Panel Discussion: Alternate Domestications Part 1
- cepmurphywrites
- 13 hours ago
- 17 min read
By D.G. Valdron
Dale Cozort
Jared Kavanagh
Jeff Provine
Edited by Gary Oswald.
The domestication of animals and plants by humanity is probably one of the most significant moments in all of human history. All of human society since then emerged from that change, from having domesticated animals and plants and so having to settle down to tend them. And any significant moment is ripe for exploration in Alternate History.
What if plants and animals not domesticated in real life were domesticated and what if those that were, weren’t? What effect would that have on history if societies which never had many domesticated crops or farm animals instead had access to that labour and food sources or those who did, didn’t?
Which animal which was never domesticated was most likely to be so and which would have the biggest effect on history if it has been? And how do you make exploring those changes interesting in fiction?
I have brought forth four uniquely qualified authors, critics, and scholars of alternate history to explore this topic:
Alternate Domestications in fiction: Balancing plausibility and excitement, or "why don’t we have pet wolverines?"
I, Gary Oswald, will serve as moderator. Our panelists are:
D.G. Valdron, writer of the Bear Cavalry novel about domesticated bears in Iceland
Dale Cozort, long term AH essayist and author, who wrote a scenario about Llamas in the Appalachians
Jared Kavanagh, writer of the ‘Lands of Red and Gold’ series about more extensive plant domestication in Australia
And Jeff Provine, another long-time AH essayist on This Day in Alternate History and author, who has written a scenario about the effect of the introduction of jumping spiders to Panama and recently reviewed The Incredible History of Cooking, which is timely for the topic.
So let’s get the conversation started.
OSWALD: So you’ve all written scenarios about alternate domestications. What are the main factors you think about when devising them?
PROVINE: With domestications through history, it’s mostly been about need. Cats were needed to do pest control around food storage. Dogs were needed to help protect the homestead and make hunting more effective. We’ve had all kinds of individual or shorter-term domestications that didn’t pan out because there wasn’t a need to drive it any longer. That works hand-in-hand with AH since continuing that need will create all kinds of interesting butterflies.
VALDRON: I tend to see domestication as a matter of economics. Economics in the larger sense not of money, but in terms of social utility, the costs and benefits to a society to do something, and the windows of opportunity. It’s one of those things, I don’t think domestications of plants or animals happen very often, I think it’s very improbable and requires a combination of factors to make it happen. Given enough time and people though, even long shots can happen, you get a domestication event, and if it has enough utility, it sticks. I don’t think that the historical domestications were necessarily definitive - that we domesticated every plant and animal it was possible to domesticate, and if we haven’t done it, it can’t be done. I like playing with the variables, tweaking social opportunities and needs. And, I like to be mischievous - so if something seems difficult or unlikely, I’m tempted to tweak it just to see what it would take to make it work.
COZORT: I’ve been fascinated by history since maybe fourth grade and gradually increased the scope of what I consider history over the years, to the point where I see history as a smooth progression starting shortly before the dinosaurs went extinct and extending into the early post-World War II era. I know that some of that time period was long before formal history, in the sense of things getting written down, and certainly history didn’t stop after World War II. It’s just that my interests smoothly traverse that time period. This topic: What animals were and weren’t domesticated sits at the heart of a couple of my interests. I wrote “Llamas in Appalachia” as part of a collection called “American Indian Victories”, a book-length series of essays where I try to find alternate history scenarios where Indians do better than they did historically.
The issue I faced with getting to Indians doing better was that it was actually both easy in one sense and nearly impossible in another. The easy part: Just have big parts of the New World megafauna survive long enough to be domesticated and voila, Indians would do much better in their competition with Europe and/or Asia. The hard part: The resulting Indians would be nothing like historical Indians culturally and no Indian the Europeans met would have ever existed. Too big of a change too early. Llamas in Appalachia was an attempt to square that circle. I had North American llamas of a species that historically went extinct survive in a little pocket in Appalachia because they carried a disease that could and did spread to humans, keeping PaleoIndians from hunting them and disrupting their habitat. They survive in that pocket, but eventually humans around them develop immunity to the disease, though fortunately by that time they have developed far enough culturally to appreciate having the option to domesticate the species. By heavy-handed, but not impossible authorial fiat, I have llama domestication spreading from Appalachia just in time to reach Northern Mexico just a little bit before the Spanish or their equivalents do. So Europe meets recognizable Indian cultures, but with a head start on handling large grazing animals, which makes adopting horses quicker and easier.
