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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   32543 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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I think at this point you are losing sight of Diamond's argument. Your statement rests on an unstated premise, which is that all that is needed for domesticability is Mendelian inheritance, and that therefore all species are capable of being domesticated. Were that true, you would be correct. But Diamond's argument is that there is a suite of characteristics necessary for a species to be domesticable.

Which indicates he's pulling a fast one with the definition of domesticability. If the definition you gave is the correct one, then it is the case that all you need is Mendelian inheritence.

Well, Diamond does refer to several works on the history of domestication, as well as unsuccessful efforts by Europeans to domesticate zebras in particular.

So what exactly happened, did someone try breeding taller zebras, and failed even at that? You know that a claim like that makes no sense.

More importantly, your claim is that the entire book must be discounted because Diamond is wrong about zebra domestication.

That wasn't my argument. You said GGS was not based on wrong factual premises, so I gave a few examples of just that off the top of my head, but my issue was the Theory of Everything stuff, which we discussed in the other comment chain.

The German KHLG went bankrupt as early as 1906. By then, the breeding facilities were already defunct. (141) The Schutztruppe's efforts in domesticating, too, never passed the experimental stage, save for a few officers patrolling their district towns on zebrabacks. All in all, both the zebra and its hybrid offspring turned out to be more wayward and less amenable to taming than predicted.

Cool, but as you pointed out yourself, taming has nothing to do with domestication, and everything I read about why the domestication of zebras failed, including your quotes, talks exclusively about breeding for more tame behavior. So there's a bait and switch where demonstrations of zebras being trained are not enough to prove domesticability, because apparently it's only about breeding for features desired by humans, and then that argument is promptly forgotten when discussing how "zebras have never been domesticated".

Also:

Around 1900, he promised to tame zebras and to crossbreed them with horses to create a new draught animal: the zebroid

What? For one, does cross-breeding even count as domestication? More importantly: that was a 6 year long experiment, you cannot seriously mean this is evidence that zebras are harder to domesticate than the ancient equivalent of the horse, and for that matter that the domestication attempt even failed. If the result was an animal different from the wild one, it already succeeded - or in the event the result isn't what was wanted at that time, it proves domestication didn't happen only because we didn't want it to (we just need to change what we want, and boom, we now know how to domesticate a zebra).

Yes, because they have been "exposed to males." Doesn't sound like they are talking about selective breeding, but they might be.

Yeah, which is why I said it doesn't prove anything either way.

did someone try breeding taller zebras, and failed even at that?

You can buy zebra semen, and the seller suggests that the stallion has qualities that are worth passing on:

Rarity is my 2004 Grant Zebra Stallion. Rarity has perfect big bold striping and very correct conformation. Rarity has a very rare temperament for a zebra stallion and is quiet with a sweet disposition. These are great qualities to pass onto his foals, making him the perfect stud for hybrid crossing.

They also control who gets to be bred:

Anyone who is interested in breeding both owner and mare must be approved first. I do NOT let just anyone breed to him.

They claim the stallion is particularly tame and that his temperament is hereditary.

This is the reason why we decided to breed with him, to create foals that also have his outstanding temperament. All our mares/jennies that we use for breeding to him have all been carefully chosen. They all have good temperaments and trainable minds.

All the people involved in horses are amazingly focused on the lineage of horses. This passes to zebra breeding, and people really care about which animal breeds with which, as they all believe fervently in selecting for traits.

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