
On Domestication
This is not something that the modern urban person often considers, but without domesticated animals civilisation as we know it would have been impossible. Food, clothing, manure for crops, and muscle power, all were provided by domesticated animals, and all were essential for human flourishing. Thus the regions which possessed such animals had a clear advantage in climbing the ladder of economic progress. As Andrew puts it, “You cannot milk a giraffe, ride a zebra into battle, make a rhino pull a plough, or breed hippos for food.”
The problem with this, however, is that domestication is not as obvious or straightforward as it might appear, especially when it comes to one key creature: the cow.
It was long generally accepted that modern cattle are domesticated descendants of the now extinct European aurochs, Bos primigenius. More recent genetic and archaeological evidence has called this into question but the real problem is explaining domestication at all. Why would anyone try to domesticate something as notoriously aggressive as an aurochs? To paraphrase Andrew, there is no species of wild cattle that you can milk, ride into battle, use to pull a plough, or breed for food. You’d no more consider doing so with an aurochs than you would with a rhino.
In his excellent Till the Cows Come Home, Philip Walling gives a useful overview of the current scientific consensus (or rather, lack of it) around the domestication of cattle and concludes,
Until genetic evidence can be found to show that our domestic cattle have some aurochs DNA, it seems the best that can be said is that we have had domestic cattle for at least 10,000 years, not descended, but as a separate species from the wild variety. And that takes us back to the beginning of the Neolithic period, when we are told that people made the transition from hunter-gathering to settled farming. But as further evidence comes to light, and we find we are having to extend back into ‘pre-history’, the beginning of human agricultural settlement, it must follow that our domestic cattle, being at least as old as farming, have been with us for a very long time indeed. Where they came from I do not know, but as things stand, neither does anybody else. It pleases me to believe that we have had them as long as we have been human, as our constant companions and partners in the great endeavour of taming the wilderness.
There is a similar problem with the commonly assumed notion that dogs are domesticated wolves. When domesticated plants or animals are left to their own devices they typically, after a few generations, start to closely resemble their wild ancestor. As Susan McHugh notes in Dog, feral dogs (those that choose their own breeding partners) should,
…increasingly resemble the original species. In other words, if they were directly descended from wolves, with each generation feral dogs breeding with each other should look increasingly more like them. Instead, such dogs progressively approximate a specific dog type, the medium-sized, reddish-brown appearance of the dingo.
(And no one really knows where the dingo came from either.)
Cattle and dogs are our two most important animals (sorry cat lovers). We’ve had cattle for as long as we’ve been farming and we’ve had dogs for as long as we’ve been human. You might almost say that humans wouldn’t be human without the influence of cattle and dogs. Yet the evidence that modern cows and dogs are descended from wild cattle and wolves is shaky, at the least.
So where did they come from?
Here’s my theory, as unprovable as other theories of domestication, but consonant with belief in a good and sovereign God: humans didn’t domesticate cattle or dogs but were given them, whole and entire. And we were given them because we needed them, as surely as we need clothing and shelter.
I’m not sure what Andrew would make of that, nor its impact upon 1776, but this Christmas as we sing about cattle lowing around the manger, or picture the shepherds with their dogs watching over their flocks, give thanks to the One who gave them to us.