There is a breed of horse who’s brain has decreased very little, if at all. Its called a Spanish Mustang.
http://spanishmustang.org/
They are so intelligent, and demanding of dignity, that most old-school horseman (bust and break ‘em cowboy types) can not understand, or get along with them at all. If ever there was a group of humans who were candidates for re-wilding, it would be those people who understand and love these out-of-step-with-the-times horses. (They also seem to have a penchant for keeping primitive looking, wolf-like dogs, or “Dixie Dingos”.)
Just thought you might find this interesting.

What happens when the domesticated soldier humans next door see you living in paradise, and they make their move at their master’s orders, just as they did the last time?

What “last time” would that be? Domesticated humans have never recognized the “paradises” that wild humans inhabit as such. At best, they think of them as wilderness going to waste. But that’s where timing comes in. When civilization is growing, it can brook no alternatives and destroys everything else. But when civilization is in collapse, the map opens up. That happens precisely because the domesticated soldier no longer lives next door, and their masters can no longer afford to send their men marching that far afield. That’s what makes the map open: the inability of civilization to exert control there.

Is this the next “cold war”?

No, it’s nothing like the cold war at all. It’s evolution, not revolution. There’s very little chance of any kind of violent, apocalyptic showdown. Rewilded humans will simply continue to survive as the situation changes, while domesticated humans won’t.

Is it reasonable to believe that China will ever reduce their population to the level that they can rewild?

Willingly? Of course not. No more than the U.S. or Europe or anyone else. This won’t be a matter of conscious, deliberate population reduction, in all probability. It’s much more likely to be a matter of natural selection.

Do you think that ANY Master will ever stop rewarding (tax credits, grants, awards, what ever…?) its slaves for making lots and lots of miserable (usable) “cannon fodder”?

Absolutely—when they no longer have tax credits, grants, awards or anything else to give them. It won’t be their choice, but they will stop.

You seem to think I’m positing this as a grand, deliberate process. Humanity isn’t that rational. We don’t choose our fate; we just try to deal with it.

How much of a chance do you think rewilded humans have,
when their neighbors are not?

Is this the next “cold war”?

Is the last “cold war” even really over?
Or, have the Masters only just agreed not to talk about it any more,
in front of the slaves, because it was hurting all of their productivities?

Is it reasonable to believe that China will ever reduce their population
to the level that they can rewild?

Do you think they will ever want to?

And if they do, and say, Europe, Russia, Brazil, the US, or ect. …
- does not?

Do you think that ANY Master will ever stop rewarding
(tax credits, grants, awards, what ever…?)
its slaves for making lots and lots of miserable (usable) “cannon fodder”?

How time much do you think we have left?

- Distant Coyote, age 19

Some people do have a different emotional response to domestication, to which your post testifies. Some people don’t, as my post demonstrates. No, I don’t suffer from severe brain damage.

I didn’t say you did, only that your response emulates severe brain damage. We’re taught that our natural extension of empathy is wrong; Jean Piaget set it as one of the basic stages of childhood development (”animism”). We are meticulously trained to become misers with our empathy, and not to extend that empathy to non-humans. No, we typically don’t have lesions on the brain, but by withholding our empathy, our judgment and reasoning is impacted in precisely the same manner as if it were. So, we meticulously train our children to emulate severe brain damage. We don’t actually have different emotional reactions to domestication; I’m actually writing an article at present on how emotions work reliably from one person to another as a kind of perception, like sight or hearing. What differs from my post and yours would be precisely the same if you did suffer some kind of physical brain damage, along the lines of Phineas Gage: you are withholding your empathy, and that makes your judgment faulty.

Either way, our emotions don’t reflect what really is.

As I said, I’m writing an article on this at present, so it’s a little much to get into here, but … this is exactly wrong. Our emotions do reflect what really is. See some of the work of Antonio Damasio.

That the emotional intelligence of some people classifies coevolution as “goodness” and domestication as “badness” says nothing about what they are. Even if every human since time immemorial has felt that way (for which there is little evidence), it’s true only for us. For other animals, we’re just another selectional pressure.

“Selectional pressure” is so vague as to become almost entirely meaningless. If I shot you in the head, I’d be “just another selectional pressure,” so there’s no reason to assume that you’d have any problem with me shooting you in the head, right?

