[Main Blog Post] Cows Don't Know What's Best for Them

[jprussell]

Another week, another blog post.

Comment here or else email me to get the comments included on the main page. I'm starting to think about a way to make commenting on the main site easier without giving up my commitment to a website "built to last", but I'm not there yet.

Comments

[jprussell]

Huh, touche!

You're likely onto something - when you look at domesticated animals, they tend to have a lot of "neotenous" features - features normally associated with the young of the species. For example, wolf puppies have floppy ears, nearly-always upright tails, wide eyes, and spend lots of time with their tongue hanging out in a doggie grin. Domesticated dogs have all these traits into adulthood. Humans also are rather neotenous compared to other primates - big eyes, bigger foreheads, small noses, smaller teeth, and so forth.

At any rate, the analogy seems fruitful for humans as well - non-domesticated humans, like say hunter-gatherer societies, would have had similar emergent, ecological limits placed on them that wild ruminants have from predators. The paddock system is a comparatively clumsy simulation of that. Maybe self-imposed limitations for humans are in the same kind of category.