When I was a child, I used to fantasise about introducing a host of exciting exotic species to British farms. Why, I thought, cannot we ride zebras or tapirs, as well as horses? If you could domesticate the ancestors of cattle and sheep, why not all those other marvellous grazing species. A boring old ‘ordinary’ farm in Europe would end up looking like the Serengeti!
http://www.messybeast.com/history/working.htm ( some interesting, if perhaps rather cruel, pictures on this site)
It was only decades later when I read Jared Diamond’s book “Guns Germs and Steel” that I learnt how few species were truly amenable to the slow historical process of domestication, and the constraining reasons behind this.
Nonetheless, one of the original objectives of the Zoological Society of London in the nineteenth century was to find ways in which exotics could become of economic benefit to Society, and today we have farmed bison, ostrich, wild boar, etc ( ‘farmed’ does not. I know, of course narrowly equate to ‘domesticated)’.
Agriculture and the overall rural economy in the developed world is in a state of flux. Within the EU at least there are significant funds available to ‘diversify’ agriculture( see http://europa.eu/scadplus/leg/en/lvb/l60032.htm). In the developing world people remain hungry because of inadequate agricultural resource, whilst ironically wild species risk extinction due to human development.
Within the international zoo community there is a vast pool of knowledge as to how to raise sustainable populations of hundreds of exotic species. Is there a case for the export of these skills? Can one protect a species by transforming it into a sustainable food source?
Or is turning a endangered wild species into a captive bred source of meat a terrible perversion of the conservation ethic?
Interested to hear perspectives on this.
John
John@johnreganassociates.com
John