I mentioned alternate domestic animals cut across a couple of my interests. The other interest is in world-building for my Snapshot Universe. If you haven’t encountered that universe, a brief summary: The premise is that extraterrestrials with Godlike powers but no interest in being worshipped have been making what amounts to backups of continent-sized hunks of Earth for tens if not hundreds of millions of years, putting exact replicas of Earth continents into snowglobe-shaped artificial realities. The results are very much like alternate histories by other means. In any case, that setup gives me a lot of scope for alternate domesticates–including animals that never got a chance to exist, like grazing, cow-like lemurs in a North America-sized Madagascar. Lots of fun stuff.
KAVANAGH: When I look at potential domestications, I look at two aspects. The first is whether there’s a requirement for whatever the plant or animal produces, and the second is whether there’s a viable path of usefulness to get to a domesticated end state.
Modern researchers have demonstrated that a wide variety of animals can be domesticated if someone is prepared to put the effort in. Take the Soviet project to domesticate foxes, for instance - it worked from the point of view of producing a domesticated fox. In general, if someone is prepared to make a go of it, it can be done from the point of view of being domesticated (though perhaps not useful). Some animals are near-impossible - it’d be a suicidal person who tried to domesticate hippos, for example - but the range is quite wide. And modern plant breeders can domesticate virtually any land plant if they want to work with it, save perhaps some with very long generation times.
This means that when looking at possible plants (which I’ve done more of) and animals, I look more as to what would be useful about that particular plant or animal. I also look at whether there is some information about how the potential domesticate may have been used historically. If people are using a plant for some reason, then I can start looking whether there’s a viable path for full domestication.
For example, when looking at Australian flora in Lands of Red and Gold, there’s a surprising amount of information out there about uses for the various Australian plants. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples knew all about the plants in their country, of course, though European colonists have often done a poor job of listening to them. But even European (and later) colonists worked out a lot. And once I know how a plant can be used, then I can look at whether that plant fits into a particular society in a way which might lead to domestication.
COZORT: There are some principles for domestication. One: The first domestication is the hardest. That’s true for several reasons. Dogs were the first domestic animals for most cultures and they made rounding up, herding, and protecting large grazing animals much easier, which made domesticating those animals easier. That first domesticated animal also shifted the mental framework so that not all animals were either rivals or prey. The first grazing animals domesticated also made subsequent domestications easier because a lot of the same mental and physical frameworks worked for the second domesticated grazing animals and so on. However, each subsequent domesticated animal made it less likely that more animals would be domesticated because the niches within human society where domesticated animals are useful would start to get filled up.
Second, there is a sweet spot for domestication in terms of how much human predation an animal has been subjected to before humans go to the point where they wanted or needed to domesticate animals. If humans have hunted an animal long enough, fear of humans becomes so deeply ingrained that domestication is difficult. If animals have never or rarely been hunted by humans, they are vulnerable to extinction when humans arrive, especially if human arrival comes at the same time as major climate shifts. A lot of African animals are difficult to tame because they are in the first category–hunted by humans to some extent or another for millions of years, while most potentially domesticable animals in the New World and Australia went extinct before human societies were at a stage where they wanted to domesticate animals.
By the way, there is some evidence, not from bones but from DNA frozen in tundra, that Mammoths and horses survived in limited parts of North America several thousand years after the rest of the megafauna went extinct. There is also some evidence that in parts of Brazil a now-extinct species of llama and the last survivor of the South American Litopterns survived until (from old and possibly faulty memory) around 3500 years ago. The llama might have been an interesting domesticated species, maybe more capable of living in humid lowlands than the domesticated species, while the litoptern was a 900-pound camel-like herbivore with a short trunk. Apparently, several other now extinct species survived unusually late in the same area, though in the other cases, late survival meant until a little over 6000 years ago or somewhat more.
