Is there any reason why almost universally chickens and cows are the go to farm animal? Like why aren’t there cultures where people are allergic to their produce and meat? Or we just got really lucky and domesticated the species that seems to just work for most if not all societies. Just seems weird that we picked cows and not some other big game like some bison or something. Why chickens? Why not ducks or geese?
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We domesticated the animals that were easy for us to domesticate. Chickens have a lot of desirable traits that originate in the wildfowl they descend from.
* They’re a social bird that likes to live in flocks, which makes it easy to keep a bunch of them.
* They like to roost in a central spot, which means they like coming home at the end of the day rather than wandering off.
* They like to lay their eggs in one place, so much even that chickens and their ancestor species would often prefer to lay their own eggs into a nest that already has eggs.
* Chickens are amazing foragers, people don’t really realize it these days but chickens will eat just about anything. From potato peels to hunting down small animals like mice and lizards. You can just set chickens free in the morning and they’ll find their own meals before coming back in the evening.
Those are all traits that the chicken’s wild ancestors already had and made them really suitable for domestication. A lot more suitable than say solitary bird that likes to migrate around large territory while needing a diet that is mostly fish for instance.
And allergies are a thing. The majority of human adults are lactose intolerant for instance. We really don’t digest dairy products all that well. But the human populations that started producing a lot of dairies, evolved dairy tolerance alongside it.
Easy access to food is a huge advantage. So any population that gained large-scale access to dairy, usually also evolved increased tolerance. Remember the cliche about the Dutch-loving cheese? It’s not a cliche really, the Dutch have better lactose tolerance than any people in the world. Meanwhile, Asian populations where dairy production was rare, have exceptionally low lactose tolerance.
The short of if it is that many animals that we did domesticate, were very suitable for domestication one way or another.
There’s also a genetic component. Cortisol is a stress hormone, animals that naturally have a lot of cortisol tend to be very skittish. Skittish animals tend to be flighty or aggressive and that makes them hard to domesticate. You might be able to breed it out of them over time, but it’s just a pain in the ass to get the process started and people simply didn’t bother.
That’s why we managed to domesticate horses but not zebra’s for instance. Zebra are much more nervous and ill-tempered than horses and as a result too bothersome to try and domesticate them.
And finally, sometimes you don’t need to domesticate the animal itself. Chickens, goats, sheep, cows, pigs etc. were all animals that were easy to fit into our lifestyles. Their natural behaviour made it easy for them to live alongside us and for us to benefit from them.
Native Americans never domesticated bison, unlike the European bovines that would eventually become cows, bison migrate. They crossed enormous distances across the American planes. That’s kind of an inconvenient trait for an animal that you want to keep in a pen next to your home.
That didn’t mean that Native Americans didn’t domesticate bison in a different way though. Rather than manipulate the animal, Native Americans manipulated the environment. They did control burns of forests to create enormous grassy plains exactly where they wanted them.
This artificial increasing of plains land also increased the size of bison herds and steered their migration routes. Without domesticating the bison themselves, native Americans did manage their population sizes and routes, thus ensuring good annual hunts.
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