Terrific essay, thanks! And in return, here is my thinking. I have posted this Predator's Bargain comment many times in different places, and I suspect many have read it before. However it is still as true today as it was when I wrote it:
--
We have a responsibility to feel love and compassion for the prey animals who are our food. In every instance - grief is the price we pay for love. I once believed what vegetarians and vegans believe now, and while I understand their empathic position, I disagree profoundly with their underlying beliefs. We kill and eat every kind of animal from bugs to blue whales. If T-Rex still existed there would be Dino-Burger stands on every corner and we would swear he tastes like chicken. We need to own this.
All of life - every species - lives on the nutrients supplied by death and the bodies of others. That is a question I have thought deeply about for a long time, many decades. As you may or may not know, I've become a primal eater - my entire diet is meat based, no plants at all, and there are thousands of us who eat this way. So the issue is - what is my responsibility as a carnivore and an apex predator? I'll link to how I arrived at this choice down below.
This is all very interesting to me also because my professional focus is communication, relationships, families, organizations, and communities. I see humans as remarkable community builders - and the best communities we build are multi-species in specific places on the landscape - all kinds of species - bacterial, fungal, plant, animal, and human. When we do this properly it is clearly a complex set of symbiotic relationships that prosper all the species involved including us and the entire ecosystem of which we are a part.
Humans are certainly evolved to be pack-hunting apex predators and obligate meso-carnivores scoring higher on the carnivore scale than wolves for the last 2.5 million years at least, but that doesn't mean we can't be responsible ecosystem engineers building healthy complex communities.
I'm reminded of the predator's bargain that I learned from Derrick Jensen: If I eat a particular animal then I am responsible for its well-being as an individual and as a species. My food must live a satisfying life of dignity in the full expression of its nature. It must be treated with respect, and I must pay attention to the health and diversity of its habitat. I must do everything in my power to protect and defend that species as an integral aspect of my own healthy community, especially because the lives and health of those animals in their natural environments are not separate from my own.
If you look closely at the work of folks like Allan Savory, Joel Salatin, and other regenerative farmers who have fully integrated animals into their practice - notice their pigs, cows, rabbits, chickens and so on - they all live lives in the full expression of who they are as animals - expressing the pigness of a pig, the chickenness of a chicken. Just by living that natural life they accomplish much of the work of the farm. They are healthy, happy, they live a good life and they are killed quickly in a way that does not stress the animal.
The exemptions are for animals that are working partners, so dogs, cats, horses, the occasional truffle-hunting pig and many other kinds of animals where we develop unique relationships - they all should get a free pass and be well-cared for too - treated with kindness, affection and respect.
To ignore the cycle of life and death is an ideological pretense that removes one's self from the world. Every living being acquires the essential nutrients of life from the death of the bodies of others, whether a bacteria, a fungus, a plant, an animal. We need to own the violence in our predatory nature and take real responsibility for it.
A Hunter's Prayer
Thank you, little brother, for your strength which will be given to my family.
Thank you for making life for us possible.
Thank you for your love.
Go and wait for me at the door of the spirit world.
Damn, dude, that prayer at the end gave me goosebumps! I couldn't agree more with what you've said here, and you put it more beautifully than I ever could. I might quote you on this in the future!
Lovely piece. Thanks for the shout out. I definitely see my goats and geese as partners in my farm, who I love dearly but also care about enough to occasionally kill and eat when it benefits the whole system.
David. Where can I learn more about Amazon tribes adopting orphaned animals and such? Very fascinating indeed, I had no idea this kind of thing was so common!
I'm not aware of any specific texts about this issue in isolation, but I've seen it mentioned in the literature here and there. I will send you the book (Auca on the Conaco) ASAP, if I remember it correctly the author comments on it as well.
This is an important discussion, and especially the processes of self-domestication, originating out of the species' members conscious agency, is very interesting and appealing to me.
That being said, and while I fundamentally agree with your article's message, I feel like I personally set the boundaries of what I consider "appropriate" domestication a bit different, maybe generally more "radically". The domestication processes that feel intuitively desireable and respectful on an interspecies level to me are the ones that happen with a high degree of consent. From my understanding, the domestication of cats and dogs fall into that end of the spectrum, since they seem to have chosen to live in closer and closer proximity with humans over generations. Big herds of herbivores growing closer over the generations with humans accompanying them probably too. Maybe wild horses each being tamed individually for riding instead of being collectively bred in captivity is another, even though I admittedly don't know much about it.
What I recognize as a clear line crossed in my (spiritual... ?) values is when consent is not established, especially towards instinctive needs and autonomy to roam freely and the possibility to disperse (and maybe total reproductive control, beyond killing aggressors). Or to put it simply: If the animals would run off permanently if fences are down.
Regarding your personal examples, your chicken wouldn't do that, and even though the rabbits might fall more on that side of the spectrum, I am not intending to criticize your approach and I would generally never judge people in todays world living off this kind of animal subsistence. And keep in mind that I'm far from a self sustainable subsistence, so my 'armchair critique' has therefore limited validity anyway.
