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jimrandomh comments on Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych - Less Wrong
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Perhaps the cuteness response is tied to domestication - ie, evolution wants us to take the bunny with us until it gets old enough to stop being cute, and then eat it.
Then it fails again. People get attached to pets. They tend not to eat them, even if they're edible.
Not during famines. We can afford to have pets, but if you are an often hungry member of a hunter-gatherer tribe, cuteness may be a good measure to compensate your desire to eat the bunny on the spot.
Also, we don't eat all domestic animals. Dogs or horses are quite important examples.
We don't, for some memetic reason, I guess, but many cultures do. New evidence suggest that dogs were actually first domesticated for livestock purposes (but see also this).
Incidentally, returning from the South Pole, Amundsen and his team did slaughter their dogs one at a time, as they had planned to do from the beginning, and used them for feeding both themselves and the remaining dogs. Scott's expedition considered killing their trusty companions immoral (not to mention ungentlemanly), a stance that ultimately cost the lives of both the humans and their dogs.
Is there any clear evidence for a single origin of domesticated dogs? Given that dogs can be bred with wolves, I see no reason why what we have now couldn't be a mix of the results of multiple domestication events.
Taking a quick glance at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_the_domestic_dog , it seems that wolves were domesticated several times but all extant dogs are descended (at least matrilineally) from those domesticated around 15,000 years ago in China.
Yep. Even in Europe (well, in Italy at least) eating horse meat is not something unheard-of.
horse meat
dog meat
I was very grossed out by a little shop advertising "Carni Equine" in Mantova, but apparently the locals did not feel the same, as it was on several restaurants' menus.
Thin slices of Mettwurst, made at least partially of equine meat, are quite a popular sandwich filling in most of Central and Northern Europe. It's not uncommon for adolescent boys to tease their (usually female) horse-aficionado peers with jokes built around this fact.
(Incidentally, horse meat is apparently very high quality - high-protein, low-fat. And of course, equines - gazelles and others - were an important part of our ancestors' cuisine.)
What do "low fat" and "high quality" have to do with one another?
Point conceded; I wrote hastily. It does seem, though, that horse meat has quite favorable cholesterol values and an omega-3 to omega-6 ratio.
Well, yes, but it is a little nitpicking, isn't it? The point is that meat isn't the reason why most of the dogs and horses are and were kept.