DS: At the end of our last program, we pointed out an interesting thing that these animals have in common. They'll never grow up, they'll grow bigger, but they won't really mature. That's because they're domesticated animals that remain in a lifelong state of social immaturity. But there's a lot more to domestication than that, especially these days in the age of high tech genetic engineering. When we look at the process of domestication and its results, we can draw some very interesting inferences about ourselves.

DS: It was long ago ordained that non human beings were placed on Earth only to serve the human being.

DS: 1000s of years before there were engines, we use living machines to do the heavy work.

DS: They've been slaving for us ever since.

DS: But how did it all get started in the first place? The evidence is very sketchy. There isn't much to go on. Of what there is. Some of the best is here. The Hula basin in northern Israel. The people who lived here and stayed put the year round seemed to have been a transitional stage between hunter gatherer and permanent settler. That was between 12 and 10,000 years ago. They didn't yet have animal husbandry, but they did have animals, at least one. Here, in the oldest house known in the Middle East, the skeleton of a human being from that period was found a woman very aged at the time of death, but she had a very young companion. Notice under her left hand, the remains of a young animal, it's a puppy, three to five months old. There have been other wolf or possibly dog remains discovered here, not as animals to eat the experts think, but to live with, possibly to hunt with. Judging from the positions of the skeletons. We can even imagine a relationship that is something more than mere mutual aid. Perhaps there was affection. To domesticate something, means to bring it into our house, to tame it, to make it of use to us We've contrived lots of uses.

DS: Somebody once discovered that if you can find two roosters so closely, that they can't keep a socially correct distance from one another, they'll fight to the death for our entertainment.

DS: Elephants have done hard labor for over 3000 years

DS: Contrary to the usual drudgery for animals in our service, sheep dogs appear to enjoy their work

DS: Once one use has been exhausted, our household prisoners can be recycled, an afterlife of style and elegance.

DS: Even in the present life however, for a favored view, there can be shiny trappings, pomp, and ceremonial.

DS: Human ceremony takes many forms. The goat is a sacrifice, but not a willing one. We actually called this sacrifice also, these serfs are pilloried so they can't scratch themselves when their eyes are inoculated with irritating, often agonizingly painful substances from cosmetics to bleaches.

DS: Because the human purpose is God's universal purpose, this unspeakable barbarism is necessary. Man's best friend presumably wouldn't have it any other way.

DS: The human interest is the greater interest. The medical industry is in that interest, to domesticate is to bring into our house, the house of horrors, in this case, psychological horrors

DS: All this and much, much more in the sacred name of science, the unique creativity of the human mind.

DS: More time honored than even the cutting edge of science is the raising of animals for meat.

DS: This is factory production. The assembly line. There used to be an expression, free is a bird.

DS: The birds beaks are cut so that in their desperate claustrophobia, they won't click one another, damaged goods or costly.

DS: Chickens have come a long and torturous way, since the first wild jungle fowl was jailed.

DS: Although some of the ancestors of our domesticated prisoners are still around, most of them aren't. It seems more than mere coincidence that once a species was successfully enslaved, its wild progenitors became extinct. There are still wild sheep and goats in the world, but their relationship to our modern breeds isn't clear.

DS: Certainly, our cave decorating ancestors knew animals very like these.

DS: They also knew the great ancestral cattle of Europe, the aurochs, extinct since the 1600s.

DS: It looked like this, if not the aurochs itself. This is an excellent facsimile produced by breeding back from present day cattle toward historical descriptions. Similarly reconstructed, although not perfectly, is the Turpan a woodland horse, extinct for over a century. The wolf, the ancestor of all dogs is mercifully still with us, as it was with our antecedents. Most, if not all domestic geese derived from the wild Greylag.

DS: Wild turkeys also still exist.

DS: From a historical point of view, at least the history of science, one of the most important domesticated animals is the common city pigeon. In a large block like this, you can see a wide variety of colors and patterns. This is the result of many and various domesticated types having been turned loose or escaping and freely interbreeding. If they were dogs, we'd call them mongrels. But just as all dogs descended from the wall, all urban pigeons are thought to descend from the wild European rock dove, which looks very much like this.