It also seems really important to emphasize here that I would never jump on the slavery/prison narrative you described as being confronted with, and to be fair I also tended rabbits a few years ago. How I solve my cognitive dissonance, though, is that I see this kind of animal husbandry as a surrogate for living off mostly wild(er) animals, a surrogate necessary in a world that is 1) so impoverished of wildlife compared to any pre-Holocene baseline, and 2) ruling elites have made hunting a weird sport for wealthy people and foresters, and at the same time mostly illegal or severely regulated for regular people's subsistence.
So for me it falls into a similar category as living of sensitive and weak domesticated plants that would disappear within a generation without human input and care due to zero resilience. I think both can be really helpful for an as-smooth-as-possible transition into what the near future brings, but in the long term I really whish for a world (or at least many cultures) in which human mutualism with other species goes into the direction of wild tending plants and mutual living and cooperation with (at least potentially) free roaming animals, more like e.g. domesticated pigs in parts of Southeast Asia or Oceania which roam villages freely and are rather fenced-out of gardens, your chicken that choose to stay within your garden, a bunch of cats hunting and sleeping around the house or the honeybird joining regularly for cooperation (and maybe being naturally selected for more cooperation in the future) but otherwise having a high degree of autonomy. To expand on why autonomy and agency is so important for me spiritually would be beyond the scope of this comment. But let me say this: I'm doubtful whether the increased safety and food supply, while at the same time e.g. being fundamentally constrained in roaming and dispersing freely, really makes the overall trade off a better life for the animal. Also when transfering this trade-off to human animals.
A last point: While the potential for authoritarian agriculture will likely end with the departure out of the Holocene, is the same true for "authoritarian animal husbandry"? Or will we need persistent cultural mechanisms in the future to prevent the emergence of this? Maybe with the end of full sedentism it is impossible anyway, since it didn't exist in the Pleistocene, who knows.
Thank you so much for your long and thoughtful commentary. And, yes, I tend to agree with what you've said here. Your point about consent is an important one, and one that I'd like to see elevated to higher importance in the general permaculture/homesteading community (and beyond).
Regarding our rabbits, I have a hard time judging their inner lives and emotions, to be honest. They just seem so content all the damn time! Every now and then one of them escapes, and at least if we're talking about a few hours, they stick around. First time it happened I sat on and watched (helplessly) from our compost toilet while one of our bucks made his way up the property and towards the forest. I thought he'd be gone for good, yet about an hour later, he was bustling about in the area right around our house!
Again, not sure if they'd really stick around in the long term without fence, but I'm not sure the "regular" rabbit breed we keep would even be able to survive in this climate. They do burrow, but nowhere deep enough to create a burrow large enough to raise their litter in it. Rainy season would also be a real threat, I reckon, as would be the ubiquitous dogs in the countryside.
In our setup, the fence is really just for our convenience and their safety. They would absolutely decimate the vegetable beds if left roaming free, and we'd likely lose more of them to both snakes and dogs.
But, back to your initial concern, I do have to say that I share it as well. Keeping the rabbits is already a compromise on our ideology, but we "explain it away" (?) by saying that they have it very good (or at least better than all other rabbits kept in the region), they have everything they need (and then some), and - a standard by which we judge all our interactions with nonhumans - if we imagine that *we would be the rabbits,* we'd likely be content enough.
Of course this is a bit simplistic and we can never truly know how nonhumans feel, but it's a good general rule of thumb IMO. We do the same with the trees we plant: we ask "if I would be this particular tree, which conditions would I like the most, and what are the conditions in which I evolved and I'm now found naturally?" Then we try recreating that niche to the best of our abilities. For instance, lowland evergreen or swamp trees are planted in the lower part and around the pond, (sub)tropical semi-deciduous trees are planted on the upper part of the hillside.
Your point about it being a compromise because hunting is difficult/impossible also resonates. We would like to hunt a lot more, but the main thing standing in the way is the fact that there's simply not that much wildlife left, so we'd much rather err on the side of caution. In a thriving ecosystem we might be able to simply trap enough wild rabbits, but that's sadly not an option anymore in today's world. And if we have to compromise and lock some rabbits up for our own convenience, we might as well try our best to make their stay at our "rabbit resort" as pleasurable as anyhow possible. They definitely eat more fruit with us (which they go crazy for) than they would find on their own in the wild, and a larger variety of tree foliage.
I also agree with your stance on the "weak domesticated plants" - although there's quite a few that are pretty important for us, the long-term goal is to "rewild" them as well, i.e. (re)create self-seeding varieties that require the least amount of care & maintenance. If we would stop taking care of any vegetables right now, I'm not sure how much of them would actually survive, but I suspect less than five percent, hahaha.
But, again, no interaction at all shouldn't be the goal anyway, and it's always a trade-off, like everything else in life. Domesticated plants do require some labor input, but they are generally super easy to harvest, process and prepare. So it's all about finding balance, I guess...
I definitely see how a life that is "too easy" and a food supply that is "too abundant" might come with unanticipated negative long-term effects - as we are currently seeing with contemporary civilization.
Moreover, I think I have an idea of the connection between autonomy/agency and the spiritual importance this has for you - it is very similar for me and my partner.
And, regarding your last point, "authoritarian animal husbandry" might actually prove a bit more resilient when compared with fixed-field monocrop agriculture, although I don't feel confident (or competent enough) to make any long-term predictions.
