have failed, for reasons that include vicunas' long and elaborate; courtship ritual before mating, a ritual inhibited in captivity; male vicunas' ' fierce intolerance of each other; and their requirement for both a year-1! round feeding territory and a separate year-round sleeping territory. Nasty Disposition. Naturally, almost any mammal species that is suffi-% ciently large is capable of killing a human. People have been killed by pigs, horses, camels, and cattle. Nevertheless, some large animals have mudr| nastier dispositions and are more incurably dangerous than are others. Tendencies to kill humans have disqualified many otherwise seemingrjS ideal candidates for domestication. One obvious example is the grizzly bear. Bear meat is an expensive delicacy, grizzlies weigh up to 1,700 pounds, they are mainly vegetarian (though also formidable hunters), their vegetable diet is very broad, thrive on human garbage (thereby creating big problems in Yellowston and Glacier National Parks), and they grow relatively fast. If they would behave themselves in captivity, grizzlies would be a fabulous meat production animal. The Ainu people of Japan made the experiment by routinely ZEBRASAND UNHAPPY MARRIAGES • I 7 I ring grizzly cu^s as Part of a ritual– For understandable reasons, , ugh the Ainu found it prudent to kill and eat the cubs at the age of one Keeping grizzly bears for longer would be suicidal; I am not aware of any adult that has been tamed. Another otherwise suitable candidate that disqualifies itself for equally obvious reasons is the African buffalo. It grows quickly up to a weight of a ton and lives in herds that have a well-developed dominance hierarchy, a trait whose virtues will be discussed below. But the African buffalo is considered the most dangerous and unpredictable large mammal of Africa. Anyone insane enough to try to domesticate it either died in the effort or was forced to kill the buffalo before it got too big and nasty. Similarly, hippos, as four-ton vegetarians, would be great barnyard animals if they weren't so dangerous. They kill more people each year than do any other African mammals, including even lions. Few people would be surprised at the disqualification of those notoriously ferocious candidates. But there are other candidates whose dangers are not so well known. For instance, the eight species of wild equids (horses and their relatives) vary greatly in disposition, even though all eight are genetically so close to each other that they will interbreed and produce healthy (though usually sterile) offspring. Two of them, the horse and the North African ass (ancestor of the donkey), were successfully domesticated. Closely related to the North African ass is the Asiatic ass, also known as the onager. Since its homeland includes the Fertile Crescent, the cradle of Western civilization and animal domestication, ancient peoples must have experimented extensively with onagers. We know from Sumerian and later depictions that onagers were regularly hunted, as well as captured and hybridized with donkeys and horses. Some ancient depictions of horselike animals used for riding or for pulling carts may refer to onagers. However, all writers about them, from Romans to modern zookeepers, decry their irascible temper and their nasty habit of biting People. As a result, although similar in other respects to ancestral donkeys, onagers have never been domesticated. Africa's four species of zebras are even worse. Efforts at domestication went as far as hitching them to carts: they were tried out as draft animals m 19th-century South Africa, and the eccentric Lord Walter Rothschild drove through the streets of London in a carriage pulled by zebras. Alas, ze ras become impossibly dangerous as they grow older. (That's not to eny that many individual horses are also nasty, but zebras and onagers I 7 Z •GUNS,GERMS, AND STEEL are much more uniformly so.) Zebras have the unpleasant habit of biting a person and not letting go. They thereby injure even more American zoo-keepers each year than do tigers! Zebras are also virtually impossible to lasso with a rope—even for cowboys who win rodeo championships by lassoing horses—because of their unfailing ability to watch the rope noose fly toward them and then to duck their head out of the way. Hence it has rarely (if ever) been possible to saddle or ride a zebra, and; South Africans' enthusiasm for their domestication waned. UnpredictaWy aggressive behavior on the part of a large and potentially dangerous mammal is also part of the reason why the initially so promising modern experiments in domesticating elk and eland have not been more successful. Tendency to Panic. Big mammalian herbivore species react to danger J from predators or humans in different ways. Some species are nerve fast, and programmed for instant flight when they perceive a threat.' species are slower, less nervous, seek protection in herds, stand theif| ground when threatened, and don't run until necessary. Most species deer and antelope (with the conspicuous exception of reindeer) are of 1 former type, while sheep and goats are of the latter. Naturally, the nervous species are difficult to keep in captivity. If into an enclosure, they are likely to panic, and either die of shock or bat themselves to death against the fence in their attempts to escape, true, for example, of gazelles, which for thousands of years were the i frequently hunted game species in some parts of the Fertile Crescent.' is no mammal species that the first settled peoples of that area had opportunity to domesticate than gazelles. But no gazelle species has been domesticated. Just imagine trying to herd an animal that blindly bashes itself against walls, can leap up to nearly 30 feet, and i run at a speed of 50 miles per hour! Social Structure. Almost all species of domesticated large prove to be ones whose wild ancestors share three social charac they live in herds; they maintain a well-developed dominance among herd members; and the herds occupy overlapping home ra rather than mutually exclusive territories. For example, herds of horses consist of one stallion, up to half a dozen mares, and their Mare A is dominant over mares B, C, D, and E; mare B is submissive tt»| but dominant over C, D, and E; C is submissive to B and A but dc over D and E; and so on. When the herd is on the move, its maintain a stereotyped order: in the rear, the stallion; in the front, the ZEBRAS AND UNHAPPY MARRIAGES • I 7 3 nking female, followed by her foals in order of age, with the youngest first– and behind her, the other mares in order of rank, each followed by her foals in order of age. In that way, many adults can coexist in the herd without constant fighting and with each knowing its rank. That social structure is ideal for domestication, because humans in effect take over the dominance hierarchy. Domestic horses of a pack line follow the human leader as they would normally follow the top-ranking female. Herds or packs of sheep, goats, cows, and ancestral dogs (wolves) have a similar hierarchy. As young animals grow up in such a herd, they imprint on the animals that they regularly see nearby. Under wild conditions those are members of their own species, but captive young herd animals also see humans nearby and imprint on humans as well. Such social animals lend themselves to herding. Since they are tolerant of each other, they can be bunched up. Since they instinctively follow a dominant leader and will imprint on humans as that leader, they can readily be driven by a shepherd or sheepdog. Herd animals do well when penned in crowded conditions, because they are accustomed to living in densely packed groups in the wild. In contrast, members of most solitary territorial animal species cannot be herded. They do not tolerate each other, they do not imprint on humans, and they are not instinctively submissive. Who ever saw a line of cats (solitary and territorial in the wild) following a human or allowing themselves to be herded by a human? Every cat lover knows that cats are not submissive to humans in the way dogs instinctively are. Cats and ferrets are the sole territorial mammal species that were domesticated, because our motive for doing so was not to herd them in large groups raised for food but to keep them as solitary hunters or pets. While most solitary territorial species thus haven't been domesticated, it's not conversely the case that most herd species can be domesticated. Most can't, for one of several additional reasons.