But you actually have experienced what it means to be a domesticated animal. What do you think, as a domesticated animal, about having your growth stunted, your intelligence retarded, and your body warped and transformed so that you could be used and thrown away by another? It’s quite valid to empathize with other domesticated animals like this, just like it’s quite valid to empathize with other humans and conclude that they wouldn’t like to be shot in the head any more than you or I would. In fact, we take that latter bit of empathy so seriously that it’s a given. We don’t need to sit here and discuss whether we’re projecting too much, and whether there are all kinds of people out there who might actually want to be shot in the head. So why is it that we presume that this is so much more controversial when we talk about the domestication of animals? One reason, and one alone: because we have been trained to be misers with our empathy, and that emulates severe brain damage.

If you’re advocating the end of the domestication of other animals for our own emotional health, that’s a more tenable argument. Ultimately the reason I don’t stab the next guy in the eye is for my own benefit: I don’t have any motivation to do so in the first place and I’d feel terrible if I did. It’s cruel. That’s the programming evolution has left me with.

The “programming” that evolution has left you with also gives you a natural empathy not just for human people, but for anything that acts like a person: other animals, even plants and inanimate objects. Simply accepting the world as we experience it is what we call “animism,” and it occurs naturally in children (see Jean Piaget). We also call it the “Pathetic Fallacy.” We beat it out of our children so that they’ll act like they have severe brain damage, and restrict their empathy only to humans. Of course, we’re restricted it further than that in the past. The same arguments you’ve giving us about why we shouldn’t extend our empathy to animals we’ve domesticated were similarly provided by slavery apologists before the U.S. Civil War, about why abolitionists were wrong to extend their empathy to negroes. In other times and places, it’s been used to restrict the extension of empathy from Jews and other “foreigners.” Today, in some circles, you see the same arguments being made to restrict the extension of empathy to gay people. It is, overall, one of the most heinous bits of bile our civilization has ever coughed up, and consistently, the bits of our history that we take the most pride in have been those moments when we repudiated the kind of thinking that you’re defending, and extended our empathy a little further than it used to go.

Of course, before civilization and domestication, no one was there to tell us about the “pathetic fallacy,” and we simply treated the world as it appeared to us, and trusted our senses and our experience. If something acted like a person, we extended our empathy to it and treated it like a person. Domestication changed much of that.

Is domestication cruel? No, because the intention is not to inflict pain on other animals.

As was already pointed out, that’s the definition of sadism, not cruelty. You can be just as cruel by personal greed, apathy towards another’s pain, or the refusal to extend empathy. If I restrict my empathy from you, and decide to flay you alive, that’s still cruel, even though it’s not intended simply to inflict pain (since I don’t even acknowledge your capacity to feel pain). But it’s still cruel.

Of course, in human society we’d call someone who pursues their own aims without regard to the suffering of others a sociopath. That’s why you’re focusing on anthropomorphic examples like rape and slavery — to invoke the same emotional response.

To put it into perspective. For people who have so restricted their empathy that it only extends to other humans (which is part of human domestication at this point), to illustrate what these things mean, they must be related in terms of when we do such things to humans. Since you don’t empathize with anything but other humans, it has to be put into those terms. But they fit. After all, you’re saying of animals the same things that slavery apologists were saying of negroes 150 years ago. You’re essentially trying to convince us that feral animals suffer from drapetomania.

But the fact is that we don’t feel the same way about other animals, and if you consider interspecies interactions in nature you can see why. Life is fundamentally opportunistic. It’s perfectly natural for different species to take advantage of one another; hence every form of symbiosis. At the same time, it’s quite unnatural for members of the same species to take advantage of one another. Thats why murder is wrong, and why slavery as an institution relies on the dehumanization of its subjects.

This is quite an outdated view of how the natural world works. In fact, cooperation and co-existence have much more to do with the natural world than exploitation or opportunism. Symbiosis does not arise from opportunism; it follows from co-evolution and alliance. The cynicism necessary to paint symbiosis as opportunism would also make every friendship or love affair in history a case of mutual exploitation. This is ultimately the failure of Darwin’s basic worldview; evolution takes place as much in cooperation as in competition. See also, “In Praise of Laziness.”

…we shouldn’t try to anthropomorphize other animals, or compare our relationships with other animals to our relationships with other humans, because it leads to nonsense.

We shouldn’t fail to anthropomorphize other animals, or compare our relationships with other animals to our relationships with other humans, because it leads to nonsense. You’re telling us that we end up with “nonsense” if we extend our empathy beyond simply other humans. You’re telling us that we end up with “nonsense” unless we emulate as closely as possible the effects of severe brain damage. I think if we emulate as closely as possible the effects of severe brain damage, we end up with extremely faulty reasoning. We could end up with the conclusion that even though our own experience as domesticated animals is abysmal, that’s no reason to conclude that any other domesticated animal might feel the same way.