Mobility is the key to pastoralism's traditional success, and as soon as the human population declines, I'd imagine that whatever herbivores are left can quickly fill in the novel niche of rewilding farmland. There are probably plenty of ways future humans can take advantage of this, and I suspect some of them will try to exert more control over the lives of "their" animals.
But I tend to think that - even with leveling mechanisms in place - it will be difficult to create sustainable egalitarian pastoralist cultures. The herd is akin to "stored wealth" (like full granaries), and it can be stolen and otherwise appropriated - thus creating the need for (armed) guards, which sets in motion the whole male warrior cult thing... But maybe that's less of an issue in areas that are less densely settled by humans?
There's definitely a lot of conversations to be had about this topic!
Wonderful article. You have reinforced many of my own opinions and expressed them in a truly friendly 'style,' one I try to use in my own writings. While it is much longer than anything I have written, I would very much like to copy it to my Substack blog, perhaps in several parts. Let me know if you would be agreeable to the idea. Thanks, again!
I would add one thought for you to consider, when discussing issues like 'selfishness.' The scientific reality is that cooperation is in our self-interest. It has nothing to do with 'allowing' others to share with us. What's best for us is to strive for what's best for all.
It has been posted on my Substack. It would be great if you subscribed, hint hint. It's free, and most of my own stuff is 2-3 pages long. jstuckey.substack.com
Thanks for this! It mirrors my own attitudes pretty well. In particular, the notion that most so-called "domestication" is actually mutualism. When being found by your keeper has a greater likelihood of propagating your genes than does hiding from predators, bright or distinctive fur patterns result. No brainer.
I'm not sure world events backs your faith in human domestication, though. One only need look at Gaza to see that aggression in humans is, at best, only muted by circumstance, rather than by genes.
My theory is different, formed from formal study in ecology.
In high-energy environments, competition has an advantage; in low-energy environments, cooperation has an advantage. You can easily see this by observing tropic (high-energy) biomes versus arctic and alpine (low-energy) biomes.
This bodes well for the coming fossil sunlight decline, and I think sitting on top of our current fossil sunlight peak explains the current predominance of aggression and competition.
During the Great Depression, there was an up-welling of cooperation among those who found themselves disadvantaged. Indeed, even today there are numerous apocryphal tales of the impoverished sharing their last available meal.
So that's my theory, and I'm sticking to it. I didn't want to buy guns in preparation for the coming decline, anyway. :-)
Recent world events are an absolute outlier when viewed in the evolutionary/"deep historical" context. I've written elsewhere that civilization is both a bug and an inherent feature in/of the system: available energy tends to get utilized, even when that's not in the best (long-term) interest of the species doing the exploiting. Positive feedback loops can set in motion drastic & dramatic changes, but they are usually rather short-lived, as balance is usually restored quite quickly (at least on biological timescales). The last few centuries/decades of extreme inequality and aggression are *nothing* compared to our species' entire 300,000-year history, and even in those times of heightened aggression (to the point of total war and genocide), it's not like the more egalitarian ways just disappeared. Throughout the entirety of recorded history, there have been strictly egalitarian cultures as well, so it's not necessarily like humanity *as a whole* has shifted towards more aggression/violence/authoritarianism - the *spectrum of observed variation in human social organization* merely got wider. We have those capacities, true, but most of the time they lay dormant.
So the societies that became more violent were just the societies that created hyperabundance (agricultural surplus), triggering rapid population growth, which quickly turned into overshoot. As an ecologist, you know much better than me that overshoot (and the highly unusual conditions it creates) usually doesn't last too long...
I tend to agree with your theory about high- and low-energy environments, and behaviorally speaking that's often what happens. Like the time when a chimpanzee group observed by Jane Goodall was briefly fed bananas from a locked storage room, and this immediately resulted in runaway aggressive behavior and violence. Instead of going on foraging trips, all the chimps just hung around the food store and beat each other up out of boredom. Sometimes I think civilization is not all that different, haha.
There's nuances as well, though. One thing is the appropriability and ease of processing of the energy source. Graeber & Wengrow (2021) talked about the differences in social organization between the Pacific Northwestern tribes who used dried salmon as a staple and their southern Californian neighbors, who subsisted on stores of acorn. Both had "raidable" food stores. But dried salmon needs no processing, so a raiding party can easily appropriate food to feed their own group (instead of procuring food themselves). Raiding becomes a new possible subsistence mode, necessitating a violent response by those being raided (and thus often setting in motion a vicious circle of escalating violence).
But if you raid the acorn-eating folks, you'd still have to soak, leach, grind and otherwise process the acorns to get food out of them, so your energy would be better spent gathering the damn acorns yourself instead of stealing them. Less risky as well.
Shifting cultivators throughout SEAsia made use of the same phenomenon, often relying on a mix of tubers, grains, nuts and other staple crops that are (when compared to paddy rice) difficult or impossible to appropriate. So I believe that even in high-energy environments, it is possible to create societies that tend more towards cooperation than competition. You just need to spend a lot more of your time processing foods, it seems, hahaha.
>In high-energy environments, competition has an advantage; in low-energy environments, cooperation has an advantage. You can easily see this by observing tropic (high-energy) biomes versus arctic and alpine (low-energy) biomes.
