Born in Chains? The Ethics of Animal Domestication

This article considers whether a morally relevant distinction can be drawn between wild and domesticated animals. The term "wildness" can be used in several different ways, only one of which (constitutive wildness, meaning an animal that has not been domesticated by being bred in particular ways) is generally paired and contrasted with "domesticated." Domesticated animals are normally deliberately bred and confined. One of the article's arguments concerns human initiatives that establish relations with animals and thereby change what is owed to these animals. The main relations of interest in ethics are the vulnerability and dependence in animals that are created when humans establish certain relations with them on farms, in zoos, in laboratories, and the like. Domestication is a pervasive way in which humans make animals vulnerable, and thereby duties of animal care and protection arise in a persistent way.

Teksty Drugie, 2015

This paper examines not the process but the concept of nonhuman animal domestication. Domestication involves both biological and cultural components. Creating a category of domestic animals means constructing and crossing the boundaries between human and animal, culture and nature. The concept of domestication thus structures the thinking both of researchers in the present and of domesticators and herders in the past. Some have argued for abandoning the notion of domestication in favor of a continuum of human-nonhuman animal relationships. Although many human-animal relationships cannot be neatly pigeonholed as wild or domestic, this paper contends that the concept of domestication retains its utility.There is a critical distinction between animals as a resource and animals as property. Domestication itself had profound consequences for the societies and worldview of the domesticators and their descendents. In addition to the material effects of animal wealth, domestic animals provide both a rich source of metaphor and a model of domination that can be extended to humans.

Reviews in Anthropology, 2012

Over the past 11,000 years humans have brought a wide variety of animals under domestication. Domestic animals belong to all Linnaean animal classesmammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fi sh, insects, and even, arguably, bacteria. Raised for food, secondary products, labor, and companionship, domestic animals have become intricately woven into human economy, society, and religion. Animal domestication is an on-going process, as humans, with increasingly sophisticated technology for breeding and rearing animals in captivity, continue to bring more and more species under their control. Understanding the process of animal domestication and its reciprocal impacts on humans and animal domesticates requires a multidisciplinary approach. This paper brings together recent research in archaeology, genetics, and animal sciences in a discussion of the process of domestication, its impact on animal domesticates, and the various pathways humans and their animal partners have followed into domestication.

Medium, 2022

Within common popular discourse on domesticated animals, domestication is often understood to be a distinct category from which we can clearly designate that some animals belong and some do not. While there are certainly discussions of liminal species within animal ethics literature, as in those animals existing somewhere on the spectrum between wild and domesticated, there is very little consideration as to how the transition from wild to domesticated may be taking place in contemporary species. And further, both wild and domesticated often persist as rigid black and white categories with domestication being framed as an inherently morally problematic dynamic. In this paper, I seek to complicate the discussion, with particular attention to using past pathways toward domestication as potential models to help us better understand contemporary cases in which animals typically perceived as wild may actually be entangled within a process of domestication. I look to zooarchaeological data on the domestication process of the donkey and the guinea fowl to explore two seemingly distinct pathways to domestication: A directed pathway and a commensal pathway. One key point that I wish to put forward is that many contemporary wild animals living among humans may be said to be proto-domesticates regardless of any intentional project to bring about such an end. I conclude this paper with the claim that we should not be dismissive of this, nor should we see domestication as an inherently problematic or exploitative process. Rather, we can understand it as indicative of dependencies emerging from an ever more anthropogenically modified world that we can strive toward being more cognizant of and intentionally engaged in.

in Bernice Bovenkerk and Jozef Keulartz (eds) Animal Ethics in the Age of Humans: Blurring boundaries of human-animal relationships (Springer, 2016), 225-39.

As the chapters is this section illustrate, we have to rethink our old categories of wild and domesticated animals. New relationships of mutual impact and hybrid management have been made necessary by relentless human expansion, anthropogenic climate change, and other ecological impacts. The animals involved in these new relations do not fit into the old dichotomy of independent wild animals untouched by humans on the one hand, or dependent domesticated animals under control of humans on the other hand. We need new ideas to help us understand the distinctive ethical challenges of these new relationships, with their mix of freedom and restriction, of independence and dependence, of self-willed agency and external control. The chapter authors of this section draw upon key concepts of animal ethics-care, flourishing, interests, intrinsic and instrumental value, capabilities, welfare, friendship-to negotiate human-animal entanglements. While broadly agreeing with their insights, we argue that their ethical approaches need to be integrated into a broader theory of interspecies justice which explicitly addresses issues of authority, responsibility and self-determination. The fact that humans inevitably affect and interact with ever more animals does not alter the fact that animals' lives are still theirs to lead, and that human management and intervention is legitimate only insofar as it respects animals as intentional agents. Our theorizing should begin by asking what kinds of lives animals want to live, what kinds of relationships, if any, they want to have with us, and whether our interactions with them bolster or inhibit their ability to lead such lives. We illustrate what such animal agency may mean using the case of the feral horses of Assateague Island.

Walking among Ancient Trees: Studies in Honour of Ryszard Grygiel and Peter Bogucki on the 45th Anniversary of their Research Collaboration, 2022

Russell, Nerissa. 2022. "The three faces of domestication." In Walking among Ancient Trees: Studies in Honour of Ryszard Grygiel and Peter Bogucki on the 45th Anniversary of their Research Collaboration, edited by Michał Grygiel and Peter J. Obst, 671-681. Łódź: Fundacja Badań Archeologicznych Imienia Profesora Konrada Jażdżewskiego. Animal domestication has proven to be a complex topic, difficult to define and with many competing ideas regarding its origins. Some of the difficulty arises from its dual bio-cultural properties, involving both human-animal social relationships and genetic and phenotypic changes to the animals. Scholars have focused on different aspects of the domestication relationship, emphasizing variously physical or behavioral changes in the animals, control mechanisms used by humans, and the conversion of animals to property. Here I propose another way of classifying models of domestication: according to the species that acts as the explicit or implicit type specimen of the domestic animal. For simplicity's sake, I will limit myself to the three taxa that have inspired the most modeling: the dog, the sheep (here taken to stand for sheep and goats), and cattle. Further, I will suggest that while many scholars have generalized their model of domestication from their favorite species to all animals, it is more useful to recognize that there are at least three distinct routes to domestication. While there are some similarities among these various paths, particularly in the biological and social consequences for both humans and animals, many features are distinctive, especially the motivations for domestication.

Where the Wild Things Are Now, 2020

Society & Animals, 1993