's lots of cases of people keeping, like bears keeping monkeys feeding, like there's certain cultures that would like breastfeed monkeys and that sort of thing, and like raise them as their own children.

Speaker 2: 54:21

Yeah, so it seems like human beings are just prone to keeping animals and letting them stick around. And you mentioned cat domestication earlier. I think that's an interesting case because that's probably I mean mean. Cats do a lot of good things, like they kill rodents, and that seems to be one of the prize things that they do. They kill snakes, which is what the ancient Egyptians liked about them. They also seem to have trained them to hunt birds, like there's Egyptian art of like cats, like grabbing, like wild birds and that sort of thing and being trained to do that.

Speaker 2: 54:48

But the primary function of the cat is that they sit and we can go all. The primary function of the cat is that they sit and they and we can go all. And you know, we can. We kind of have these little like like familiar, like little house demons, I guess, that like sit and like beg for food. So, um, it seems that even in ancient Egypt they weren't kind of immune to this and that people's all over the world would just keep cats and you know, they kind of had the side benefit of doing that, uh, to, like, you know, um, have these kind of things.

Speaker 2: 55:16

But I, you know, I think we kind of confuse the utilitarian benefits of some of these domesticated animals with the real benefit, which is probably just because we like having them around and so, like human beings trying to integrate animals into their society and trying to go out of their way to actually take care of them is a fascinating phenomenon, um, and it's one of those things that I I'm still trying to wrap out of their way to actually take care of them. It's a fascinating phenomenon and it's one of those things that I'm still trying to wrap my head around, because it doesn't seem like we stopped trying to bring more animals into the domus. Right, like domestication is actually. It goes in waves, but I think the most recent wave maybe wave number four or five, if you, depending on your counting it seems to be happening right now in the last like 100, 200 years is that human beings have started domesticating like reptiles I have reptiles, but like insects and like birds and all different kinds of small fuzzy animals. Fruit flies, I mean. Those are major lab animals that are like people.

Speaker 2: 56:09

Why are people domesticating fruit flies? Well, we can learn a lot about ourselves by messing with them but also, like people, are just keeping lots of weird exotic animals now that they never could, because they have the means to, and it seems that that is an ongoing thing that people just kind of do, even if it doesn't have any sort of major economic output, and they're actually putting a lot of resources into it and trying to understand. That is important, I think, because, um, if we try to collapse this out of the way, it just seems like you know, we can't really understand what the hell's going on otherwise. Uh, so I I think that there's there's some some weird stuff going on with this.

Speaker 1: 56:46

I think for sure yeah, I find it fascinating. Also, the assumption that we don't attach to food animals is kind of weird to me, because you were mentioning the monkeys Not all the culture, but some of the cultures that will breastfeed and raise monkeys will also eat them. And I find that fascinating because the idea that we would yes, we use dehumanizing things, but domestication, like what we do to cows to people sometimes, is one of the horrifying things we do. But also there are times where we even treat food animals like really well comparatively, and that it's not consistent. Consistent it's all over the place. I don't want to like over generalize there, but when you think about it, like people get attached to to cows, people, you read about this even in like, even in harder times like the 18th century or the 15th century. You, you, or even I remember learning like some Roman was mocking another Roman because he was sad about his fish dying and it's like so, and they were talking about this in like the first century and I'm like you know, I'm like that's a culture that's perfectly willing to slaughter a lot of people but like we're still forming weird bonds with fish. Yeah, and I find that interesting and it's bizarre because there are some other animals that domesticate other animals, although, like I said, they seem to be mostly insects.

Speaker 1: 58:35

They are social, though. That's one thing they all share, and um, but we're. That is something that's kind of unique, that's definitely unique to us. Amongst the apes you don't see even bonobos doing that. They're not, you know, they haven't figured it out yet.

Speaker 1: 58:51

They might have symbiotic relationships and I think it's interesting to think how much domestication starts off as symbiosis and how much doesn't.

Speaker 1: 58:59

I think with cats, for example, that's one case where it does look like it begins off of like we find them cute, they're around, they like that we bring food either in trash and or rodents, and somehow we formed a symbiotic relationship, and of the animals from that time that are still around, cats are doing pretty well, as opposed to a whole lot of other animals from 3,000, 5,000 years ago in North Africa that you don't see that many of anymore.

Speaker 1: 59:31

So it's just an interesting thing to to think about why we do it, and it's also interesting that you know, yeah, we'll eat horses, um, but it does look like the first things we domesticated were not food animals, I mean, and that's just. I think that that goes against a lot of people's. You know, what is real is rational in a caloric or economic sense, and it might be rational, but it may not be rational according to that logic. But it's interesting to think about the domestication thesis because if we are and I agree with you I'm one of these people who, like I, kind of believe in human neonatity. I don't know that we're tame, but I do know, although we probably are way less aggressive.

Speaker 1: 1:00:23

Um, compared to a lot of things right well, I mean like, for example, if I come up with another human, I'm not usually afraid they're gonna rip my face off.