Ultimately, the only guide any of us has on how to act towards anyone else is our empathy. I know the things that upset and hurt me, so I project that onto you, and there’s my guide of what would upset and hurt you. We need to do the same thing towards the more-than-human world. Our failure to empathize lies at the root of so many of our problems, including our destruction of the world. If we hold back our empathy, we may not have lesions in our brain or a giant metal pipe through our frontal lobes, but we act like we do. We end up with nonsense like “drapetomania,” or the idea that empathy would lead us to nonsense.

If you feel bad domesticating animals, don’t domesticate them. But don’t try to invoke the moral force of nature on your side because it isn’t there.

It is there, and it takes severe brain damage (or a lifetime of close emulation of it) to not see it.

But, again, this detail is only important to ourselves. How many proud species has climate change broken? Or volcanic activity? Countless. We are highly unique animal, able to do far more for ourselves than any other species has been able to. But the effects we have on other species is not unique. It’s not even unusual.

Here’s you’re relying on conflation, obfuscation and hand-waving. Sure, natural disasters happen, and they have an impact on species. But that’s a far cry from the effects of domestication. Domestication is a very specific kind of change, not only in terms of human agency, but in terms of its effects. Domestication is nothing like climate change or volcanic activity in its effects or in its commission. Animals adapt and evolve, and learn how to survive passing catastrophes like that. But they’re not ongoing; they don’t diminish animals so that they can be used, and they don’t enforce that state of affairs into perpetuity.

Do we have any evidence that civilized humans have smaller brains than contemporary non-civilized humans?

Yes. I’d have to look it up, but I remember reading a bunch of confused researchers from the bad old days of anthropology back in the nineteenth century trying to figure out what it meant that “savages” had bigger brains than Europeasn.

Also, in my freshmen anthropology class, we were warned against relating brain size and intelligence in humans. I recall seeing charts for brain sizes for various human populations: East Asians having the largest brains, then whites, then blacks; we were specifically told not to link this to intelligence. But on the other hand, an increase in brain size from H. erectus to H. sapiens was supposed to be an indicator of an increase in intelligence. I never quite managed to make sense of all of this…

Yup. The thing is, it’s a very rough indicator of intelligence. Most domesticated populations vary only by 1% or 2% or so, and the correlation of cranial capacity to intelligence is too rough to read anything into a variation that small. But when you get up to around 10%, you’re probably looking at a clear change in intelligence. Of course, more important is the body-to-brain mass ratio, in order to control for ennervation, but domesticated and wild humans don’t vary enough in body mass for that to make much difference. You see that in discussions about neanderthals, though (though I don’t think neanderthals were sufficiently larger to explain their larger brains solely in terms of ennervation, either).

Do we have any other examples of parasites attacking whole populations, not leaving any single individual in that population healthy? And having this go on for many generations?

I don’t think there are too many examples of parasites breeding populations for better control, either. No, I don’t think you can really classify domestication as a kind of parasitism. It’s something wholly new.

The part of our brain that’s in charge of feeling emotion is far older than the logical/rational part; are we to think that all our evolutionary ancestors had no grasp of reality whatsoever?

That’s quite what Damasio proved: our reason is not inhibited by our emotions, it’s built on top of and requires our emotions. We cannot think rationally about anything we can’t empathize with. Remove our empathy, and we end up sounding like blithering idiots.

I mean, next thing I know, such people will see me in purely utilitarian terms. As in: I have no worth except to the extent that I can be used for this or that narrow purpose.

As I mentioned above, that’s even somewhat common in civilized history. Once you learn that you can’t empathize with things that appear clearly like persons to your senses, who else can you withdraw empathy from? “Species” is a fuzzy line; people have claimed that blacks or Jews or Irish might be other species, is it OK to withdraw our empathy from them?

What gives me a visceral emotional response, may not do the same for you.

Not really; that’s what my article’s about. In the meantime, see Damasio.

What people classify as “goodness” or “badness” says a lot more about the individual than it does about what they are responding to.

If that were true, then how can it be that almost all of us agree on what’s “good” or “bad” in nearly all cases? We’ve increased the number of those cases by teaching our children to be misers with their empathy, splitting the world between those who trust their educations, and those who trust their experience, and putting them at odds with one another (you have to travel a pretty long road before you come to the point where your education once again confirms your experience), but even with this, we still agree far more than we disagree. None of us would think it would be “good” for me to stab you in the eye, for instance. And most of the judgments we could make would fall into this kind of universally recognized category. Only when we get down to very fine details do we get to the point where people’s opinions of “goodness” or “badness” differ. Haven’t you noticed how verbose a description of a moral dilemma has to be, to make it a dilemma? I don’t think I’ve ever seen one posed in less than 25 words. When people can’t recognize this, we recognize that there’s something wrong with them. They’re what we call “sociopaths,” and we recognize that there’s something they lack, the way a blind man lacks sight, or a deaf man lacks hearing.

