Philosophy
Domestication and Its Discontents
How the taming process impacts humans and other animals
Domestication is defined as humans adapting other animals and plants for their usage. This might constitute a fatter, friendlier pig or a bumper yield of corn. Not all definitions limit the term for flora and fauna though. The move towards farm-based and city living would forever change the human animal also.
Coming out of extreme climate shifts, hunter-gathering had been made increasingly difficult. Notable adaptations include the domestication of wolves 15,000 years ago — an artificial form of selection that has resulted in tame dogs ranging from Yorkshire Terriers to Great Danes. Some of the oldest crops include barley, flax, and wheat with some humans moving from foraging to farming around 13,000 years ago.
The domestication of pets is often framed as a matter of ownership and property. It leaves our possessions in a highly vulnerable state, reliant as they are on us for kindness, medical care, and access to food, water, and the outdoors. Other harms include pedigree standards, with some breeds developing illnesses more frequently such as brachycephalic breeds.
The UK is said to contain 11 million cats and 11 million dogs and breeding them for sale is big business. The RSPCA report spikes in cruelty as humans increasingly perpetuate this exploitative practice. Many shelters are full, with animals being surrendered once the COVID lockdowns ended.
The key battlefield in domestication, beyond even the pet industry, has been the world of farmed animals. 98.5% of the terrestrial mammal biomass is now said to be humans and domesticated animals with only the remaining 1.5% wild. 23 billion animals are factory-farmed every year alone. Whether we like it or not, this is a domesticated planet.
The environmental ramifications of this global shift and the sixth great extinction event of species are huge, with vast swathes of habitat being gobbled up for crops and the animals who will eat them. The ethical costs are similarly immense because farmed animals are sentient, conscious beings who suffer hugely in our increasingly intensive farming operations.
Perversely, ideas such as growing chickens without brains or lab-grown meat are often decried as unnatural. The assumption is that there is comfort and tradition to be found in conscious victims being exploited in the demand for animal products. The global demand increases with human population growth and increases in living standards. Animal products are aspirational as a display of wealth.
Sociologist David Nibert coined the term domesecration for the many ethical negatives that have resulted from the process. He disagrees here with Jared Diamond who credits domestication with having advanced humanity. Nibert links domesecration to pandemics, violence, enslavement, disease, extermination, repression, and hunger. He ultimately sees the domestication of animals as a prerequisite to the oppression of humans.
Many ethicists point out that wild animals also suffer hugely from predation, disease, starvation, dehydration, stress, violence, etc. While this is true, it still doesn’t imply that we should breed farmed animals or take wild animals into captivity. The case of the caged zoo animal causes many suppressed instincts and neurotic behaviour.
So, as Nibert warns that humans too are victims of domestication and we elsewhere observe troubling behaviour in captive animals; psychologists such as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung connected the dots on how humans are also repressed and develop complexes due to their very own domestication.
Group conformity demands that individual freedom be curtailed. This is highlighted particularly in their books such as Civilization and its Discontents and Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Freud remarked that “It is impossible to overlook the extent to how civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct” and stated:
The element of truth behind all this, which people are so ready to disavow, is that men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness.
We are animals too and our ability to maintain a safe, secure society relies in no small part on our ability to control our animal impulses, i.e. we repress them. Critics of religion have seen its rules as an effort to distance us from our animal selves. Freud might explain this as the self-concept of the ego being in battle with the animalistic and primal id. Jung could frame this as the conscious mind vying with the all-powerful subconscious, what he would term the shadow self.
These repressions lead to guilt-driven neuroses and create the titular discontents of civilization. Ultimately we are all simultaneously the oppressed and the oppressors. Freud reflected:
Against the dreaded outer world, one can defend oneself only by turning away in some other direction, if the difficulty is to be solved single-handed. There is indeed another and better way: that of combining with the rest of the human community and taking up the attack on nature, thus forcing it to obey human will, under the guidance of science.
Desmond Morris an early proponent of the biosciences, first charted our history in The Naked Ape. His sequel focused on our unhealthy relationship with our new urban lifestyles in The Human Zoo. He highlighted our vast numbers and how far Zoo-living is from our evolutionary inheritance of small tribes:
…In little more than a single century from 1820 to 1945, no less than fifty-nine million human animals were killed in inter-group clashes of one sort or another…. We describe these killings as men behaving “like animals,” but if we could find a wild animal that showed signs of acting this way, it would be more precise to describe it as behaving like men.
On the small mercies of religious control:
The only reason why we are always having the doctrine of original sin instilled into us, in one form or another, is that the artificial conditions of the super-tribe keep on working against our biological altruism, and it needs all the help it can get.
An extremely trenchant critic of civilization and domestication is the anarcho-primitivist writer John Zerzan. A contemporary of Ted Kaczynski (AKA the Unabomber), the two share a Luddite perspective. Zerzan rejects the civilised world and promotes the pre-agrarian lifestyle of hunter-gatherers. He fondly recalls an era in which he believes humans lived healthier, happier lives; a time of a much smaller population living in tribes rather than powering an industrial, mass society that leaves its citizens sedentary, sick, and depressed. He remarks:
I don’t want to be overly dramatic about it, but I think people more and more wonder, is this living, or are we just going through the motions? What’s happening? Is everything being leached out of life? Is the whole texture and values and everything kind of draining away?
Whether you accept the anthropocentric point of view that domestication has enriched humanity via access to food calories, a plentiful supply of docile, loving pets, and made life safer and secure; many ecologists would surely respond that it has been a destructive process and ultimately unsustainable.
Ethicists will also flag up the numerous harms. Can chickens be said to have won the evolutionary lottery, by simply becoming the most numerous bird on the planet if it comes at the cost of their suffering en masse? If so, it is a Pyrrhic victory indeed.
