Outside of the few ruminant species who can eat grass, almost all mammals compete with humans for food. Instead of feeding a growing pet for a year, and then making one large meal out of it, you could feed a growing human child for a year. Bad evolutionary tradeoff. The correct decision is to eat that mammal now.
Thousands of years of history of people raising pigs suggests otherwise. Dogs appear to have been domesticated at least partly because they were able to help with hunting and presumably the widespread adoption of canine companions is evidence that humans benefited from the relationship more than enough to compensate for any upkeep costs.
As I said, useful species like dogs and pigs are domesticated because of their usefulness; their cuteness is not a prime consideration. Piglets aren’t champions of cuteness. Puppies are cute, but grown dogs or wolves are dangerous and must be very frightening if you’re not used to domesticated ones.
I’m not really sure what you’re arguing exactly. Would you agree that animals that are commonly domesticated (cows, sheep, pigs, dogs, cats, horses) have young that humans also find cute? It seems that the widespread domestication of these animals is partly because they are also useful, either as a direct food source or because they help find, hunt or protect a food source.
Is your point that other animals also have young that humans find cute (baby seals spring to mind) but are less commonly domesticated and therefore usefulness rather than cuteness of young is the primary criteria that determined domestication? That may be true—hunting hawks are an example of an animal that has been partially domesticated (or at least trained) but isn’t generally considered ‘cute’.
It is probably impossible to know the full story behind the domestication of animals but it seems at least plausible that humans first ‘adopted’ some animals partially because they were ‘cute’ and the utility was an unplanned benefit.
Would you agree that animals that are commonly domesticated (cows, sheep, pigs, dogs, cats, horses) have young that humans also find cute?
Yes, but not significantly more than the average young mammal is cute. The difference |P(Cute|Domesticated) - P(Cute)| is small and uninteresting.
Is your point that other animals also have young that humans find cute (baby seals spring to mind) but are less commonly domesticated and therefore usefulness rather than cuteness of young is the primary criteria that determined domestication?
Yes, precisely.
It is probably impossible to know the full story behind the domestication of animals but it seems at least plausible that humans first ‘adopted’ some animals partially because they were ‘cute’ and the utility was an unplanned benefit.
It’s possible. There are also other models, where humans domesticated whole groups of animals gradually over many generations. For instance, people who followed herds of large grazing mammals around could have protected them from predators and very gradually tamed them by selection and by relaxation of predator pressure, perhaps over many generations of people as well as of cattle. In another case, it’s said wild wolves or dogs may have come to live in human settlements and eaten scraps, or cats may have come in to hunt rodents in grain stores, and were only gradually domesticated.
We can’t know for sure, as you say. But at the very least, once humans had a general concept of domestication, they began trying to domesticate potentially useful animals, disregarding their cuteness or un-cuteness.
Thousands of years of history of people raising pigs suggests otherwise. Dogs appear to have been domesticated at least partly because they were able to help with hunting and presumably the widespread adoption of canine companions is evidence that humans benefited from the relationship more than enough to compensate for any upkeep costs.
As I said, useful species like dogs and pigs are domesticated because of their usefulness; their cuteness is not a prime consideration. Piglets aren’t champions of cuteness. Puppies are cute, but grown dogs or wolves are dangerous and must be very frightening if you’re not used to domesticated ones.
I’m not really sure what you’re arguing exactly. Would you agree that animals that are commonly domesticated (cows, sheep, pigs, dogs, cats, horses) have young that humans also find cute? It seems that the widespread domestication of these animals is partly because they are also useful, either as a direct food source or because they help find, hunt or protect a food source.
Is your point that other animals also have young that humans find cute (baby seals spring to mind) but are less commonly domesticated and therefore usefulness rather than cuteness of young is the primary criteria that determined domestication? That may be true—hunting hawks are an example of an animal that has been partially domesticated (or at least trained) but isn’t generally considered ‘cute’.
It is probably impossible to know the full story behind the domestication of animals but it seems at least plausible that humans first ‘adopted’ some animals partially because they were ‘cute’ and the utility was an unplanned benefit.
Yes, but not significantly more than the average young mammal is cute. The difference |P(Cute|Domesticated) - P(Cute)| is small and uninteresting.
Yes, precisely.
It’s possible. There are also other models, where humans domesticated whole groups of animals gradually over many generations. For instance, people who followed herds of large grazing mammals around could have protected them from predators and very gradually tamed them by selection and by relaxation of predator pressure, perhaps over many generations of people as well as of cattle. In another case, it’s said wild wolves or dogs may have come to live in human settlements and eaten scraps, or cats may have come in to hunt rodents in grain stores, and were only gradually domesticated.
We can’t know for sure, as you say. But at the very least, once humans had a general concept of domestication, they began trying to domesticate potentially useful animals, disregarding their cuteness or un-cuteness.