Why Do People Feed So Many Animals?

The group will largely be limited to the past 2000 years, but Dr. Black said some detours are compelling, like the Tomb of the Eagles, a 5,000-year-old Stone Age site in the Orkney Islands officially known as the Ibister Chambered Cairn. The cairn or grave contained approximately 16,000 human bones and the remains of approximately 30 white-tailed eagles, said Dr. Black. “They were dumped over a long period of time,” he said, “so people came back and put eagle remains in there.”

He said, “The key question that no one has really answered right now is whether people went out and killed and then deposited them as some kind of sacrifice. There is an indication that they may be pets. “If this were the case, the eagles would likely have a different diet than the wild eagles that forage at sea.

Dr. Sykes sees much of the human habit of feeding animals in the light of domestication, which she believes happened through the process of feeding animals by humans as well as through the trapping and corralling of animals. That seems clear enough with our close companions, dogs and cats.

It also appears that some animals we now eat, such as chickens and rabbits, first came into our lives not as food but as eaters.

And she said, “Domestication is not what happened a long time ago when we were going to domesticate animals in a Neolithic moment where everyone came and went. I just don’t buy it. I think this has not only continued over time, but is really accelerating. “

Bird feeding is just one example, and that triggers warning bells for them, because domestication and extinction often go together, even when cause and effect are not clear.

The aurochs gave way to the cattle. The UK has many domestic cats but few Scottish wildcats. Wolves are still here, but not the wolves that dogs are descended from. They are extinct. And modern wolves just hang on to it while dogs could be a billion. Their future is promising, at least numerically. As long as there are humans, there will be dogs. Nobody knows what they will look like and whether we will have to brush their teeth day and night and spend a fortune on their haircuts. But they will be here.

The same is not true of wolves. And when wild creatures become extinct, we all lose.

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