I have no *formal* study in ecology, but you can find examples of mutualism and cooperation in/between species in all of those environments I would say. To me, and this comes mainly from informal study in anthropology as well, it seems like civilization/a stable climate biases us towards an unstable social organization. Ie one that is based around expansion and consumption of available resources. While an unstable or extreme climate, that doesn’t allow for a tumorous mode of production like agriculture, trends us towards stable social organizations, that are based around conserving and sharing what resources are available. But it is more about unpredictability, and the runaway consequences of grain-based farming, than available energy itself, which is of course going *up* with global warming.
In the form of heat energy to the earth system. This takes the obvious form of more extreme weather, but also results in a generally hotter, wetter world with increased plant life. Last time there was this much CO2 in the atmosphere, pine forests and permanent animal life were at the South Pole.
I don't think increased heat energy in the atmosphere will be any benefit to humans.
By "high-energy environments," I meant biomes that were particularly productive in a way that would produce trophic energy that could be harvested by other creatures in the web of life.
Most ecological assessments I've seen of global warming is that it will be, at best, a mixed benefit to living creatures — some will thrive, and some will go extinct.
I think you might broaden your use of energy to look beyond fossil fuels. It was the caloric/chemical/biological energy of grain-based agriculture that put us on this path. Modern civilization is actually less warlike and aggressive than pretty much any historical society has been.
I know. Hence there being forests in Antarctica. Increased heat energy in the earth system results in greater plant life and more productive ecosystems. As I said, outside of extreme weather, that energy is going to go somewhere/be used by something. That’s what Life is.
‘Some’ is sort of an odd word to use here. Many will go extinct, but many many more will thrive. Not in terms of pure species, but in terms of biomass. The PETM saw extinctions in certain specific lifeforms while biomass and diversity largely remained the same and possibly increased overall. At the most extreme, the Eocene wasn’t a desert, it was a whole jungle earth teeming with life.
This isn’t to say that hotter means more life necessarily, it’s more plant vs animal based shifts, and of course humans cannot inherently access all of this biotic form of energy. But the point is that climate change does mean greater energy and in a way that is at least semi-usable to mankind (in the form of harnessed biology, ie plant/animal domestication and ecosystem engineering). Or even without that, as pure hunter-gatherers.
I'm a fan of Daniel Quinn. I don't disagree with grain-based agriculture beginning our downfall. For one thing, grainery receipts were likely the first form of money. Grain allowed us to live beyond the natural seasons. It gave us social stratification and hierarchy.
I'm unsure that the coming climate changes will be good for biomass. For one thing — and it's a VERY BIG thing — such changes have never been as fast as they are hitting us now. Entire forests are not going to be able to react fast enough. Then next-fastest such climate change took place over thousands of years, giving forests plenty of time to migrate.
The magnificent cedars on Vancouver Island are dying. Not only can they not retreat north fast enough, but we've decimated any possible landing place. Their only hope is if humans plant cedar forests further north. But we're too busy replacing climax forest with "economically important" trees, like Doug Fir.
"Modern civilization is actually less warlike and aggressive than pretty much any historical society has been."
I'm not taking that on your word. This statement is at odds with my study of history. Some references would be nice.
As for "ecosystem engineering," haven't we already done enough?
We really don't know what we're doing with ecosystems. Or, more correctly, we know *exactly* what we're doing — exploiting ecosystems for greatest financial gain!
I'd be delighted if real ecologists were in charge. Based on my formal study of ecology, most of them wouldn't touch a thing, but would be content to observe and interact.
Good reflections and assertions. I fully endorse your statement to “strive for more conscious interaction between all kinds of living beings”. This includes greater awareness of our human inner habitats, archaic and new.
As an anthropologist I would like to add a metaphysical note to the case of domestication with integrity, with examples from the recent past. It is well known that communal hunts practiced by First Nations in America involved ritual and prayer (to the spirit of the animal being hunted) with a request for the Spirit Animal to provide sacrificial individuals. In the west we tend to be satisfied in seeing this performance as simply “indigenous traditions”. We might be less comfortable in accepting the indigenous assertion that they actually work.
To that effect it is less known that even in Europe, in more remote settings away from “totalitarian agricultural” farms, similar practices were enacted at least 40 years ago. In rural Iberia, a farmer might prepare to kill a rabbit before hand, with due circumspection, and enter the pen and wait for one individual that would not run away.
I think that our attitudes towards domestication are deeply enmeshed with our attitudes towards death and dying (as other reviewers mentioned). Also with the notion of sacrifice, a concept that today seems to be a vague relic from the past. A deeper dive into these perennial inner structures may explain a lot of the most aggressive behaviour against any form of domestication (ethics without transcendence) including a whole lot of psychological projection that is going on when protecting or exploiting animals. After all, the animals are also us…
I agree with this view. Thanks for posting this.
Terrific essay, thanks! And in return, here is my thinking. I have posted this Predator's Bargain comment many times in different places, and I suspect many have read it before. However it is still as true today as it was when I wrote it:
--
We have a responsibility to feel love and compassion for the prey animals who are our food. In every instance - grief is the price we pay for love. I once believed what vegetarians and vegans believe now, and while I understand their empathic position, I disagree profoundly with their underlying beliefs. We kill and eat every kind of animal from bugs to blue whales. If T-Rex still existed there would be Dino-Burger stands on every corner and we would swear he tastes like chicken. We need to own this.
