Animal Domestication Quotes

Eurasia ended up with the most domesticated animal species in part because it's the world's largest land mass and offered the most wild species to begin with.

Why were there far more species of domesticated animals in Eurasia than in the Americas? The Americas harbor over a thousand native wild mammal species, so you might initially suppose that the Americas offered plenty of starting material for domestication.

Even to this day, no native Australian animal species and only one plant species-the macadamia nut-have proved suitable for domestication. There still are no domestic kangaroos.

Thousands of years ago, humans domesticated every possible large wild mammal species fulfilling all those criteria and worth domesticating, with the result that there have been no valuable additions of domestic animals in recent times, despite the efforts of modern science.

Although native Africans domesticated some plants in the Sahel and in Ethiopia and in tropical West Africa, they acquired valuable domestic animals only later, from the north.

You can draw the character out of pets, and you can make them your friends, but they are animals, and they have to be allowed to live the lives of animals.

If you want to save a species, simply decide to eat it. Then it will be managed - like chickens, like turkeys, like deer, like Canadian geese.

I just don't believe people can tame animals.

I have absolutely no empathy for camels. I didn't care for being abused in the Middle East by those horrible, horrible, horrible creatures. They don't like people. It's not at all like the relationship between horses and humans.

I had a very famous trainer tell me once, 'You can usually train a wild animal but never tame a wild animal, ever.' They are always going to be wild, no matter what anybody says.

It is not part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious.

I was a psych major in college and I actually owned two white lab rats. I had to train them and I took them home so that's just kind of missing for me.

In waking a tiger, use a long stick.

The first animals to be successfully domesticated were dogs, which were a big help because they would bark all night and fetch thrown sticks, thereby freeing humans from having to perform these tedious yet vital tasks.

It's been argued that of all the animals humans have domesticated, the horse is the most important to our history. For thousands of years, horses were our most reliable mode of transportation.

You can't train a goat. You can't. You can't. So I don't recommend making a movie with a goat in a major role to anyone.

I love animals, but I don't really like riding animals. Like, I don't love being on a horse - it's just not my thing.

Measles and TB evolved from diseases of our cattle, influenza from a disease of pigs, and smallpox possibly from a disease of camels. The Americas had very few native domesticated animal species from which humans could acquire such diseases.

No animal ever has an ugly body until it is domesticated. It is the same with the human body.

That we have altered the dog genetically is well understood; it is hardly known how they changed us.

We all love animals. Why do we call some 'pets' and others 'dinner?'

Genesis 9 is where the animals went wild, and God gave them wildness. After the flood, that's when he made animals wild. Up until that time, everybody was vegetarian.

Cats are impossible to work with. They're just very difficult because you can't really train them. They're not really interested in whatever you want them to do. Dogs want to please you; cats only want to please themselves.

The domesticated chicken is probably the most widespread bird in the annals of planet Earth. If you measure success in terms of numbers, chickens, cows and pigs are the most successful animals ever.

It is just this rage for consideration that has betrayed the dog into his satellite position as the friend of man. The cat, an animal of franker appetites, preserves his independence. But the dog, with one eye ever on the audience, has been wheedled into slavery, and praised and patted into the renunciation of his nature. Once he ceased hunting and became man's plate-licker, the Rubicon was crossed. Thenceforth he was a gentleman of leisure; and except the few whom we keep working, the whole race grew more and more self-conscious, mannered and affected.