DS: Fancy pigeons were a very great interest to the man who once lived here, Charles Darwin. He belonged to various pigeon fanciers clubs, and kept birds himself dead and alive.

DS: What got Darwin thinking was the way that artificial selection, controlled breeding, could have such very different results. By mating carefully selected pairs, you could produce a bird radically different from other breeds, yet all were descended from one original source. Natural variation, together with selection could take a species in unprecedented directions.

DS: The extraordinary powder for example, is colored vaguely like a rock dove, but its physical configuration is different, to say the least. The monk like feathered hood of the Jacobin shows that for a rock dove in the right hands, all things are possible. The largest of the fancy breeds naturally is called the runt All this and more from the bird almost exactly like this one.  Domestication, biological engineering.

DS: Primping for a beauty contest.

DS: In this case, the items displayed are Holstein cows. A Holstein cow is a machine for the production of great volumes of milk, high in butter fat, The silverware has meaning much greater than its intrinsic value. The contestants are not the cows, but the owners. This is big business. And a trophy is the best advertising there is.

DS: With dairy cattle, artificial selection has reached a new level of sophistication. The cow has become a scrupulously engineered artifact.

 Holstein Judge: I like a muzzle, wide muzzle so they can consume lots of food, prominent eye. I like the ear up like this. We don't like them hanging down that take the style away from the cow. We're like long neck, long clean neck, chest, plenty of wit so the heart and lungs have room to function. Nice blending through the shoulders. Super high, flat bone flat ribs. We'd like plenty of rib, so the cow can consume a lot of food and digest it and turn it into milk. Like a nice strong top line like this cow has, a nice clean flat bone in the leg and good feet because they have they use them a lot they carry a lot of weight. It's a well attached utters both for and at the rear load aware and also nice width, a thorough are there in order to have no problems with reproduction.

DS: These are no longer other their mechanisms on the manufacturing line. They're the result of meticulous juggling of the genetic material of already proven milk producing devices. Every increase in output is improvement of the breed. The most productive individual cow machines will be used in the manufacture of a new and improved next generation of machines.

DS: Bulls are evaluated mostly on the milk production of their daughters. So it takes five years or so before you know whether a male Holstein is worth his keep, or baloney.

DS: Enough sperm is produced by one good bull to breed 1000 cows a week by artificial insemination. His productive life is about 12 years, but frozen in liquid nitrogen, his semen can outlive him. The patriarch of the artificial insemination industry in the 1950s was called Citation R, his sperm lives on. This is a valuable cow, a top producer in the process of being flushed. She has been artificially induced to produce several legs, not one at ovulation, and then has been artificially inseminated. The live embryos will be implanted in less valuable cows. In this way, the best parents can reproduce in much greater numbers than ever before.

DS: The surrogate mother will now receive the embryo. There may be eight to ten such recipients from this batch thanks to induced super ovulation of the prize cow. She'll carry a calf much more important than she is. Exhaustive records are kept genealogy production quantity, butterfat and all the rest ET means embryo transplant.

DS: Her task complete the surrogate mothers submits to yet another indignity.

DS: By being removed so abruptly, the cap is prevented from having the first and most fundamental social bonding experience of his life.

DS: The calf is a bull, but he's an excellent family, so he'll probably survive in solitary confinement as a seaman factory. You'll never know a cow.

DS: These are all bull calves. Female calves, especially those of prominent lineage will become milk machines and super ovulated embryo machines. They'll never know a bull. Most male Holsteins are slaughtered

DS: Some veal producers have moved away from solitary calf stalls to open stalls. The calves have no exercise because the gourmets like their veal pale in color, soft in texture. But a growing calf needs roughage and will not on almost anything in a vain attempt to get it. A liquid high protein diet keeps the calves anemic, their flesh gourmet flabby it's a short life and a grimly deprived one

DS: The milking cows life is equally deprived, just longer. Slave to her reproductive system, slave to her metabolism, slave to her proprietor.

DS: Slave auctions are as old as civilization. She's young, she's beautiful. She's a virgin. She's the daughter of a princess.

DS: The beef here is a very different animal from the dairy cow. But they have things in common. His lot is not a happy one either. It's crowded, filthy, unhealthy.

