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Strange7 comments on Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych - Less Wrong
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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.