Speaker 1: 1:00:34

If I roll up on a gorilla which is not even a carnivore right, and it's a lot like me, we can socially bomb with them. If we try, like, uh, they will bond with us. It's mutual um. But if I just roll up on a random gorilla, there's a good chance it is gonna rip my face off like um, and I find that interesting. But I think people sometimes think that take that they mean that oh, like, oh well, human beings are like way more pacifist and everything else. That can't be true, clearly. I'm like no, we're not and I don't know why you would assume that either. Um, but yeah, we do things like play way more, uh, parts of our lives than most of the animals. It just wouldn't occur to other animals to to play beyond a certain point and we seem to do it our entire lives.

Speaker 1: 1:01:36

Um, a whole lot of ritual and religion could have be argued to have developed out of prey ritual, for example. It's just, yeah, you know, uh, add to it that we do weird stuff the moment you give us surplus, like I mean, marcel mouse is right about that. We start doing strange shit. It's not always. We don't always develop hierarchy With it. We usually develop hierarchy. We don't always do it, but we do weird stuff with Surplus, like we will just destroy shit, just to destroy it. I don't know why we have it. We can prove now that we have it and now that we have it, we can just waste it Because I got enough. I don't know.

Speaker 1: 1:02:14

We do a lot of those behaviors, um, and it's interesting to think about in terms of like, the way we think about humans today, because there is both I agree with you both like I would say, a um hyper conservative or fascistic tendency. But you also see it in, say, primarist anarchists, who I wouldn't necessarily accuse of being fascioids, who also have this obsession with an untamed humanity. And I'm just like an untamed humanity. The way you think of it isn't humanity as we know it, even when you're thinking about hunter, gatherers or whatever you're fetishizing. But like there's there does not seem to be untamed Us is basically not us If we consider our actions to be tamed or untamed us is basically not us.

Speaker 1: 1:03:14

Um, uh, if we consider our actions to be tamed, or is taming us just making other things like what we did to ourselves, like I? That's the question that you know is is is what's going on? Cause? The other thing is, when you talk about human domestication, we always associate domestication with power as a power relationship, but it's pretty clear that if we domesticated ourselves, that was a collective social reproduction strategy that no one enforced on us. There was no big human, proto-h, homo sapien had a vision and forced us all to do it, which is not the case for, say, like agriculture, which a lot of us were first into, but like we clearly didn't. Um, no one, no other animal was like no, you're gonna start acting this way, like there was, we weren't hanging out, hanging out with the common ancestor, with the orangutan, and they made us be chiller. We did it to ourselves, and that does kind of raise a bunch of questions. For what are we even talking about when we talk about domestic domestication, if domestication traits are just traits that we bred into ourselves, you know?

Speaker 2: 1:04:39

um, yeah, so I think, um, it's interesting too, so kind of bringing up the, uh, the point about like, um, like, like the frank, like it seems like there's this economics brain that wants to explain everything by like utility and like what you know, like the profit motive and, and, you know, it is very useful to look at certain things from that perspective, but it can lead us astray, and I think, uh, one of them is that there was a paper I was reading the other day. Um, they were looking at, you know, cattle farming in india and, uh, the conclusion of the authors is like, well, none of these farms are, like very few of them actually make a profit, if any of, or most of them are operating at a loss. But why are they doing that? That doesn't seem to be economically rational. They should just learn how to do it better.

Speaker 2: 1:05:28

Um, first of all, I mean, I don't think these guys ever have spoken to a farmer in their entire lives, but there's the sense that they're trying to do a good thing and they're trying to give these guys good lives and still, you know, make a living off of it, right, um, and so this means that they're going to harvest the animals and that means slaughter, or it means milk, or you know there could be some other things too, or eggs, and so there's this expectation that their their way of protecting animals is by having these kind of exploitative relationships.

Speaker 2: 1:06:16

They're not necessarily economic, and one of the things interested me was that when I went to visit a feedlot a few years ago, the person that worked there is like we basically don't make a profit, we're a tax write-off for rich people so that we can actually you know there are still going to be feedlots at some point but like this is not like a high margins business and so like basically operating at like no profit at all and most of the stuff that they're doing is just trying to minimize the costs as much as possible, but it's not really making a huge amount of money. So there's a certain aspect of this that's very ritualized, that we have that kind of thing, and I think this goes way back. You know, the intentional destruction of the animal in this kind of sacrificial sense is a very old motif and I think probably it could be argued. One of the primary reasons human beings domesticate livestock, you know, is so that they can destroy the animal at the time and place of their choosing. Um, hunts are very ritualized in a lot of hunter-gatherer cultures, but in a lot of cultures as well, there's a ritual and a and a kind of mystique and you know, um, there's often a religious aspect and there's a gratitude sort of thing. But these happen opportunistically, right like they're. They're not patterns that can be easily put at a specific time and place. But when you have domesticated animals you can sync this up to astrological phenomenon. You can actually do specific times of the year or specific moon phases, that kind of thing, and that allows you to have these kind of elaborate rituals and have these kind of things and have these kind of things.