It’s possible in the Brazilian case that the local populations survived so long because local humans took a certain degree of ownership of the herds in their territories. There isn’t always a hard line between wild animal and domesticated one, I remember reading somewhere that some Andean cultures would herd local wild camelids into traps, then kill only certain animals according to rules that allowed the wild herds to continue to exist, releasing the rest back into the wild.
VALDRON: Just throwing some ideas out here. In terms of animal domestication, I think that there is an element of mutualism going on that we often overlook.
Out where I’m from these days, there’s a place called The Forks. It was a meeting place for Indigenous peoples. So of course, there’s a lot of Indigenous art and memorabilia. One of the interesting sculptures depicts a traditional Bison hunt - the hunters would wear the furs and skins of wolves in order to crawl up to the Bison close enough to plink it with arrows. If you’ve seen Bison up close, that’s actually pretty courageous.
But that tells us something. It tells us that in the Pre-Contact era, Bison were more tolerant of wolves than they were of humans. Basically, they were prepared to allow wolves to get a lot closer to them, than they were to allow upright humans. If a standing or walking man got as close as a wolf could, the Bison would turn them into mash. I find that fascinating.
Because in this part of my world, there were also marijuana grow ups in the country. Now what was interesting there, was how much of a nuisance deer were. Deer, it seemed, loved marijuana and could go right into a crop. I listened to all these stories of growers talking about how deer would hang around and watch them, often approaching quite close, waiting for the opportunity to raid the crops.
An essential element of domestication, to my mind, is human tolerance. An animal has to be or become tolerant of human presence, or even to be able to find tangible benefit to human presence, so that when we’re hanging around, they’re hanging around. Arguably this applies to canines, who probably scavenged around humans, it applies to cats because agricultural societies were such a magnet for tasty rodents. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that our big horsepower domesticates, horse and cattle (and their close relatives), were grazers when we were building grain based agricultural societies. I think that a key part of the domestication process is where an animal finds that some human activity or human production provides some form of clear benefit to it, that habituation for humans and tolerance of human presence and activity starts to set in. It may be as simple as we produce their key foodstuffs as a product or byproduct. Or we create a great nesting habitat.
Which leads me to note that human habituation occurs in more than domesticated animals. Raccoons, Coyotes, Seagulls, some Monkeys, Rats are all highly human habituated and have made themselves quite at home in a human environment. Even deer - I walked down the street in my urban area once in the early early morning and came face to face with a small herd of deer. There are deer in the city, go figure. I think they hide out in abandoned houses during the day or something (joke).
Now, the point here is that we’re not doing it to them. They’re doing it to themselves. Humans don’t have any particular investment in domesticating raccoons. My father had some tame raccoons, loved the critters, but they were as destructive as four-year-olds with morals. Raccoons as a species ‘chose’ to habituate to human presence, to the point where there are likely as many of them in urban areas as the wilderness.
The presence and existence of these intermediate ‘garbage’ species - habituated to and human tolerant, making a good living off of us, but not domesticated - gives us some possible window into the process. Clearly, there’s commensalism at work. We’re not controlling domestication, they’re meeting us halfway.
Excuse my casual use of language. When I talk ‘choices’ and things like that, I’m not saying that some conclave of raccoons made a decision, or Leonard de Raccoon figured it out and told everyone else. Rather, it’s a selection process. Over twenty or thirty thousand years of human-Bison coexistence, it turned out that Bison that were chill about humans approaching within arrow plinking distance tended not to reproduce as much as the Bison that turned humans into mash if they got that close. Bison through selection processes habituated to keep humans well away, until the only way to get close enough was to dress up like a wolf and crawl around.
Cats and raccoons were both solitary in their ways, but each species had a selection process where the ones that were most tolerant of human presence, least triggered, most chill, tended to be fatter, more successful and have more offspring than the ones that stayed well away.
As a general rule, I think this ‘self-selection’ has probably been the way things have worked. Human driven selection, selective breeding, has probably been fairly half-assed and ad hoc for much of our history. It’s only in the last couple of centuries that we’ve realized we can actually select heavily for traits (apart from some limited examples). Mostly it’s been incremental.
