More on Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel

A Finnish reader writes:

Your VDare article about Jared Diamond reminded me why I started to question his premises after reading 'Guns, Germs and Steel'. It was those Russian fox breeding experiments in Siberia. Diamond pretty much states in that book that all the plants and animals it is possible to domesticate were domesticated a long time ago, and too bad for those people who weren't lucky enough to have any good candidates around.

Now most people would probably agree that while foxes bred for their fur are used by man, they are by no definitions tame. Yet the Russians created very tame foxes in only a few decades.

Young foxes, or kits, scamper in a cage in Siberia, Russia, where they are part of a 45-year research project to domesticate foxes. Each generation has been selectively bred for tameness—fearlessness and nonaggression toward humans. By now the foxes in the project behave like pet dogs, barking and wagging their tails at humans.

Also like pet dogs, the domesticated foxes can "read" human cues (pointing, for example) much better than their wild cousins or even tame chimpanzees, according to a new study published today in Current Biology. The study authors call such behavior social intelligence. They say its appearance in domesticated foxes may help us better understand how intelligence developed in humans and other animals.

If they could do that with foxes, it might very well be possible with most other animals too. As you said, ostriches are farmed now. And if the historical accounts of what the European wild cattle were like are at all accurate, they weren't any more 'tame' to start with that the African buffalo is, yet, as far as I remember, they are supposed to be what our placid cows were bred from.

The American Indians could have domesticated the horses and camels that were indigenous to the Americas when they arrived here from the Bering Strait, but, instead, they ate them all, at least according to Diamond.

I've seen the Mongolian wild horse, Przewalski's Horse, at the San Diego Zoo and it is a ferocious beast. Zebras aren't pussycats either, but they don't strike me as any wilder than Przewalski's Horse. It's hard to imagine how much courage must have been possessed by the first person thousands of years ago to catch wild horses and start domesticating them.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer