Bad Breeding
I’ve been doing all of my non-book writing today on somebody else’s blog. Check out the ongoing discussion on Confessions of a (former) breeder at Invisible Voices. The comments have veered into the intersection of speciesism and sexism.
Speaking of animal breeding, the NYT has published this editorial on the latest news about the Middle Eastern origins of “domesticated” cats, whose wild relatives — surprise, surprise — are near extinction.
The editorial, like most of the articles reporting those scientific findings, asserts that “domestication” — i.e., enslavement and forced breeding — is a good thing, as evidenced by the reproductive success of the “domesticated” cats as opposed to their wild relatives. They conveniently fail to mention that habitat loss due to human encroachment is the chief cause of species extinctions worldwide. “Domestication” doesn’t offer protection from the vagaries of wild life, it merely offers refuge (at the price of freedom) from the depradations of human-inflicted habitat destruction.
Most of the commentary on the findings also conveniently fails to note the difference between coevolution and “domestication.” For dogs, and probably cats too, “domestication” was preceded by thousands of years of cooperative cohabitation in which there was truly mutual benefit. It’s only when the people decided to make property out of their former partners (in the same manner that male humans made property out of the females who used to be their partners) that the problems began.
By the way, I write about the “domestication” of dogs, the freedom of feral chickens, and what all of this might mean for animal liberation tactics in this 2005 article in Satya Magazine.