The thing with the ‘garbage’ species is that while they’ve come halfway, we don’t actually find any particular use or utility for them. I’m pretty sure we could domesticate raccoons in a heartbeat. They’re practically knocking at the door with a suitcase. But to what benefit? Every family could have a domesticated raccoon, they could be as common as cats, but instead of killing mice for us, they’d just empty out all our drawers, raid the fridge and just be patiently destructive. Well, we already have teenagers for that.
So I think we didn’t domesticate cows because we were able to build fences and corral them. I think we ended up with cows because they started to just find it useful to be close to us, and we started to find benefits to having them around.
Which brings us to the human side. I think that for domestication, we need some kind of ‘economic’ utility for humans, some net benefit to human society, which leads to tolerance on our side, and even encouragement, in the form of outlying time and energy to feed them or to provide appropriate habitat.
Now, there’s a lot to say about economic utility. I don’t want to go overboard. But let me give my thoughts on a couple of case studies - Caribou and Reindeer. Reindeer are domesticated, or semi-domesticated. Caribou are not. But as far as I can tell, Caribou and Reindeer are basically genetically identical. They’re distinct populations, but the range of variation within each group, is generally greater than the range of distinction between the groups.
So why aren’t Caribou domesticated/domesticable since clearly Reindeer are? Or for that matter, Musk Ox, which show every sign of being domesticable?
I think that in North America, the indigenous population followed a seasonal life cycle - they travelled through a variety of habitats - summer fishing, winter fishing/winter seal hunting, spring and fall caribou, other hunting gathering - it’s a lifestyle where you could make a good living, but it’s also a lifestyle that demanded you be in different locations and engaging in different subsistence activities through the year.
Which makes domesticating caribou nigh impossible. What are you going to do, drag them out onto the ice floes while you’re sealing or ice fishing, drag them down to the rivers for the spawning runs, etc? The seasonality of the Inuit economy precluded domestication, because the Caribou only fit into a part of that seasonality, you couldn’t keep them year-round. Trying to domesticate Caribou would inevitably mean foregoing a lot of critical economic/subsistence activity. Maybe there was a tangible benefit to domesticating caribou, but it was not worth the trade-offs - the social/economic losses.
My impression of groups like the Sammi, the Nenets, the Yakuts is that their economic/seasonality was not nearly so extreme, and they could and did spend the year round, and so their subsistence economics were different. The tangible benefits didn’t come with the same order of losses. It made more sense on a gradual cultural basis.
COZORT: I sort of alluded to this earlier, but I suspect that a couple of factors that lead to or fails to lead to domestication are (1) the amount of difficulty involved in getting the animals involved to breed in captivity and (2) the amount of effort involved in caring for and controlling the animals.
For the first one, some animals like cheetahs are notoriously difficult to breed in captivity, Cheetahs fit in that category, I believe, as do several others. Some animals are very picky about when and how they mate in terms of privacy, diet, etc. and those animals are unlikely to be domesticated. If an animal is solitary and highly territorial, even if it learns to tolerate humans, it is an unlikely candidate for domestication, though cats, which fit that description, are flexible enough behaviourally that they can sort of make it work.
You can kind of gauge the ease of caring for animals (and plants) by looking at which animals spread quickly from Europeans to American Indians, though there are some caveats to this. Pigs and chickens spread quickly to Indian groups, at least in New England and on the frontier around Spanish Florida. On the plant side, peach trees and watermelons spread rapidly also. Horses and cattle spread more slowly on those frontiers, though on the plains horses were so obviously useful that they spread quickly once Indians were able to pry them out of Spanish hands. Indian adoption of horses on the plains was facilitated by the Spanish habit of kidnapping and enslaving Indians from unconquered tribes and using those slaves as stableboys and the like. A steady trickle of such slaves learned how to ride and how to care for horses, then escaped back to their tribe on horseback.
Finally, I want to talk briefly about my favourite recently (probably) extinct animal and some limitations on domestic animals. It’s quite possible that the thylacine could have been domesticated, given the right circumstances. Historically, during the period between British settlement on Tasmania and the thylacine’s probable extinction, a number of families sought out and kept Thylacines as pets, sometimes teaching them to walk on a leash. Cool possibility there, huh? They might have been difficult to breed in captivity or the pet ones might have been isolated enough they didn’t have the opportunity.