All of life - every species - lives on the nutrients supplied by death and the bodies of others. That is a question I have thought deeply about for a long time, many decades. As you may or may not know, I've become a primal eater - my entire diet is meat based, no plants at all, and there are thousands of us who eat this way. So the issue is - what is my responsibility as a carnivore and an apex predator? I'll link to how I arrived at this choice down below.
This is all very interesting to me also because my professional focus is communication, relationships, families, organizations, and communities. I see humans as remarkable community builders - and the best communities we build are multi-species in specific places on the landscape - all kinds of species - bacterial, fungal, plant, animal, and human. When we do this properly it is clearly a complex set of symbiotic relationships that prosper all the species involved including us and the entire ecosystem of which we are a part.
Humans are certainly evolved to be pack-hunting apex predators and obligate meso-carnivores scoring higher on the carnivore scale than wolves for the last 2.5 million years at least, but that doesn't mean we can't be responsible ecosystem engineers building healthy complex communities.
I'm reminded of the predator's bargain that I learned from Derrick Jensen: If I eat a particular animal then I am responsible for its well-being as an individual and as a species. My food must live a satisfying life of dignity in the full expression of its nature. It must be treated with respect, and I must pay attention to the health and diversity of its habitat. I must do everything in my power to protect and defend that species as an integral aspect of my own healthy community, especially because the lives and health of those animals in their natural environments are not separate from my own.
If you look closely at the work of folks like Allan Savory, Joel Salatin, and other regenerative farmers who have fully integrated animals into their practice - notice their pigs, cows, rabbits, chickens and so on - they all live lives in the full expression of who they are as animals - expressing the pigness of a pig, the chickenness of a chicken. Just by living that natural life they accomplish much of the work of the farm. They are healthy, happy, they live a good life and they are killed quickly in a way that does not stress the animal.
The exemptions are for animals that are working partners, so dogs, cats, horses, the occasional truffle-hunting pig and many other kinds of animals where we develop unique relationships - they all should get a free pass and be well-cared for too - treated with kindness, affection and respect.
To ignore the cycle of life and death is an ideological pretense that removes one's self from the world. Every living being acquires the essential nutrients of life from the death of the bodies of others, whether a bacteria, a fungus, a plant, an animal. We need to own the violence in our predatory nature and take real responsibility for it.
A Hunter's Prayer
Thank you, little brother, for your strength which will be given to my family.
Thank you for making life for us possible.
Thank you for your love.
Go and wait for me at the door of the spirit world.
I will be along fairly soon.
And we will be together again.
--
Damn, dude, that prayer at the end gave me goosebumps! I couldn't agree more with what you've said here, and you put it more beautifully than I ever could. I might quote you on this in the future!
"Domestication, from this point of view, is the enslavement of animals, and thus synonymous with domination."
I don't see any vegans complaining about human wageslaves and terrorizing the largest corporations to free the humans.
Lovely piece. Thanks for the shout out. I definitely see my goats and geese as partners in my farm, who I love dearly but also care about enough to occasionally kill and eat when it benefits the whole system.
David. Where can I learn more about Amazon tribes adopting orphaned animals and such? Very fascinating indeed, I had no idea this kind of thing was so common!
I'm not aware of any specific texts about this issue in isolation, but I've seen it mentioned in the literature here and there. I will send you the book (Auca on the Conaco) ASAP, if I remember it correctly the author comments on it as well.
Thanks, I appreciate it! Definitely something I want to look more into.
This is an important discussion, and especially the processes of self-domestication, originating out of the species' members conscious agency, is very interesting and appealing to me.
That being said, and while I fundamentally agree with your article's message, I feel like I personally set the boundaries of what I consider "appropriate" domestication a bit different, maybe generally more "radically". The domestication processes that feel intuitively desireable and respectful on an interspecies level to me are the ones that happen with a high degree of consent. From my understanding, the domestication of cats and dogs fall into that end of the spectrum, since they seem to have chosen to live in closer and closer proximity with humans over generations. Big herds of herbivores growing closer over the generations with humans accompanying them probably too. Maybe wild horses each being tamed individually for riding instead of being collectively bred in captivity is another, even though I admittedly don't know much about it.
What I recognize as a clear line crossed in my (spiritual... ?) values is when consent is not established, especially towards instinctive needs and autonomy to roam freely and the possibility to disperse (and maybe total reproductive control, beyond killing aggressors). Or to put it simply: If the animals would run off permanently if fences are down.
Regarding your personal examples, your chicken wouldn't do that, and even though the rabbits might fall more on that side of the spectrum, I am not intending to criticize your approach and I would generally never judge people in todays world living off this kind of animal subsistence. And keep in mind that I'm far from a self sustainable subsistence, so my 'armchair critique' has therefore limited validity anyway.