Speaker 2: 1:07:54

The temple economies of, like, the ancient Near East and other parts of the world are very notorious for having large numbers of animals just gathered there, so they can slaughter a huge number of them for both for, like these, gratitude sort of things, but also for sin, eating and that kind of thing too. But the specific kind of ritualized aspect of killing and destroying these animals plays a big, important role that way and there's a lot of theories to explain that. I mean, you mentioned house, but there's also, like, um, some of the other kind of explanations that this is like, like nancy j, for instance, um in, uh, she was mentioning that it's very much a a way of patriarchal kind of learned knowledge to pass through the generations. That is kind of a blood ceremony that only men can participate in. There's also, like the you know, the same gate going with Gerard and that kind of thing too. But there's a lot of explanations to explain it, but really what it comes down to is you want to be able to kill an animal at a time and place of your choosing for some specific ritual reason. You're going to need a ritual, some captive animal to do it, and if you have livestock, that's the easiest way to do it. But you know, there's some aspect to that.

Speaker 2: 1:08:57

That way, getting to the point about the kind of the fetishization of the wilderness, and I think this is an important thing because, yeah, like you mentioned, it does seem to transcend like many different ideological spectrums, right, like there's the primitivists and the anarcho-primitivists especially, um, there's some fascist sort of kind of or wilderness nazi stuff going on there too, um, and there seems to be. But like, all across that, like you know, you get like liberals, um, you get people like teddy roosevelt and, uh, like a huge spectrum of different kind of individuals who are. They want a wilderness that's pristine, and the pristineness is important. Like you don't want to have people living there, um, you don't, and especially not domesticated animals. That's like the number one thing they don't want to see when they go out to a wilderness place. And this is like a big motivating factor for the construction of, like, the national park system in the united states.

Speaker 2: 1:09:52

Um, it was to build a places where people couldn't graze their cattle because they wanted to keep these places wild and they wanted to have only wild animals there and that people could go to these places and be cleansed of civilization and to have this kind of rejuvenating kind of sort of experience, right, um, it's a very experiential thing and that's very turn of the century. Um, this is where, like kind of the jack london jack london was a marxist, but he's also like a weird, like eugenicist. I don't know, his politics were very weird, but this is the call of the wild stuff. You know, the return to nature. The dog becomes de-domesticated and goes and returns to live with the wolves, and that kind of thing too.

Speaker 2: 1:10:27

Um, it's also like the, the scouting movement of that kind of started in this period and it's also this idea that young men would be better off if they were exposed to nature and that they went off into the wilderness and had these kind of bonding rituals out there, where they would be not perverted by civilization or whatever. So there's this feeling that civilization, especially at the height of the industrial revolution the second industrial revolution, I should say was corrupting humanity and that eventually would lead to problems and that humans were becoming too domesticated and that it was becoming too much of a problem. And in some senses the Nazis were kind of the height of this sort of movement, because you know, a lot of Nazis also had this futuristic sort of arc, you know with the rocketry and that sort of stuff, but they also had this fear that they were becoming too degenerate and that they were fearing that they were becoming too domesticated. This is really like they're kind of driving this from, like Conrad Lorenz, who was a Nobel laureate who won the. He won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work in ethology in 1976. So after World War II, um, he was a nazi and he worked for the nazi uh department I guess it was the office of um race science and his whole thing. He was famous. He was the guy who discovered imprinting in ducks the reason that ducks imprint on, they can like imprint on people and that sort of thing. But he was also like really racist, um, and one of the things that he was big about was that human beings were too domesticated and that they had to become degenerate and that that human beings needed to. This actually made them too soft and too weak and that actually this led them to not appreciate the ugliness of the domesticated animal and that this was a problem for their future health and safety basically. So they had to return to a wilderness and of course this is a big justification for genocidal politics.

Speaker 2: 1:12:20

But there's also like the creation of the Heck cattle. The Heck brothers were these Germans and they wanted to backbreed cattle, de-domesticate them and turn them back into oryx. And they're still. These cattle are still around. They're basically they look like shaggy bulls. They have like kind of brown, black, very long horns. They have very. They're much more antisocial than a lot of other cattle. They tend to hate people. They're still used for rewilding projects in Europe today as placeholders for those original Oryx.

Speaker 2: 1:12:54

But the Nazis were really kind of, especially Hernan Göring who was the Reichsjägermeister the drink is named after him. But he was also really interested in this project and his you know their vision was that they would actually take the lands that the Nazis conquered and they would commit genocide to kill all the people living there and they would rewild it and turn it into a private hunting reserve for nazi officials to go and like spear hunt. These, these oryx, basically live this germanic fantasy of like, like primitive wilderness. It's kind of nuts to think about. Um, it seems to also, you know, have this captive kind of like, this feeling of like we could escape the problems of civilization if we just ditch the domestication and we could all live in some sort of anarchic beauty and life. But there's no way to do this without killing large numbers of people and killing large numbers of animals as well and enacting some of this genocidal politics.

Speaker 2: 1:13:51

I mean, this seems obvious to most people, right?

Speaker 2: 1:13:54

Because, like, obviously we need to have food in order to live, and turning large chunks of land into basically barren wastes where there can't be anything grown has to be returned to nature, that kind of thing.