DS: But it's high tech notwithstanding, at least that the raw material and the job of beef cattle is to grow as fast as they can be made to. So there's great emphasis on food mixtures that will get the meat into the freezer quickly and abundantly. Conditions in feedlots are so squalid that the food is heavily laced with additives, including antibiotics. The animals must survive long enough to get to the avatar alive. Individuals are usually quiet, placid, passive. Fed does stupid stupefaction engineered for behavioral dullness and social unawareness. Sluggish butcher blocks of meat, but they're alive and they still have central nervous systems.

DS: They fared better on the open range where they were born.

DS: At least for a few brief weeks, then it's time for the calves to have their first indoctrination into the human service. For the male calves, castration. For all calves, ear tag and, of course, branding.

DS: There's inoculation and still more ear cutting. There's also dehorning, insurance against damaged goods. They're going to be at close quarters in the feedlot and in the stockyard pens.

DS: Bulls do what bulls have always done. Home on the Range, there is no artificial insemination. But the breeding males are just as carefully selected as dairy cattle. Like all domesticates they're sexually precocious and promiscuous. They mature very rapidly in a physical sense, very poorly in a social sense. There is no subtlety in their behavior. Little sensory acuity, no individuality. They stare as if drugged, glazed, unaware.

DS: Wild animals don't look like that. They don't behave like that. Wild animals have all the qualities we don't want in domesticates: sharpness, quickness, responsiveness. What we most admire in wild animals we most dislike in our household chattels.

DS: We don't want social interdependence in our captives, we want dependence on us. The last things we want are alertness and agility.

DS: But one thing we do want is size, lots of live meat. The Fringe-eared Oryx is a heavy antelope, and it's the latest wild animal experiment toward possible domestication. They seem to take captivity without much resistance. The oryx is a big, strong, potentially very dangerous animal, but it shows little or no resentment here.

DS: This ranch is in eastern Kenya, in semi arid country, the oryx is physiologically adapted to dry conditions. And although it drinks readily need not drink, often, cattle are entirely dependent on a reliable water supply. And they're vulnerable to local parasites.

DS: Cattle are true domesticates engineered for 1000s of years. The ohas not been in captivity for even one generation yet. It's not genetically changed, it's tamed. It's become used to the herders to regular food and drink and to captivity. Ear tags... can castration branding, and dehorning be far away?

DS: The concept of freedom has no meaning without experience of its opposite. These tobi don't know they're free, but their behavior tells us they are. You won't see domesticates doing these things. instantaneous communication, razor sharp responses, fine tune coordination, crackling, sensory alertness. Also, and just as important, an obvious sense of interrelationship of social belonging.

DS: Add a few gazelles and you have the wider sense of community. Topi, zebras, Impala, as it was in the beginning.

DS: The female tobi doesn't know she's free to lick her newborn, she only knows she must. The first and the most essential step in the development of a whole being.

DS: While this is more than freedom. It's a particular quality. Domestication is a quality also. And it's more than captivity. The ultimate slavery is a life of suffering, a life on sufferance, a gray and terrible world, devoid of stimulation, empty of relationship, sterile, meaningless. 

DS: So there, very broadly, we have the general characteristics of domesticated animals, especially mammals. We breed for dependents, manageability, fast growth, behavioral sameness and all the rest. And that's what we get. We get it at enormous cost to the individual animal, and not merely in a physical sense. The artifact we've designed and manufactured is essentially a social cripple, an individual without a social identity, a social place. But there's even more than that. At the level of the species, we have a creature that no longer has an ecologic place. Introduced into a natural community. It can rarely fit in smoothly if at all, or it may simply take over altogether.

DS: This is Orpheus Island of Australia's Great Barrier Reef, beautiful from the air, less salt from the ground. It's infested by domestic goats. Goats were put here in the 18th century as emergency food for shipwrecked sailors. As goats are wont to do, they've played havoc. Goats didn't evolve here on the mainland either, and have no ecological place. The community cannot cope with them.

DS: Apart from the human species, the goat is the only animal that creates its own habitat, desert.

DS: Natural deserts are splendid places, they're ecologically integrated. Goat deserts, like human habitations or ecological nightmares.