Well, compared to wild humans, domesticated humans are sociopaths. There is only a tiny subset of people that we recognize as such, and we restrict our empathy from all the rest, classifying them as objects that we can use any way we like. A sociopath simply takes the logic of domestication to its inevitable conclusion, an amoral post-modernism that recognizes the inability to truly communicate and the over-arching skepticism of all existence. The only thing the sociopath knows for sure is his own existence, because he’s discounted his own sensuous experience and his own empathy, the way we’re taught to as children.

I personally find the concept of complexity from simplicity extraordinarily beautiful.

As do I, but that simply makes it all the more important to truly understand the underlying simple rules, since even a slight variation at the outset will lead to escalating and catastrophically wrong conclusions. Life does follow from a few simple rules, but the idea that life exists only to propogate itself is somewhat backwards. It’s a useful perspective sometimes from an evolutionary point of view, but it’s not really true. Most of all, life wants to live, and those that propogate themselves live longest.

On a species level we are here in order to reproduce. That says nothing about how you live your life or how you should live your life, so it’s not the answer to any deep philosophical questions.

And we’re talking about domesticated animals, not the species level. Their wild ancestors were reproducing, too. Species don’t try to take over everything and overpopulate, either; that’s a quick road to overshoot and extinction (and that’s also what domestication has provided).

But you have experienced life as a domesticated animal. Do you like having your growth stunted and your intelligence retarded? Do you like having your body twisted so you can be a better beast of burden? Do you like have blunted senses, so that by your ancestors’ standards you’re deaf, dumb and blind? Do you like being constantly diseased and malnourished (see “affluent malnutrition”)? Is it any consolation to you that for this small price, humanity gets to be vastly overpopulated, caught in an ecological overshoot that threatens the survival of the species at all?

And what makes you think that any other domesticated animal would think of this any differently than you? Can you answer that question in terms that wouldn’t also mean it’s OK for someone else to stab you in the eye?

You (and Jason too) seem to think there exists a reason vs. emotion dichotomy and that I advocate exercise of the former instead of the latter.

On the contrary, I said quite explicitly that reason is impossible without emotion. You’re telling us how much we need to suspend our emotions, and I responded by explaining how that would make reason impossible.

What I am saying is that if you react emotionally to the natural world around us you will constantly be confused.

A common enough claim, but I’ve already shown that it’s B.S. If you react to the natural world without emotion, you will constantly be confused. Reason is not possible without emotion. Without extending your empathy, your reasoning literally emualtes that of someone with severe brain damage.

You’ll condemn ants for being aphid slavedrivers and mosquitos for being poor parents.

No you won’t. It’s clear that aphids have adapted to that situation and benefit from the way ants take care of them, and it’s equally clear that mosquito children are able to take care of themselves. To empathize doesn’t mean to become blind to clear differences. Do you need to obliterate my personality and uniqueness in order to empathize with me? Then why would you need to obliterate the uniqueness of other animals, and their personalities, in order to empathize with them?

How sad, you’ll say, that the mosquito mother abandons her children. If mosquitos were humans you’d be right; but they’re not, and your emotional response is misleading you. Isn’t that clearly nonsense?

That would be ridiculous; as ridiculous as empathizing with an elderly man and assuming that that entails assumptions that he lives the same kind of lifestyle you do. Empathy doesn’t involve any assumption of homogeneity, it just means putting yourself in someone else’s place. I’m quite certain you don’t actually have any problem understanding this, and you do this constantly without even thinking about it, but this is just stretching for some excuse to justify being such a miser with your empathy. That’s all right; that’s what we were all meticulously trained to be. A major part of rewilding is learning to trust our senses again, and to extend our empathy to anything that acts like a person.

The same is true when you compare cattle to human slaves and dogs to women we’ve raped. That comparison is misleading. It tricks our evolutionary programming, which tells us that neither cows nor dogs are humans and applying emotion (which is a product of evolution) to them is nonsense. It’s false empathy, and it’s not natural.

In reality, it’s the most natural thing in the world. We need to be meticulously trained to have any other reaction. The comparison isn’t misleading at all; it’s the denial of it that’s misleading. Our “evolutionary programming” naturally extends empathy to everything that acts like a person, including cattle and dogs. We have to be trained to not apply our emotions to them. It’s not a false empathy, it’s the very definition of empathy, and nothing could be more natural. Because at the end of the day, domestication is slavery, and the difference between co-evolution with wolves and the domestication of dogs is exactly the same difference between making love and rape.

