June 11, 2008

• Interspecies Love

  Can we dispense (for now) with those thoughts of interspecies sex?  Yeah, we know it happens, and sometimes, such as in the mating of peach and plum to make nectarines, the outcome is splendid.  I’d just rather wait until Mercury isn’t retrograde and Venus isn’t square Uranus, before I tackle that topic.

  Today I’m thinking about affection and partnership, and the way they often transcend biological boundaries.   Interspecies cooperation helps get work done and can make life more sustainable and satisfying for everyone.

  Up until about fifteen thousand years ago, archaeological evidence
  suggests that our relations with other species were all of the
  predator/prey variety, or as competitors for territory and food.  The earliest evidence of animal domestication involves dogs. 
  
   When I was a kid, the prevailing theory was that humans adopted
  orphaned wolf pups.  A more recent, and to me more credible idea is
  that wild canids moved in on our garbage heaps, and then their affiliative, big-eyed puppies moved into our hearts.    A recent genetic study suggests that all present day domestic dogs are descended from “three females near China,” about 15,000 years ago.  By 14,000 years ago, dogs were being buried with their people in Germany.

  Genetic research suggests that cats also domesticated themselves.  They show up in the archaeological record as far back as 12,000 years ago, and their importance to humans is shown by ancient Egyptian cat mummies, and respectful burials of cats alongside humans in other cultures.

  Sheep and goats were first domesticated around the same time or shortly after cats were  What I have been learning about the way dogs and cats domesticated themselves has made me wonder if maybe some sheep or goats might have wandered into a human shelter during a storm.  Another possibility is that the dogs and cats gave us the idea, and we took it from there.

  Donkeys and horses were domesticated at around the same time in different parts of the world.  At Krasni Yar in Kazakhstan, the earliest (7,000years ago) archaeological signs of horse domestication are pens with lots of dung.  Those horses could have been penned for food.  Evidence of horse riding first shows up in Kazakhstan and the Ukraine, about 5,000 to 5,500 years ago.  It consists of bit wear on teeth in some horse skeletons.  The relatively small numbers of skulls showing bit wear suggests that some horses might have been ridden for purposes of herding the others.

  Genetic data traces all extant domestic horses to one ancestral stallion and/or his close relatives.  Matrilineal diversity is much greater, and it would have taken at least 77 ancestral mares to produce all the lines of currently extant wild and domestic horses.  Sorta reminds me of Genghis Khan.

  How do you like these pictures I found to go with this topic?  I had a lot of fun collecting them.  This one is of Jeff Guidry and Freedom, the eagle he nursed back to health from injuries that included two broken wings.  They have been together for ten years.  Just as the photos above illustrate that interspecies love can involve many other species besides our own, this one shows that there doesn’t have to be any long history of domestication for animals and humans to form loving bonds.

  Kamunyak, the lioness in this photo, during the summer of 2002, adopted five separate oryx calves.  It wasn’t such a great thing for either the lioness or the calves, because some of them were killed by other lions, and some had to be taken away from Kamunyak by rangers because they were too young to survive without their mothers’ milk.  Every time she would lose one calf, Kamunyak would go find another one.

  It isn’t uncommon for any mammalian female to adopt whatever little thing comes around, especially at times when her body is flooded with oxytocin, such as when she has just borne young.  I found videos today of two different cats cuddling baby chicks along with their kittens.  In addition to countless dogs and cats, I have mothered broken birds, a raccoon, an opossum, orphaned lambs and calves, and a tubful of tadpoles, among other things.  Sometimes, I stop and ask myself if that is nuts, and the answer is always, “Maybe so, but it feels great.”

  Mammals and birds aren’t the only ones who can develop odd interspecies relationships.  Mzee, this 100 year old tortoise, adopted Cosmo, an orphaned baby hippo.  Cosmo is now much bigger than Mzee, but they are still friends.

  I’m not going to go very deeply here into the moral or ethical issues surrounding our interactions with animals.  I’ve done it before, every March for the last few years, when the Iditarod is on.   The benefits of interspecies relationships can be one-sided, or they can come down on both sides.  People are as capable of being inhumane to other species as we are to our own kind.  I don’t understand that.  For me, happiness is a warm puppy.
   

  • 5:49 pm
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