DS: Pigs are bad news also, so bad that in Australia, marksman are hired to reduce them.

DS: Shooting of pigs is at the behest of farmers, not naturalist. They're hard on agriculture. But they're even harder on natural communities like wetlands.

DS: Domestic pigs first got loose in Australia 200 years ago, and they're still spreading.

DS: In those days, domestic pigs didn't look like they do now. So their descendants don't. But their looks are irrelevant. They entered a community which had no prior experience of pigs and it fell before them.

DS: Wherever in the world they've gotten loose, domestic animals have always desecrated the temple. But why?

DS: Perhaps the temple was not designed with them in mind. Perhaps the template can only tolerate natural process. When things settle down after the Big Bang, it still took quite a while for life to get moving.

DS: Life took its own geological time. As the continents formed and moved, life moved also. But it took hundreds of millions of years to cover the earth. Plenty of time for ecological integration. But very recently, yesterday in Earth time, a strange thing happened. There arose in East Africa, a new species. It happened to be a primate that began to overrun the planet. It could live in almost any kind of habitat. It was extraordinarily adaptable, goat-like, pig-like. It could eat almost anything. It was prolific, and it was aggressive. All foreigners fell before it. It moved too swiftly for ecologic integration to catch up. It simply took over

DS: Like a grass fire, but not like a natural one, which burns out eventually. This one hasn't, at least not yet. Of course, at its beginning in the Rift Valley, it showed no sign of the Holocaust, it was to become a planet for the burning. And it all started somewhere near here. 

DS: There is record of a human presence here as long ago as two and a half million years. Now, those weren't people of our species, our species hadn't yet evolved. But they were still people, or at least proto people. There is some evidence that fires were burning here about 1.4 million years ago. And some scientists have suggested that people were using them, although many questioned the evidence. In any case, there's a difference of course between using fire and actually controlling it. We do know that Homo erectus, Peking Man, was regularly controlling fire well over half a million years ago, but when it was first controlled, is still a matter of intense debate. All it is certain is that it didn't start with us. 

DS: Perhaps it happened here, or near here, with the very first human species known Homo habilis, or even among his Australopithecine contemporaries. In the beginning, a smoldering stump or log must have been the source. But we had to learn to make it from scratch. And without a match. We had to learn how to do it, the techniques and we had to communicate that knowledge to others, technology.

DS: These are not primitive people. Of course, they're modern people. The first fire users didn't have tools. It appears that the first natural phenomenon to be domesticated to be brought into the house was not a puppy, or a geranium, but a chemical process. No doubt it was used long before it could be manufactured, but the knowledge of how to use it, technology, could be learned and thus transmitted like any other information. As fire became increasingly important in human affairs, we became more and more dependent on it. We forgot how to do without it. Rain forest slash and burn for settlements, fire for cooking for heat, as insect repellent, perhaps even as companion, but the much deeper and more fundamental dependence was on how to do it, technology.

DS: Significant also is the fact that at most any ceremonial location, a central, almost reverential role was given to fire. The day to day simple utility of fire comes to be at least equal, perhaps surpassed by the importance of its symbolism.

DS: And by its power, fire commands many human servants. Technology commands us all.

DS: It's been said, the moment man tamed fire, he tamed himself. We became the domestic servants of our own technology. As a force in the world, technology has become virtually autonomous, infinitely more powerful than its inventor. Ironically, we've become the servants of that which was intended to serve us. Dependence is insidious. But the dependence isn't merely on the hardware. The deeper dependence is on the ideology of technique. The belief that a technical world is a higher, better, finer thing than the natural world which gave it birth. The belief that since the human purpose is God's purpose, high technology is consecrated, medical technology and the silent screams of the laboratory multitudes.

DS: Dependence means vulnerability. We know that, but it also means servitude. In the course of our domestication by technology, we had to modify our behavior to meet the demands of the machine. We do what the machine tells us to do. Environment influences behavior. The simple uni-dimensional environment of the feedlot or the dairy barn is conducive to simple behavior in domestic cattle. The modern urban environment is uni dimensional also, the only information we receive is human information mediated by machines.