It also seems really important to emphasize here that I would never jump on the slavery/prison narrative you described as being confronted with, and to be fair I also tended rabbits a few years ago. How I solve my cognitive dissonance, though, is that I see this kind of animal husbandry as a surrogate for living off mostly wild(er) animals, a surrogate necessary in a world that is 1) so impoverished of wildlife compared to any pre-Holocene baseline, and 2) ruling elites have made hunting a weird sport for wealthy people and foresters, and at the same time mostly illegal or severely regulated for regular people's subsistence.
So for me it falls into a similar category as living of sensitive and weak domesticated plants that would disappear within a generation without human input and care due to zero resilience. I think both can be really helpful for an as-smooth-as-possible transition into what the near future brings, but in the long term I really whish for a world (or at least many cultures) in which human mutualism with other species goes into the direction of wild tending plants and mutual living and cooperation with (at least potentially) free roaming animals, more like e.g. domesticated pigs in parts of Southeast Asia or Oceania which roam villages freely and are rather fenced-out of gardens, your chicken that choose to stay within your garden, a bunch of cats hunting and sleeping around the house or the honeybird joining regularly for cooperation (and maybe being naturally selected for more cooperation in the future) but otherwise having a high degree of autonomy. To expand on why autonomy and agency is so important for me spiritually would be beyond the scope of this comment. But let me say this: I'm doubtful whether the increased safety and food supply, while at the same time e.g. being fundamentally constrained in roaming and dispersing freely, really makes the overall trade off a better life for the animal. Also when transfering this trade-off to human animals.
A last point: While the potential for authoritarian agriculture will likely end with the departure out of the Holocene, is the same true for "authoritarian animal husbandry"? Or will we need persistent cultural mechanisms in the future to prevent the emergence of this? Maybe with the end of full sedentism it is impossible anyway, since it didn't exist in the Pleistocene, who knows.
Thank you so much for your long and thoughtful commentary. And, yes, I tend to agree with what you've said here. Your point about consent is an important one, and one that I'd like to see elevated to higher importance in the general permaculture/homesteading community (and beyond).
Regarding our rabbits, I have a hard time judging their inner lives and emotions, to be honest. They just seem so content all the damn time! Every now and then one of them escapes, and at least if we're talking about a few hours, they stick around. First time it happened I sat on and watched (helplessly) from our compost toilet while one of our bucks made his way up the property and towards the forest. I thought he'd be gone for good, yet about an hour later, he was bustling about in the area right around our house!
Again, not sure if they'd really stick around in the long term without fence, but I'm not sure the "regular" rabbit breed we keep would even be able to survive in this climate. They do burrow, but nowhere deep enough to create a burrow large enough to raise their litter in it. Rainy season would also be a real threat, I reckon, as would be the ubiquitous dogs in the countryside.
In our setup, the fence is really just for our convenience and their safety. They would absolutely decimate the vegetable beds if left roaming free, and we'd likely lose more of them to both snakes and dogs.
But, back to your initial concern, I do have to say that I share it as well. Keeping the rabbits is already a compromise on our ideology, but we "explain it away" (?) by saying that they have it very good (or at least better than all other rabbits kept in the region), they have everything they need (and then some), and - a standard by which we judge all our interactions with nonhumans - if we imagine that *we would be the rabbits,* we'd likely be content enough.
Of course this is a bit simplistic and we can never truly know how nonhumans feel, but it's a good general rule of thumb IMO. We do the same with the trees we plant: we ask "if I would be this particular tree, which conditions would I like the most, and what are the conditions in which I evolved and I'm now found naturally?" Then we try recreating that niche to the best of our abilities. For instance, lowland evergreen or swamp trees are planted in the lower part and around the pond, (sub)tropical semi-deciduous trees are planted on the upper part of the hillside.
Your point about it being a compromise because hunting is difficult/impossible also resonates. We would like to hunt a lot more, but the main thing standing in the way is the fact that there's simply not that much wildlife left, so we'd much rather err on the side of caution. In a thriving ecosystem we might be able to simply trap enough wild rabbits, but that's sadly not an option anymore in today's world. And if we have to compromise and lock some rabbits up for our own convenience, we might as well try our best to make their stay at our "rabbit resort" as pleasurable as anyhow possible. They definitely eat more fruit with us (which they go crazy for) than they would find on their own in the wild, and a larger variety of tree foliage.
I also agree with your stance on the "weak domesticated plants" - although there's quite a few that are pretty important for us, the long-term goal is to "rewild" them as well, i.e. (re)create self-seeding varieties that require the least amount of care & maintenance. If we would stop taking care of any vegetables right now, I'm not sure how much of them would actually survive, but I suspect less than five percent, hahaha.
But, again, no interaction at all shouldn't be the goal anyway, and it's always a trade-off, like everything else in life. Domesticated plants do require some labor input, but they are generally super easy to harvest, process and prepare. So it's all about finding balance, I guess...
I definitely see how a life that is "too easy" and a food supply that is "too abundant" might come with unanticipated negative long-term effects - as we are currently seeing with contemporary civilization.
Moreover, I think I have an idea of the connection between autonomy/agency and the spiritual importance this has for you - it is very similar for me and my partner.
And, regarding your last point, "authoritarian animal husbandry" might actually prove a bit more resilient when compared with fixed-field monocrop agriculture, although I don't feel confident (or competent enough) to make any long-term predictions.
