GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

170 • GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL
like to, either. That's what derailed attempts to domesticate cheetahs, the
swiftest of all land animals, despite our strong motivation to do so for
thousands of years.
As I already mentioned, tame cheetahs were prized by ancient Egyptians
and Assyrians and modern Indians as hunting animals infinitely superior
to dogs. One Mogul emperor of India kept a stable of a thousand cheetahs.
But despite those large investments that many wealthy princes made, all of
their cheetahs were tamed ones caught in the wild. The princes' efforts to
breed cheetahs in captivity failed, and not until 1960 did even biologists
in modern zoos achieve their first successful cheetah birth. In the wild,
several cheetah brothers chase a female for several days, and that rough
courtship over large distances seems to be required to get the female to
ovulate or to become sexually receptive. Cheetahs usually refuse to carry
out that elaborate courtship ritual inside a cage.
A similar problem has frustrated schemes to breed the vicuna, an
Andean wild camel whose wool is prized as the finest and lightest of any
animal's. The ancient Incas obtained vicuna wool by driving wild vicunas
into corrals, shearing them, and then releasing them alive. Modern merchants
wanting this luxury wool have had to resort either to this same
method or simply to killing wild vicunas. Despite strong incentives of
money and prestige, all attempts to breed vicunas for wool production in
captivity have failed, for reasons that include vicunas' long and elaborate
courtship ritual before mating, a ritual inhibited in captivity; male vicunas'
fierce intolerance of each other; and their requirement for both a yearround
feeding territory and a separate year-round sleeping territory.
Nasty Disposition. Naturally, almost any mammal species that is sufficiently
large is capable of killing a human. People have been killed by pigs,
horses, camels, and cattle. Nevertheless, some large animals have much
nastier dispositions and are more incurably dangerous than are others.
Tendencies to kill humans have disqualified many otherwise seemingly
ideal candidates for domestication.
One obvious example is the grizzly bear. Bear meat is an expensive
delicacy, grizzlies weigh up to 1,700 pounds, they are mainly vegetarians
(though also formidable hunters), their vegetable diet is very broad, they
thrive on human garbage (thereby creating big problems in Yellowstone
and Glacier National Parks), and they grow relatively fast. If they would
behave themselves in captivity, grizzlies would be a fabulous meat production
animal. The Ainu people of Japan made the experiment by routinely