DS: We learn early, we're conditioned early to a life of servitude to technology, a new generation of improved machines, loyal and faithful servants. Believers. Plato once asked, Who will watch the watchers, we still don't know.

DS: We've now learned that machines can do the job better than people can. Having domesticated us, the machine no longer needs us. The circle is complete. human workers are redundant, expendable. However, no longer needed on the automotive line, we can get on with our real specialty, the machines of war. Biologically, war is perverse, unnatural. But all animals do strange things under stress, occasionally, even aggressive things.

DS: High tech is in the driver's seat, it insists on being used.

DS: Even the automobile insists on being used in spite of traffic jams. We like to say that we grin and bear it. We don't. We grind our teeth and curse. We're under stress. The only animals that will relatively peaceably tolerate this level of crowding are domestic animals. But we don't like the connotations of the word domestication. So we use the synonym civilization. 

DS: Both mean physical and behavioral adaptation to unnatural degrees and the natural kinds of stress. But crowding is only one kind of stress. Another is tension. We fear violent crime, but we also fear theft of property. Security has become an industry. You never know what beings under sufficient stress will do. 

DS: However, peaceful souls that most of us are, we persist in our willing servitude to the machine, in this case, to help to eliminate bank tellers and to feed more private information into our all knowing master, the data bank. 

DS: In choosing animal species for domestication, we look for those that naturally flock or herd in large numbers, and which respond well to leadership. In the human animal leadership, maybe religious, military, political, but always ideological.

DS: Both leadership and followership come into sharp focus at a political convention, so to do the modern means of manipulation, thanks to high tech hardware, gameplans, tactics, strategy, technocracy, followership at its apogee.

DS: "Confidence and enthusiasm, the nation..." During an apparent lull in the proceedings, a network of highly trained negotiators is plying its trade furiously party frantically behind the scenes, manipulating. And what we don't see either is many months of backroom technocratic planning, how to manipulate followership and win the day. How to make them perform on cue, how to engineer docile spontaneity.

DS: But sometimes, political expression is spontaneous stress can induce aggression. You could say, however, that given the grievously unnatural and environmentally deprived conditions under which most people live today, anomalous behavior has to be expected. Every living being is a pressure cooker. There are limits to tolerance, even in domestic.

DS: One of the prime features we look for in a domestic species is ability to survive in a foreign habitat, especially a simple habitat, one low in variety, low in stimulus. It must be able to accept sensory undernutrition, that should also be low in individuality. It should accept and become dependent on whatever is provided for it. It should not form firm attachments either to individuals or groups or to any physical place, it should not require contact with or the presence of other species.

DS: Especially, a domestic animal must be able to accept routine repetitiveness. It must accept sameness, it must accept being enclosed. Some can endure it some can't. Or won't.

DS: Most of us at least go through the motions, but the terrible specter of human self alienation knows no social or economic boundaries.

DS: There is sadness, loneliness, sensory impoverishment, in the midst of opulence, standard of living is not quality of living.

DS: We are living beings, biological beings. As such, we have fundamental need of the very things we so persistently deny both our slaves and ourselves, yet we survive, even in this. We survive because we accept, because in some glazed, insensate way we tolerate. The ultimate slavery is a life of suffering, a life on sufferings, a gray and terrible world devoid of stimulation, empty of relationship, sterile meanings.

DS: In our cities we perceive much reflected glory, but the cost of glory is sometimes disproportionate to its value. All this has cost us dearly. But within each one of us, there still lives the ancient will to be part of a greater life enterprise. A wider experience, a richer reality. It's still there.

DS: Are we domesticated animals? Is civilization, just the most sophisticated form of domestication? It certainly looks that way. But the essence of domestication after all, is genetic selection. Ever since the ancient Greeks of Sparta applied quality control over their infants, people have talked of improving human beings by better breeding. Nazi Germany tried it this century. But today's revolution in molecular biology, first tried in plants and animals now has the potential to bring our genetic destiny under scientific control. 

DS: We have always prayed for healthy children. Technology is one way to improve on nature. Desirable and undesirable are culturally determined values found in our rituals and belief systems. As we penetrate the mysteries of life, we gain control over our physical makeup. Next week, improving on nature.