Speaker 2: 1:14:07

It's not compatible with human life to a certain degree, and trying to live in these conditions means we have to live at a much lower density than we live now. So, um, there there's the. I'm not saying that rewilding or that sort of thing is a bad idea. I think there's many cases where lands could be um, de-intensify the agriculture that's already living on them and trying to establish, especially in critical kind of migration areas and critical habitats, protecting those and sending some aside, some of those and, you know, reducing the harms that we're doing with industrial animal agriculture. But the idea that all the world can be rewilded and that we can all live and return to nature and forget the whole domestication thing altogether is kind of a fantasy in it, and a dangerous one because it's been entertained by, you know, some of the most dangerous people in the world, uh, with some of the stupidest ideas of how to execute that.

Speaker 1: 1:14:58

So I feel like there's some weird allure to this whole thing, I think yeah, well, the the uh anarcho-primitivist to nazi pipeline is something I've actually seen happen in my real life. So, um, uh, which it's? I still would say it's rarely rare, but there is a logic to it. That is, um, that's wild to me, one I, I think, like these hunting reserves that they were imagining are still based off a domesticated landscape most of the time. They don't realize that, but it is, um, I mean, basically, we don't know. Most modern humans have no idea what an undomesticated landscape actually looks like, even when you're out where there are no obvious domesticated species. Um, you know, I like going out into the woods. When, particularly, I lived in southeast. It's a little harder now I live in the desert. Um, but uh, I would.

Speaker 1: 1:15:59

You would see things that you thought were not domesticated and then you realize, no, I'm in a forest of cut through and pine trees none of this is from here. Like this is not what this originally looked like. I have no idea what this originally looked like. I have no idea what this originally looked like. World trade systems and food is another one. It's hard to get people to realize how much food they eat, that traditional Eastern European dish of potatoes that's at most 150 years old, my friend 200 years old, that's at most 150 years old, my friend, like 200 years old. You know, that's what you got. I don't know what you're eating before that, probably turnips and shit, I don't know. But it's not what you think and you know. So a lot of things that we assume have long pedigrees. The most they probably have is 500, 600 years, but domesticated animals, that's pre-nace agriculture, uh, so, uh, that's an interesting thing to think about.

Speaker 1: 1:17:04

Um, and I find this tendency quite fascinating. I'm with you, I'm not, I'm not always like I, I would not mind so, but I want actually is not what these people who want wilderness is. I'm like, I want more, uh, you know, unaggressive, uh, non-used land with relatively wildish animals. I say I say this all as a relative thing um, integrated in, more frankly, urban, ask environments, because that's how I think we, we could save it and also survive. That requires thinking about things wildly differently and thinking about when and how we're doing population density differently and stuff like that, and I've seen it happen in societies that are, I think, a lot about, uh, the koreas, where you have rural areas, where you still have dense, like social living, like you go out and you're in farmland because they don't have a lot of it.

Speaker 1: 1:18:13

You're not in farmland with, like, no one's trying to maintain single family dwellings. You're still living in, like um, massive apartment blocks but you're surrounded by farmland, you know, and stuff like that. These are the things that I think a lot about, um, and I think the rewilding stuff actually is so based on this idea of quote pristine, unquote wilderness that you can't really do that. That, because what I want it's like no, I want actually the city and the country to kind of merge, actually a lot more than you do. I am not trying to maintain these untouched swaths of land that just sit there Because in some ways, as anyone who's ever had to deal with them knows, they're domesticated too.

Speaker 1: 1:19:04

It's not like we're not doing fire breaks and shit in them and stuff like that. Their pristineness is kind of fake. If you think about what it takes to keep a national park healthy with humans around it, it's actually a whole fuck lot of human activity and work. It's not just being left alone. I think a lot of people have issues with that and right now, as everything as people seem so divorced from domestic life and you're seeing so much damage to the environment. There is a traction to like oh if we could only go back to being usually not hunter-gatherers. I think people do realize that hunter-gatherers would require I think they get that it would require a 99% die-off of humanity. I don't think they realize it also requires a 99% die-off of humanity. I don't think they realize it also requires a 99% die-off of all biomass, not just ours. So good luck with that. As you were mentioning how much of the biomass is domesticated, I'm like, well, all that's got to go away.

Speaker 1: 1:20:21

Just want to tell you that that doesn't look like what you think it looks like, um, but I I think about this a lot and when you're trying to like talk about I get into the growth and degrowth things and I I just find the framework really, really, really, really crazy, because there are things I'm like you got to quit consuming this and this and this and this and this, but also if we wanted to not consume these things.

Speaker 1: 1:20:48

We have to restructure society. It's actually going to require a lot of certain kinds of development. Maybe once. Maybe you don't have to do it all the time. We're not, you know, we're.

Speaker 1: 1:20:58

One of the things I will say that is unique to I think is you relatively unique to capitalism is how much we consume just to consume, to make profits, even more so than our normal wasting of surplus just to do it, because it does lead us to have things like.