Mobility is the key to pastoralism's traditional success, and as soon as the human population declines, I'd imagine that whatever herbivores are left can quickly fill in the novel niche of rewilding farmland. There are probably plenty of ways future humans can take advantage of this, and I suspect some of them will try to exert more control over the lives of "their" animals.
But I tend to think that - even with leveling mechanisms in place - it will be difficult to create sustainable egalitarian pastoralist cultures. The herd is akin to "stored wealth" (like full granaries), and it can be stolen and otherwise appropriated - thus creating the need for (armed) guards, which sets in motion the whole male warrior cult thing... But maybe that's less of an issue in areas that are less densely settled by humans?
There's definitely a lot of conversations to be had about this topic!
Wonderful article. You have reinforced many of my own opinions and expressed them in a truly friendly 'style,' one I try to use in my own writings. While it is much longer than anything I have written, I would very much like to copy it to my Substack blog, perhaps in several parts. Let me know if you would be agreeable to the idea. Thanks, again!
I would add one thought for you to consider, when discussing issues like 'selfishness.' The scientific reality is that cooperation is in our self-interest. It has nothing to do with 'allowing' others to share with us. What's best for us is to strive for what's best for all.
Thanks! Yes, you may copy it to wherever you want, as long as you credit me 😉
Also, thanks for clarifying - you are of course correct!
It has been posted on my Substack. It would be great if you subscribed, hint hint. It's free, and most of my own stuff is 2-3 pages long. jstuckey.substack.com
Thanks for this! It mirrors my own attitudes pretty well. In particular, the notion that most so-called "domestication" is actually mutualism. When being found by your keeper has a greater likelihood of propagating your genes than does hiding from predators, bright or distinctive fur patterns result. No brainer.
I'm not sure world events backs your faith in human domestication, though. One only need look at Gaza to see that aggression in humans is, at best, only muted by circumstance, rather than by genes.
My theory is different, formed from formal study in ecology.
In high-energy environments, competition has an advantage; in low-energy environments, cooperation has an advantage. You can easily see this by observing tropic (high-energy) biomes versus arctic and alpine (low-energy) biomes.
This bodes well for the coming fossil sunlight decline, and I think sitting on top of our current fossil sunlight peak explains the current predominance of aggression and competition.
During the Great Depression, there was an up-welling of cooperation among those who found themselves disadvantaged. Indeed, even today there are numerous apocryphal tales of the impoverished sharing their last available meal.
So that's my theory, and I'm sticking to it. I didn't want to buy guns in preparation for the coming decline, anyway. :-)
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Recent world events are an absolute outlier when viewed in the evolutionary/"deep historical" context. I've written elsewhere that civilization is both a bug and an inherent feature in/of the system: available energy tends to get utilized, even when that's not in the best (long-term) interest of the species doing the exploiting. Positive feedback loops can set in motion drastic & dramatic changes, but they are usually rather short-lived, as balance is usually restored quite quickly (at least on biological timescales). The last few centuries/decades of extreme inequality and aggression are *nothing* compared to our species' entire 300,000-year history, and even in those times of heightened aggression (to the point of total war and genocide), it's not like the more egalitarian ways just disappeared. Throughout the entirety of recorded history, there have been strictly egalitarian cultures as well, so it's not necessarily like humanity *as a whole* has shifted towards more aggression/violence/authoritarianism - the *spectrum of observed variation in human social organization* merely got wider. We have those capacities, true, but most of the time they lay dormant.
So the societies that became more violent were just the societies that created hyperabundance (agricultural surplus), triggering rapid population growth, which quickly turned into overshoot. As an ecologist, you know much better than me that overshoot (and the highly unusual conditions it creates) usually doesn't last too long...
I tend to agree with your theory about high- and low-energy environments, and behaviorally speaking that's often what happens. Like the time when a chimpanzee group observed by Jane Goodall was briefly fed bananas from a locked storage room, and this immediately resulted in runaway aggressive behavior and violence. Instead of going on foraging trips, all the chimps just hung around the food store and beat each other up out of boredom. Sometimes I think civilization is not all that different, haha.
There's nuances as well, though. One thing is the appropriability and ease of processing of the energy source. Graeber & Wengrow (2021) talked about the differences in social organization between the Pacific Northwestern tribes who used dried salmon as a staple and their southern Californian neighbors, who subsisted on stores of acorn. Both had "raidable" food stores. But dried salmon needs no processing, so a raiding party can easily appropriate food to feed their own group (instead of procuring food themselves). Raiding becomes a new possible subsistence mode, necessitating a violent response by those being raided (and thus often setting in motion a vicious circle of escalating violence).
But if you raid the acorn-eating folks, you'd still have to soak, leach, grind and otherwise process the acorns to get food out of them, so your energy would be better spent gathering the damn acorns yourself instead of stealing them. Less risky as well.
Shifting cultivators throughout SEAsia made use of the same phenomenon, often relying on a mix of tubers, grains, nuts and other staple crops that are (when compared to paddy rice) difficult or impossible to appropriate. So I believe that even in high-energy environments, it is possible to create societies that tend more towards cooperation than competition. You just need to spend a lot more of your time processing foods, it seems, hahaha.
>In high-energy environments, competition has an advantage; in low-energy environments, cooperation has an advantage. You can easily see this by observing tropic (high-energy) biomes versus arctic and alpine (low-energy) biomes.
