The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose Domestication. - book reviews

Sierra, July-August, 1992 by Kathleen Courrier

Pet fanciers have always tried to get the pick of the litter, but in a larger sense dogs - along with cats, goats, sheep, horses, and cows - have been almost as aggressive in choosing people as companions. Science journalist and sheep farmer Stephen Budiansky makes this point in a provocative new book on how animals came to be domesticated.

According to Budiansky, animals began to pal around with humans about an ice age ago. During the Pleistocene, rapid temperature changes played havoc with habitats and food supplies. In the ensuing extinction spasm, evolution favored animals with juvenile traits that made them appealing to Homo sapiens, who became their protectors. Those animals mature enough to reproduce but still immature enough to cower and play, to beg rather than forage for food, and to tolerate human beings and other strange species, managed to roll with the evolutionary punches. (Neoteny, as this phenomenon is called, explains why most dogs look a lot more like wolf pups than like full-grown wolves.) People helped these pliant and forever-young animals succeed by feeding, sheltering, and even breeding them - a cozy co-evolutionary relationships, but not a case of humans taming (and thus shaming) the beasts.

To some extent, this book is a reaction against the animal-rights movement, but Budiansky doesn't state the other side's case fairly. At times he mistakenly lumps animal-rights advocates and environmentalists together. More troubling, he equates all animal-rights types with the movement's most radical fringe, which the ridicules. Yet, while he observes that extinction is natural, he does not wink at human-caused extinctions. In the end, his careful reading of current science (he waffles only on the issue of where natural selection ends and human selection begins) does force us to question whether all animal species prize freedom as much as ours does.