GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

I 6 8 • GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL
Ukraine, as well as in England, Kenya, Zimbabwe, and South Africa; an
experimental farm for elk (red deer, in British terminology) has been operated
by the Rowett Research Institute at Aberdeen, Scotland; and an
experimental farm for moose has operated in the Pechero-Ilych National
Park in Russia. Yet these modern efforts have achieved only very limited
successes. While bison meat occasionally appears in some U.S. supermarkets,
and while moose have been ridden, milked, and used to pull sleds in
Sweden and Russia, none of these efforts has yielded a result of sufficient
economic value to attract many ranchers. It is especially striking that
recent attempts to domesticate eland within Africa itself, where its disease
resistance and climate tolerance would give it a big advantage over introduced
Eurasian wild stock susceptible to African diseases, have not caught
on.
Thus, neither indigenous herders with access to candidate species over
thousands of years, nor modern geneticists, have succeeded in making useful
domesticates of large mammals beyond the Ancient Fourteen, which
were domesticated by at least 4,500 years ago. Yet scientists today could
undoubtedly, if they wished, fulfill for many species that part of the definition
of domestication that specifies the control of breeding and food supply.
For example, the San Diego and Los Angeles zoos are now subjecting
the last surviving California condors to a more draconian control of breeding
than that imposed upon any domesticated species. All individual condors
have been genetically identified, and a computer program determines
which male shall mate with which female in order to achieve human goals
(in this case, to maximize genetic diversity and thereby preserve this
endangered bird). Zoos are conducting similar breeding programs for
many other threatened species, including gorillas and rhinos. But the zoos'
rigorous selection of California condors shows no prospects of yielding an
economically useful product. Nor do zoos' efforts with rhinos, although
rhinos offer up to over three tons of meat on the hoof. As we shall now
see, rhinos (and most other big mammals) present insuperable obstacles to
domestication.
IN ALL, OF the world's 148 big wild terrestrial herbivorous mammals—
the candidates for domestication—only 14 passed the test. Why did the
other 134 species fail? To which conditions was Francis Galton referring,
when he spoke of those other species as "destined to perpetual wildness"?