I have no *formal* study in ecology, but you can find examples of mutualism and cooperation in/between species in all of those environments I would say. To me, and this comes mainly from informal study in anthropology as well, it seems like civilization/a stable climate biases us towards an unstable social organization. Ie one that is based around expansion and consumption of available resources. While an unstable or extreme climate, that doesn’t allow for a tumorous mode of production like agriculture, trends us towards stable social organizations, that are based around conserving and sharing what resources are available. But it is more about unpredictability, and the runaway consequences of grain-based farming, than available energy itself, which is of course going *up* with global warming.
How is global warming increasing "available energy?"
It seems to me that global warming is both non-available and unwelcome!
In the form of heat energy to the earth system. This takes the obvious form of more extreme weather, but also results in a generally hotter, wetter world with increased plant life. Last time there was this much CO2 in the atmosphere, pine forests and permanent animal life were at the South Pole.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/apr/03/south-pole-tree-fossils-indicate-impact-of-climate-change
I don't think increased heat energy in the atmosphere will be any benefit to humans.
By "high-energy environments," I meant biomes that were particularly productive in a way that would produce trophic energy that could be harvested by other creatures in the web of life.
Most ecological assessments I've seen of global warming is that it will be, at best, a mixed benefit to living creatures — some will thrive, and some will go extinct.
Or to put the first point another way, fossil fuels are just stored biotic energy.
If plastic is made out of dead dinosaurs, plastic dinosaurs are made out of REAL dinosaurs! :-)
I think you might broaden your use of energy to look beyond fossil fuels. It was the caloric/chemical/biological energy of grain-based agriculture that put us on this path. Modern civilization is actually less warlike and aggressive than pretty much any historical society has been.
I know. Hence there being forests in Antarctica. Increased heat energy in the earth system results in greater plant life and more productive ecosystems. As I said, outside of extreme weather, that energy is going to go somewhere/be used by something. That’s what Life is.
‘Some’ is sort of an odd word to use here. Many will go extinct, but many many more will thrive. Not in terms of pure species, but in terms of biomass. The PETM saw extinctions in certain specific lifeforms while biomass and diversity largely remained the same and possibly increased overall. At the most extreme, the Eocene wasn’t a desert, it was a whole jungle earth teeming with life.
This isn’t to say that hotter means more life necessarily, it’s more plant vs animal based shifts, and of course humans cannot inherently access all of this biotic form of energy. But the point is that climate change does mean greater energy and in a way that is at least semi-usable to mankind (in the form of harnessed biology, ie plant/animal domestication and ecosystem engineering). Or even without that, as pure hunter-gatherers.
I'm a fan of Daniel Quinn. I don't disagree with grain-based agriculture beginning our downfall. For one thing, grainery receipts were likely the first form of money. Grain allowed us to live beyond the natural seasons. It gave us social stratification and hierarchy.
I'm unsure that the coming climate changes will be good for biomass. For one thing — and it's a VERY BIG thing — such changes have never been as fast as they are hitting us now. Entire forests are not going to be able to react fast enough. Then next-fastest such climate change took place over thousands of years, giving forests plenty of time to migrate.
The magnificent cedars on Vancouver Island are dying. Not only can they not retreat north fast enough, but we've decimated any possible landing place. Their only hope is if humans plant cedar forests further north. But we're too busy replacing climax forest with "economically important" trees, like Doug Fir.
"Modern civilization is actually less warlike and aggressive than pretty much any historical society has been."
I'm not taking that on your word. This statement is at odds with my study of history. Some references would be nice.
As for "ecosystem engineering," haven't we already done enough?
We really don't know what we're doing with ecosystems. Or, more correctly, we know *exactly* what we're doing — exploiting ecosystems for greatest financial gain!
I'd be delighted if real ecologists were in charge. Based on my formal study of ecology, most of them wouldn't touch a thing, but would be content to observe and interact.
Good reflections and assertions. I fully endorse your statement to “strive for more conscious interaction between all kinds of living beings”. This includes greater awareness of our human inner habitats, archaic and new.
As an anthropologist I would like to add a metaphysical note to the case of domestication with integrity, with examples from the recent past. It is well known that communal hunts practiced by First Nations in America involved ritual and prayer (to the spirit of the animal being hunted) with a request for the Spirit Animal to provide sacrificial individuals. In the west we tend to be satisfied in seeing this performance as simply “indigenous traditions”. We might be less comfortable in accepting the indigenous assertion that they actually work.
To that effect it is less known that even in Europe, in more remote settings away from “totalitarian agricultural” farms, similar practices were enacted at least 40 years ago. In rural Iberia, a farmer might prepare to kill a rabbit before hand, with due circumspection, and enter the pen and wait for one individual that would not run away.
I think that our attitudes towards domestication are deeply enmeshed with our attitudes towards death and dying (as other reviewers mentioned). Also with the notion of sacrifice, a concept that today seems to be a vague relic from the past. A deeper dive into these perennial inner structures may explain a lot of the most aggressive behaviour against any form of domestication (ethics without transcendence) including a whole lot of psychological projection that is going on when protecting or exploiting animals. After all, the animals are also us…