As to limitations on domestic animals, I did a thought experiment a while back: How difficult would it have been for Indians to breed the animals they did have available to be useful in more ways? Could they, for example, bred dogs to be better beasts of burden? Plains Indians used dogs as pack animals, for example. Indians didn’t have enough control over dog breeding for that to work in most circumstances, though in the Northwest, at least one tribe isolated a special breed called the woolly dog on an island and used their wool-like fur like wool.
If Indians had access to multiple species of dogs that couldn’t interbreed, they might have been able to breed divergent lines of doglike domestic animals for differing purposes, but the one case I know of where Indians domesticated canines other than common dogs, in the southern part of South America, to the best of my knowledge they only kept their own unique domestic species, not it and dogs.
PROVINE: We’ve had some great examples of potential domestications and even near-misses with cases of individual domestication. With the points about utility, it makes me think of a case of de-domestication: pigeons. Of course, many people still do keep pigeons for show, pets, racing, and food, but it’s nothing like we once had as humans. Pigeons are small, fairly hardy, and genial. I had the chance just a few weeks ago to meet several at the American Pigeon Museum. For centuries, pigeons were kept as a small-scale food source in homes, a sort of living pantry for quick and cheap protein and fats. With them so common, they could easily be traded in the marketplace, giving a bit of revenue, too. Then came faster communication, their most impressive feat, flying home with messages faster than horses could carry human messengers.
Gradually humanity’s ability outpaced the pigeon need. With larger farm animals like chickens, waterfowl, and turkeys available in the countryside and improved transportation to bring them into cities, people didn’t need to keep their pigeon supply as desperately. Wild pigeons supplied any emergency need with easy hunting, and they were plentiful: North American migrations of the passenger pigeon were known to block out the sun with millions of birds in the late 19th century. “Were” is the key word there, since overhunting killed off the passenger pigeon as well as making dents in other species. Telegraphs and telephones made pigeon-born messaging more of a novelty, though the birds had final impressive shows at the Siege of Paris in 1870 and the World Wars.
Many pigeons had already become feral whether through escape or neglect, and they hold populations in just about every major city today. Still, we do have numerous pigeon aficionados raising domesticated birds with brilliant plumage and impressive racing speeds, not to mention keeping them as loving pets (they do love to be petted!). It wouldn’t too hard to imagine a timeline where people held onto their pigeons as lovingly as we have our household pets today.
KAVANAGH: To give another example of the utility of domestication in different societies, the dingo was introduced into Australia sometime between 10,000 and 4000 years ago, as what was an already domesticated species from elsewhere (probably New Guinea). It’s often thought of as the dingo having “gone feral,” but in fact what happened was more complicated than that. Some Aboriginal peoples used to catch wild-born dingoes as pups, then raise them as treasured companions, guards, hunting assistants, and even living blankets. Dingoes would then often (but not always) return to the wild at the age of about two years to breed, and not return. Dingoes were, in effect, semi-domesticated, in a role which suited those particular societies.
Aboriginal peoples had no previous experience of domesticated animals, but when presented with the opportunity, they found a way to make them work in their societies. So it’s very much worth thinking about how different societies may find varying uses for domesticated animals.
VALDRON: I want to follow up a little on what Jeff Provine said earlier about Pigeons. Domestications can be abandoned. Another example seems to be the Hutia, a small mammal in Cuba that the native Taino, going by some of the evidence, appear to have domesticated as a mini-livestock - equivalent to chicken, turkey, geese or guinea pigs. Either through social disruption or through superior replacements that appears to have been abandoned.
Regarding plants, there’s evidence of other domestications being abandoned. The Northeast Agricultural Complex in North America, a lot of their domestications appeared to have been pushed out by crops from elsewhere. New world crops had a serious impact on African crops, with some of them vanishing or becoming marginalized.
Then there are domestications which seem localized and don’t spread. I think that the key Ethiopian crops seem to fall into that category. They were highland crops, which just didn’t translate to lowlands.
This Discussion will continue next week where we talk more about how to make these divergences interesting in fiction.