A very interesting read, especially for anyone who has any pets or other domesticated animals. The case for evolution is clear, but artificial selection by humans speeds up the process, making it visible. Anyone who has looked up pictures of dog breeds from a century ago and compared them to the breed of the same name can see obvious changes in the facial features and other "desired" traits - usually for the worse, from the standpoint of the animal's health. Pug noses, for example, used to be only slightly shortened compared to a typical dog, however, now some of these dogs have such flat faces that they commonly have difficult breathing and their sinuses are always inflamed.
Not all the animals covered in this book are ones that most people would consider to be properly domesticated. Raccoons are provided as an example of a species that may be early in the stages of self-domestication, since they have only recently adopted cities as dwellings. Raccoons in cities live in much higher population densities with each other, and are more able to tolerate the presence of humans nearby than non-urban coons. That said, even the author admits that there are no studies of urban-born versus wild-born raccoons to see if these traits are inherited or merely behavioral, forced upon them by their early learning. I rather hope that raccoons are domesticating themselves somewhat, they're darn cute... although I'm sure I won't live long enough to have a raccoon that is fully tamed.
I do think that the book could have been somewhat better organized, and felt that the chapter on horses and other equines really shorted the donkey. It may not be as "admirable" an animal, but donkeys have been used as freight animals since the days of the Old Testament or earlier, and their domestication process was only glossed shortly. The chapter on the Siberian fox-taming experiment seemed too short, and I felt that better descriptions of the interactions of the latest (at the time of the writing) tame foxes with humans as pets could have been included and compared with those of their wild cousins, or at least their caged fur-fox ancestors, especially since both wild and fur foxes are still extant.
As excellent as the book is, I did catch Francis factually overstating in one case: Francis claims that only dogs and horses will look at human facial expressions and eyes for clues as to how the human is reacting to them, a process we call social referencing (common in typically developing infants and toddlers, though unusual in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders). This is not necessarily the case, although I will grant that they do it the most COMMONLY of any non-human animal, and that wolves (i.e., the modern cousins of the ancestors of dogs) probably do so very rarely. That said, I work in communication sciences, and I've had two cats that social referenced me frequently. The first one can be argued as an atypical case - Peeshee was orphaned at a week old, and I bottle-fed him, so as far as he was concerned, I was mommy. Cats (and most other mammals) will look to their mothers once they start toddling out of the nest to see if they are "okay." However, I didn't adopt Nimitz until he was already 7 months old, much older than he would have used that skill with his birth mother. I can provide a very clear example of him using social referencing for communication: one day, I had him in my bedroom with me, while I was concentrating on quarterly reports. The door was closed to help cut down on noise from the rest of the household. I heard him meow, so I looked at him, only to see him looking at me. He then jumped up onto my desk and proceeded to paw the bedroom door. He meowed again and looked to be sure I was watching him, then touched the doorknob again. Interpreting this correctly as a request to go out, I opened the door of my room and he promptly left. Nimitz had food, water, and a litter box in the room, he simply wanted to go out to the rest of the house and play instead of being cooped up in my room. So, while social referencing in animals other than dogs and horses may be unusual, signs of it may be an indicator of "tame" genes in the more recently or less thoroughly domesticated animals that we may want to keep for breeding.
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ashlie spedding
Great book covering multiple species
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 8, 2024