Speaker 1: 1:21:20

It incentivizes making shit that won't last, uh, so that you could continue having a market up, whereas if you were to make it your, if you were to make it for nonprofit motives, you want it to last 200 years.

Speaker 1: 1:21:31

So it's a just, it's a different motivation, and there's a reason why. You know, beds from the 17th century might be passed down to a family, but no one's passing down an Ikea bed because it's going to be lucky to make it 20 years, and I do think these things are things to think about. But when I think about this in terms of domestic domestication or what this is about, what human beings are, I think it's a. I think what we get is a much more paradoxical and complex picture. What we get is a much more paradoxical and complex picture, um, you know, I think about this also in terms of other debates about human evolution, whether or not we're individual, um, or collective, and I actually do sort of think the gene-centric view, as opposed to the individual or collective view, get you out of a lot of like hard to explain human behaviors, uh, because, you could be if you have a gene 60 view.

Speaker 1: 1:22:24

You might be collective in some instances and you might be individual on others, um, but also collective evolutionist. I mean, I hate to tell people, but kropotkin ended up kind of a crackpot racist, partly based off that. Like, um, it is not just the individual evolutionist who end up being eugenicist or whatever there's. It can happen with anybody and the people you assume are happy hippie anarchists have some dark undertones.

Speaker 1: 1:22:54

If you take it to a logical conclusion, um if you start assuming that, like, group competition is how humans uh evolve. Well, group competition implies some things, um yeah, some of which are very nasty. Uh, it doesn't get you out of social Darwinism, um, so it's just. Uh, it's. It's an interesting thing for me to think about when we're talking about how we handle something like, say, we know that something's going to have to happen with climate change. We know that it's probably going to have to be both bottom-up and top-down.

Speaker 1: 1:23:32

It's going to have to happen both ways and what that looks like. It would help to understand how we handle convergent threats historically to make that more likely to succeed. Um, because I do, you know, I think a lot of appeals to human nature or bullshit, but I will say I do think there actually is such a thing as human biological flourishing and conditions where we don't. And and, uh, if you ask us to do certain things, we're not, as a species, gonna be that great at it. Um, and there's a lot of stuff we do that's good, maybe even seems noble on a micro level. So like, I don't know, like we're talking about, like adopting puppies or whatever, but might be, might be, when taken to an industrial level, it like a terrible thing. Um, so, uh, it's. You know, I think I think a lot about that. Another thing I was thinking about when you were mentioning this and I then I'll turn it back over you because I'm kind of babbling, because I have so many ideas off of this when I'm thinking about it now.

Speaker 1: 1:24:44

Is like trauma studies. Interestingly, I've lived on a farm for a brief period of my life and you have to kill animals and my youngest brother worked in a meat processing practice in a slaughterhouse for a while and I've seen that and I can tell you that, um, the people working in meat processing uh plants, in the uh slaughterhouses are a particular kind of people that show signs of the kind of trauma that you see in, like drone operators and shit, whereas like the people who slaughter like one animal, like a every couple of months on a farm, they're harder people but they don't show that kind of psychological damage and I think that's something to think about, like the motivations, because if it was just a kind of rational calculus thing going on, even with food animals, it probably wouldn't bother us to watch a slaughterhouse work.

Speaker 1: 1:25:52

But I don't know that many people who are moved by that. If you have to kill a pig or a cow or whatever, it's not fun, but you don't tend to be horribly messed up from it. But there does also seem to be even fairly traditional farmers. It's not just modern hippie farmers who are like well, I want the animal to have a decent life before I end it. Like, that is part of the. That is in the logic of what they're thinking about, like, oh, you know there's some kind of like, yeah, we're going to exploit and kill this animal ultimately, but like, until that happens, I want it to have a relatively comfortable existence.

Speaker 1: 1:26:40

And, um, people who go to work on traditional farms versus people who go to like a dairy processor today, they have different responses to that. I think for a bio like a development reason like it certain things do do strike even our rapacious selves is still somewhat beyond the pale. That we only started doing because industry made it possible that we could remove ourselves from having to deal with it, because it's not something we naturally want to deal with. And I think that's that's a paradoxical thing, because it implies that, oh, maybe we're not as a species is super awful, as you think, but it might not lead to any grand like positive hippie conclusions either.

Speaker 2: 1:27:29

Those are all really good points. I think, yeah, especially with, like, the slaughterhouses. That's an interesting one because, like I mean especially living after the pandemic. So I almost took a job, working at a summer job, working for the CFIA during the height of COVID, and I, only I. The reason I didn't take the job is because there was a massive COVID outbreak, basically like a week before my interview and I said, oh no, I don't want to be part of that.

Speaker 1: 1:27:57

I don't want to go there to be part of that.