But if the goal is to understand how the natural world works, and whether or not our behavior is anomalous, you can’t rely on them.

This could hardly be more wrong. Ask any tracker: empathy is crucial. You absolutely cannot understand how the natural world works without your emotions.

For Jason’s argument to survive scrutiny, he will need to tie it back into the belief that diversity is a primary good or to state that the non-domesticated animal is a primary good.

Already did that. In the original article, I wrote:

The result of these requirements is that only a small number of animals have ever been domesticated, and with few exceptions they are large, ruminant herd mammals. With plants, domestication does little better: with the exception of a small selection of fruits and vegetables, the vast majority of the domesticated diet, past and present, comes from just a vanishingly small number of closely related cereal grain species. Besides their genetic closeness, the fact that all of our domesticates fulfill basically the same ecological niches makes the domesticated world a supreme example of a curtailed, stunted, and even pathological ecosystem. The various problem of agriculture (illustrated so well by Richard Manning (2005)) ultimately come down to the basic issue of a homogeneous, inbred ecology. The problems of soil loss and desertification that has dogged agriculture since its inception in the vast, dense cedar forests of the Fertile Crescent, that it turned into the desert wasteland of modern Iraq, are the result of monoculture: growing cereal grains adapted to catastrophe all in a field, year after year, seperated from the other plant, animal, fungal and even bacterial relationships and biological succession that mark these species in their usual ecological niche. The simplicity of domination is easy to spread, and easier to overshoot, but it lacks the mutuality of normal evolutionary relationships that make a living community stable and sustainable. When we see this behavior in human lineages, it is easier to understand; marrying within the same family may keep a line “pure,” but without the genetic input and variability of other lineages to nourish and enrich that line, it becomes increasingly weak, and even twisted, as it has no other inputs but itself. Likewise, domestication is the inbreeding of ecology.

In other words, one of the key marks against domestication is its overwhelming homogeneity, and the consequences of such a lack of diversity.

Lamentable from an all-too-human perspective but there was never a time when human had the agency to choose a different path - natural selection brought us here.

Not true. Domestication was a path we chose. We co-evolved with wolves for 100,000 years, but domesticating them, turning them into dogs, was something we did deliberately.

But we have to acknowledge that factory farming is not synonymous with all forms of domestication and farming. There’s free-range organic farming in which domesticated animals are allowed to roam and range the way their wild descendants were on a certain area of land. And not all animals are tortured or beaten on farms.

Oh, I never even got to factory farming. I’m talking about “organic agriculture,” agriculture as it was practiced before 1930, the agriculture that turned the Fertile Crescent into a desert and the Great Plains into the Dust Bowl. So-called “free range” animals are most emphatically not “allowed to roam and range the way their wild descendants were.” Free-range animals are still kept on a particular piece of land, kept from their usual migrations. They are still domesticated, with all the effects mentioned in the article. Even without being tortured or beaten, the process of domestication all on its own is sufficiently cruel. Whether or not domesticated animals are then additionally tortured or beaten is an altogether other subject. Right now, we’re just talking about the cruelty of domestication all on its own.

They are not the same? Why would you argue that they are?

Nobody said they were. Right now, we’re just talking about the underlying cruelty on which even the kindest, gentlest, free-range, organic, grass-fed farm is based.

These two links in the sources are broken

Give it time.

What I am saying is that if you react emotionally to the natural world around us you will constantly be confused.

But you’re not advocating for or against reason, right….

No, not all domestication is the same. Animals on free range farms have it better than those on factory farms. Just as indoor slaves generally had it better than did those slaves who picked cotton, who in turn generally had it better than did the Auschwitz inmates. That doesn’t make enslaving someone to cook for you in your nice mansion right.

When I said “They are not the same?” I meant “They are not the same.” I should have put a period. I put a question mark.

Also, if I do not reply to anyone’s response, that is because the response was sufficient to answer my comment (in my opinion). I just wanted to mention something, not join the conversation entirely.

But we have to acknowledge that factory farming is not synonymous with all forms of domestication and farming. There’s free-range organic farming in which domesticated animals are allowed to roam and range the way their wild descendants were on a certain area of land. And not all animals are tortured or beaten on farms.

I oppose factory farming. But I still don’t see why we should lump the domestication of factory farming and the steroid-injected animals of those farms to the organic, free-range farms that also exist, such as the alternative grass-fed beef farms around the country.

They are not the same? Why would you argue that they are?

These two links in the sources are broken:
http://media.anthropik.com/marzluff2005.pdf
http://media.anthropik.com/schleidt2003.pdf