Tag: against the grain

It takes just 10 generations to turn a wild animal into a pet

silver-fox

One of the many many 🤯 bits from James Scott’s Against the Grain which I’ve mentioned before:

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By selecting the least aggressive (most tame) from among 130 silver foxes and breeding them to one another repeatedly, the experimenters produced, in only ten generations, 18 percent of progeny that exhibited extremely tame behavior—whining, wagging their tails, and responding favorably to petting and handling as a domestic dog might. After twenty generations of such breeding, the percentage of extremely tame foxes nearly doubled to 35 percent.

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So in 10 generations – which is just 10 years in fox time because incredibly, it takes a fox just 10 months to reach breeding age – almost 1/5 of offspring become pet-like.

And then I think about human reproduction, and the power of culture and institutions to selectively breed us (I’m not saying such behavior is fully conscious or purposeful, but it certainly is interesting!)

Homo domesticus (excerpt from Against the Grain which is a fantastic read)

I was struck by this passage from Against the Grain (by James Scott, who also wrote Seeing Like A State; thanks to my friend Cathy for the rec):

Domesticated animals—especially sheep and goats, in this case—can be seen in the same light. They are our dedicated, four-footed (or, in the cases of chickens, ducks, and geese, two-footed) servant foragers. Thanks to their gut bacteria, they can digest plants that we cannot find and/or break down and can bring them back to us, as it were, in their “cooked” form as fat and protein, which we both crave and can digest. We selectively breed these domesticates for the qualities we desire: rapid reproduction, toleration of confinement, docility, meat, and milk and wool production.

Isn’t this what governments and large institutions are doing to us? Whether intentional or purely through the invisible logic of incentives…

The main exception from the above list seems to be rapid reproduction, as fertility rates in developed countries are very clearly declining. But confinement…docility…production… one only needs to look at the inexorable march of capitalism and centralized power structures to see some worrying trends…