Speaker 2: 1:27:59

I don't want to go there. But so slaughterhouse workers are kind of like it sucks, like it's like some of the worst conditions that you could possibly think of in a workplace. Right, it's dangerous, like people get carpal tunnel or they just get seriously injured, they cut themselves knives, that kind of thing all the time. The psychological aspects of it are just enormous and that's not very well quantified. It's very hard to say what sort of things will affect someone and what won't. What's the breaking point? Right, like how many animals do you have to kill to get trauma? I don't think anyone's actually done it, for the amount of animals that human beings kill, and it's like hundreds of millions daily but, like you know, every year is like billions of animals. Basically, right, but how much does one individual have to kill in order to get this? And I mean there's going to be a difference, widely different answer for individual. Maybe some individuals one, and then some of us can be thousands, tens of thousands. Maybe they never will, um, but it takes its toll and I, you know, like this is like something that is a big issue for veterinarians now, because the case loads are a lot harder, a lot larger, uh, they're killing a lot more animals. And so I've seen, like my colleagues like get burnt out by difficult end-of-life quality of life cases when it turns into human euthanasia and it just like destroys them, and I've seen other veterinarians who just go about it, it's like, okay, now you know, wash my hands and and get the stuff ready, that sort of thing. So there seems to be some sort of aspect to this that is very troubling and in human beings is, you know, even if we can think of it as an industrial process, you know, there's an aspect to it that it's a dehumanizing process. Um, there, it's interesting too because like uh, uh, reading um, uh, upton sininclair's the Jungle, it's very much about this kind of dehumanization and it's just the backdrop.

Speaker 2: 1:29:47

Is the slaughterhouse right, like everyone thinks? Oh, it's about the food and about the slaughterhouse conditions and it's like unhygienic. No, no, no, it's about workers' rights. It's about, like immigrant laborers who come to this slaughterhouse to work and they're treated horribly, who come to this slaughterhouse to work and they're treated horribly and they're basically like robbed blind by all these, like house speculators and like they're given these crappy loans and then they go and work at these slaughterhouses and they get like physically burnt out and they, you know, through these disgusting conditions and that kind of thing and then eventually their lives fall apart and their families get sick and die and that kind of stuff right.

Speaker 2: 1:30:26

And this is a reality that has not changed very much in the hundred years since that book was written. Like slaughterhouse workers are still dealing with this problem. This is something that the industrialized kind of animal agriculture system and its critiques of it tend to neglect. Is that the enormous human costs of these kinds of situations as well, and that's very different than you know, grandma goes and kills a few hogs, that kind of thing, which, yeah, you know, you may not want to kill your own hogs, but like you got to know where the bacon comes from.

Speaker 2: 1:30:51

I think, at the end of the day, and displacing this level of violence and this level of ecological costs, you know, out of sight, out of mind, is kind of ruinous like long term, especially because, like most people don't like realize what it what it takes to raise an animal and then to end its life and then consume it, right, like they just get the end product of that whole life cycle.

Speaker 2: 1:31:14

I think this is.

Speaker 2: 1:31:15

You know this might be out of date by the time this comes up, but you know it's very salient now with the H5N1 sort of outbreak in the United States and North America.

Speaker 2: 1:31:24

I mean, there's been multiple waves of this throughout the world in the past, so we're probably it's not going to go away anytime soon, but it's caused, like egg prices to go up in the United States, and that's what the people notice is like, why are the eggs so expensive now? It's like they've just shot up in price, right, and what they don't realize is that, like tens of millions of poultry died, that the entire system of animal agriculture has collapsed in on itself in the United States because they aren't using vaccines to actually fight this thing. They're trying to burn, like basically eliminate and cull entire barns to try to keep it out of, out of, you know, controlled, and that that strategy has failed. Um, and so now they're looking at like kind of wild, like strategies of, just like you know, just let it burn through the whole you know um population basically, and you know good luck to them if it doesn't jump to humans in mass yeah, it seems like there's like a huge like.

Speaker 2: 1:32:22

Uh, you know, the fact is that people aren't very aware of these topics because they don't interface with them except on a very tangential level. Right, we're not involved with food production, and there seems to be kind of like a sense of if you are doing food production, you're at the lowest of the low, which is kind of ridiculous because we all eat and the food is the most important thing in our lives and that's what binds us together. But it's very much a sense of like well, if you're doing food production, you're at a lower stage of progress than if you are, like you know, abstracted, living in a cubicle typing a little box, putting AI inputs in that poop out some sort of like studio ghibli picture or something like that. You know, for some reason, that scene is a higher calling than, like you know, growing your own food and raising your own animals and and that kind of thing. Uh, so it seems like that that level of like mass.

Speaker 2: 1:33:17

Like agriculture has really changed the dynamics. This also has like major ecological impacts, obviously, with the climate change, but also like nitrogen cycles, and people don't think about this. But you bring a bunch of animals to one specific site to kill them all and then you basically send their nitrogen elsewhere and this nitrogen is taken from the soil of the plants those animals originally ate. So you're extracting nitrogen from one area and then it goes into the sewer system eventually of somewhere else and just winds up in the ocean, causing these massive algal blooms and that causes ocean like anoxic conditions and that kind of thing. Um, so there's huge upsets to the ecological swing that are completely like abstracted, they're kind of just offset, basically they're they're considered like, um, like not important people, just, you know, they're just kind of like oh, it's just the cost of how things, this is how things are done, right. So, um, obviously there needs to be major changes in food systems and there needs to be major changes the way that people relate to animals that way.

