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DanArmak comments on Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych - Less Wrong
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What possible use can a foster-child ever be to a non-human parent? As for human adoptive parents, animal cuteness does not seem strongly correlated with usefulness. Apart from the few species we domesticate anyway, how are "most mammals" of any use to us?
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_2242217.html
If this happened in the wild, that momma pig would eventually have adult tigers ready to fight alongside her legitimate offspring, which could conceivably help to defend them from predators. At the same time, adopted tigers won't compete with the other piglets for root vegetables as a food supply. Combined-arms tactics, almost.
"Most mammals" are made of meat; if all else fails, they're edible. "The few species we domesticate anyway" were low-hanging fruit in terms of suitability for domestication, and also happen to be cuter than many non-domesticated species, which I doubt is a coincidence.
Yes, but there's a theory here that you have the cause and effect backward: they're cute because they're more babyish, and they're more babyish because that's what they're bred for. Apparently, dogs are supposed to look and act like wolf puppies or something. So says Temple Grandin, anyway. Wikipedia agreed when last I looked.
A tiger couldn't grow on pig milk alone - the zoo in that story are giving the cubs meat supplements. Later, the young tigers will need to be taught to hunt to get enough meat. And pigs wouldn't like the games adolescent tigers play. Later on, the tigers could eat other pigs who might have mated with their adopted siblings; or the tigers' own future mates might eat them. There's no way this wouldn't end in tears.
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.
It's not a coincidence. But that doesn't mean we necessarily benefit from it in evolutionary terms. We just enjoy doing it. Those animals that are truly useful, I believe we would have (and in some cases did) domesticated, whether or not they were cute.
Unless you've got a surplus of highly-perishable food, a surplus which will end as surely as winter follows after fall. In that case, the mammal in question acts as a convenient storage device, a bank which will often follow you around of it's own volition rather than needing to be carried.
Even if there's overlap between human and potential-pet diets, that doesn't mean they're in direct competition. Dogs, for example, will happily eat the same fresh meat a human would, but can also survive on gristle and partially spoiled meat that human stomachs violently reject.
Agree. It is interesting that unless you grew up in an agricultural/non-industrialized culture, such things can only be known from reading novels about people that have (and written by people with such first-hand experience).
For example, the book Independent People by Halldor Laxness gives an idea of how critical a domesticated animal could be for survival. In the story, the main character's wife died because he wouldn't keep her a cow. Relevantly, he raised the child she left (their child, in fact) because the child was cute more so than out of duty. When the child was 15 or so and less cute he forgot all about her.
The book is longish but so good. He's got like 50 pages in a row about minute details about sheep.
These sentences seem extremely incongruous to me.
I predict-- in advance, even!-- that you are not a fan of Lord of the Rings.
...I liked the movies...
<gasps of horror> You worshipper of feudal tyranny and racism!!
And I would like more information about Lothlorien's ecosystem. But the movies are epic, I admit.
Yes, usually reading about sheep would be boring. But I suppose this book is so interesting because it exposes one to a world view that they wouldn't otherwise have known about, in very high relief -- and an important component of that world view was the importance of sheep.
Plausible. How often do people eat most or all of their tame animals in late autumn, and adopt new animal babies in spring, instead of maintaining bigger herds of tame animals that can reproduce to replace the ones eaten? I remember hearing about something of the kind, but can't recall the details...
The question is, then: how viable is taming and raising animals for short periods of time before eating them?
Spoiled meat isn't something you have a reliable supply of. You can't raise a dog just on spoiled meat and other things humans won't eat.
Martinmas (November 11) was the traditional day for slaughtering and salting old stock and swine to provide a supply of meat, however meagre, for the coming winter.
Not exactly the environment we evolved for, but it's solid evidence of feasibility.
I don't doubt that slaughtering some tame animals in winter is a good strategy. But those come from self-sustaining, reproducing herds of tame animals. What I doubt is the viability of slaughtering all your animals and then taming new ones each spring, as you seemed to suggest.
It had never been my intention to suggest a slaughter of all available tame animals; only enough to cover the shortage. The strategy I spoke of is based on preservation, and living animals tend to stay fresh longer than dead ones.
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.