Speaker 2: 1:34:18

Um, and it's interesting too because, like we think about, like other animals and we've kind of talked about this a little bit or alluded to us a little bit with ants and with these social insects and one of the major ways that there's been an argument that ants are domesticator species, because, well, these certain kind of leaf cutter ants and kind of termites are another example, or ambrosia beetles. They basically farm large amounts of fungus inside of their hives or nests basically, and then they feed on these kind of fungus and basically the care that these animals give to these kind of fungi is kind of like domestication, right. It's kind of like a plant husbandry or fungal husbandry system. Basically that's mutually dependent. There's kind of this mutualism going on between there.

Speaker 2: 1:35:03

Obviously that's lacking the social complexities that human beings have with their domestic pets, but there seems to be this kind of biological interrelatedness and this co-evolution between two radically different species that are on very different sides of very different kingdoms of organism, right, and that co-evolution has led to very interesting kind of ways of food production in the insects. Now, humans aren't like a eusocial species, like these eusocial ants, termites, that kind of thing, but it seems that, you know, maybe we will be one day, but it seems that this higher level of social organization that these eusocial insects have evolved, where there's reproductive division of labor, has allowed them to also have this system. Seems that this higher level of social organization that these eusocial insects have evolved, where there's reproductive division of labor, has allowed them to also have this system where they can kind of grow these, these, uh, these fungi and it seems like, you know, ants also do certain kinds of interesting behaviors, like milking aphids and that kind of thing, which you know are similar to kind of how we interact with other animals too. It's less complicated than like the actual, like they don't breed the aphids, but they do like harvest them, so they kind of have we interact with other animals too. It's less complicated than like the actual, like they don't breed the aphids, but they do like harvest them, so they kind of have these interactions as well.

Speaker 2: 1:36:06

And so what does that tell us?

Speaker 2: 1:36:07

It tells us that, um, you know, when you have these large societies that need large amounts of food, they're going to start controlling the cultivation of a food in a way that is, um, has to be sustainable, and so if it's not sustainable, it's just not going to work for them long term.

Speaker 2: 1:36:25

And I mean right now, we could say well, you know, you can be very critical of our current food system, but it feeds people. But my response to that would be for how long, right, like how long is this going to be sustained before we deplete the soil, before the climate becomes like we can't actually grow anything in the climate anymore or the animals start dying because of heat waves or there's too many epidemic epizootic diseases caused by these sort of things, and if we don't take into account these things then we're not going to have a food system and then we are going to have to deal with starvation yet again. So I think we have yet to see the dark side of the food system really kind of fall. Maybe that's my Doomer prediction, but maybe we'll figure it out. I'm hopeful that there will be some sort of reckoning and people will start to recognize that we need to be a little bit more conscious about the costs and the tradeoffs associated with our current food system, if that makes any sense.

Speaker 1: 1:37:24

Right, no, it makes a lot of sense to me. I think a lot about it. You know, I remember thinking that I need to learn to really like, get over my fear of eating our octopoid relatives, because there's not going to be a whole lot left in the ocean, because they seem to be one of the few species that thrive under algal bloom conditions. And why are the algebra blooms happening in the gulf and whatnot? Well, because of the breaches in the nitrogen cycle that nitrogen based fertilizer being flushed into the ocean as opposed to even being put back into the soil leads to. And industrial agriculture hit this crisis already in the beginning of the 20th century. We knew it. That's why we have nitrogen fertilizer in the first place. I mean, you want to talk about, you know, the, the paradoxes of life? The guy who gave us nitrogen, nitrogen fertilizer that really helps human population growth and keeps us from getting into Malthusian cycles, I guess, is also a guy who invented, like, all kinds of chemical weapons. So, yeah, yeah, just, it's just like. It's like, uh, these are things that we do over and over again and um, whenever someone's like oh well, human beings are blah, blah, blah, I'm like we seem to be all those things, um, but on the food cycle, I'm really with you that we have to rethink large portions of it. We have to like, um, for nitrogen cycle reasons, for water uses, reasons like the fact that we we utilize the weird microclimates in california to the, to the way that we utilize the weird microclimates in California to the way that we do makes sense in an industrial process, as long as you aren't having climate change. But we've already had 20 years of that being unstable.

Speaker 1: 1:39:36

And the other thing that you have is and I'm going to sound like a dirty hippie but the fact that we breed a lot of and domesticate a lot of plant life to be uniform, for shipping. You know, every couple hundred years we're going to have to change what a banana tastes like, because we only have one kind of banana and it eventually dies because we remove all genetic resistance, because they're all basically naturally occurring biological clones of one fucking banana. Um, like, that's a bad idea. Like you know, um, these are the kinds of. You know, um, these are the kinds, and that was obvious. But there's a lot more of that.

Speaker 1: 1:40:27

Um, you know, and I don't just say it's because I'm a, I will, I'd make a lot of dirty hippie jokes in this thing, but I am one of those people who, like cultivates my own tomatoes because modern tomatoes are fucking gross. Um, and I love tomatoes, but I store-bought tomatoes are useful for nothing other than shipping and maybe kind of turning in the sauce, I guess. And, um, when you realize how much genetic diversity exists out there, even in heirloom seeds, and then you start like extrapolating it out to you know all kinds of stuff, just, oh, we really need to rethink some of this. You know, famines have always happened, but the kind of famines, for example, like the Irish potato famine, only started happening when we started, like hella, monocropping.

Speaker 1: 1:41:15

And we only do monocropping, for I mean, we monocrop for market reasons, we don't monocrop for like, not even community reasons it wouldn't occur to communities to do that.

Speaker 1: 1:41:27

So, um, it is something that I think we have to think about, and domestication gives us a lot to think about. But I also think, when we're trying to figure out why we do these things, if, if part of what domestication is is, yes, we're lording over other animals, but we're also basically making animals look and act more like us, then we need to think about what us actually is, um, to get a handle on how to do this in a way that's not gonna, I don't know, destroy the fucking planet. So you know, it's it does seem like there. This doesn't seem related, obviously related to politics, and yet I'm like, in some ways, this is one of the most base forms of politics. You can't reproduce this society if people can't eat and they destroy everything around them and then they desecrate everything and no one can do anything, because it's just not a great idea absolutely.

Speaker 2: 1:42:29

I mean, that's just like the, that's the basic part of it, right. Like, um, like I, I don't know, it's just. It's kind of mind-boggling at the end of the day, like trying to think about some of this stuff because like, obviously, that, uh, having a sustainable society isn't like just some woke thing that we're talking about. To discard points. It's like, yeah, no, I'm talking about this because I want people after me to have something to eat so they don't starve.

Speaker 2: 1:42:57

Um, and this point about the monocrop is very important because you know, there's been a radical reduction in genetic diversity in the last, you know, 100 years and like the selective breeding has been touted as a miracle is like, yeah, we're going to only have the best genetics and they're going to advance the breed and it's going to improve it, and then that that way we're going to only have the traits that we desire so that we can feed more people. But that doesn't work if you're also losing the immunity genes that would protect them against epidemic diseases like COVID, like avian influenza, like all these other things that are becoming a problem again, because you know, you have these large sort of concentrations of animals in large numbers of populations that just don't exist in nature, basically. So that is definitely one of the big problems, I think, at this point, that we're dealing with there. I don't know, I was going to say something else, but I've lost my train of thought there.

Speaker 1: 1:44:01

Yeah, gonna say something else, but I've lost my train of thought there. Um, yeah, well, um, to turn this back you, this will come out before your class comes out, so where can people find it and what will you be covering?

Speaker 2: 1:44:13

so that's a good question. So the uh domestication syndrome, it's going to be with the memory school. It's going from uh june to august. It's going to be with the memory school. It's going from June to August. It's going to be seven sessions, two hours each, 200 pages of reading for every two weeks basically. So that's more than doable.

Speaker 2: 1:44:28

We'll be talking about everything from the definitions of domestication We'll be talking a full session about dogs, one about small ruminants, one about beasts of burden. We'll talk about the ontogeny of this and the and the domestication syndrome and neoteny, uh, human domestication, as well as the concept of the wilderness and how this interplays with cattle in particular, but also like these concepts that we've kind of been talking about in this sort of thing as well. Um, outside of that, of course, I do have my youtube channel it's zoonosis with joy, and I talk about different kinds of concepts related to animals, health, society, that kind of thing. Um and uh, I try to upload relatively regularly, you know once, everything from like once a month, once every couple weeks, that kind of thing. So, um, do check that out if you get a chance.

Speaker 2: 1:45:18

Um, there's also I do have a paper coming out soon that I've been. I've been working on Um it's. It's in currently in review, so I can't tell you exactly when that's coming out, but uh, um it's uh about uh horses in the new world, um and uh related to the um reintroduction of horses and debates about the historical aspects of that and related to environments and that kind of thing too. So I'm kind of doing I've got a lot of irons in the fire right now but definitely check out the course and I think it's going to be very interesting and hopefully helps kind of expand about some of the topics that we discussed here yeah, I hope so too.

Speaker 1: 1:45:57

Thank you so much. I will put links to everything in the show notes and, like I said, I think I'm timing this one so it's going to come out perfectly for people to have enough time to sign up but not feel like they're signing up for something that's like six months away. So it it. It should be up by then. It definitely will be out before June. Just look in the show notes on your YouTube channel and the member school link at least. Thank you so much for coming on.

Speaker 1: 1:46:29

I'm always fascinated with these kind of topics. I do think, in the seemingly super crazy world that we currently live in, even by our normally crazy standards, going back and looking at these kinds of relations to what human beings are and how we relate to the non-human world is actually really important, particularly as we seem to be, particularly as we seem to be now openly spiting things. I don't know. I'm like what does it mean if your entire society is like doubling down on capricious consumption? To prove you, can I just like? I don't know, but it feels like we're there anyway.

Speaker 2: 1:47:23

Thank you so much. Yeah, no worries, thank you for having me on, all right.