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S THINGS STAND TODAY, there are countless species
unsuited to assume a place in human society—as
any parent of a teenage boy will tell you. But fear not.
While it’s too late to do anything about Junior’s surly
deportment, dubious hygiene, and barbaric dietary
predilections, advances in genetic engineering
promise to vastly broaden your pool of potential pets.
In theor y, any way.
True domestication goes beyond the mere taming of an individ-
ual animal, and reaches deep into an entire species’ hard-coded
DNA. It’s a generations-long handshake between humans and ani-
mals—each side gets something valuable out of the arrangement.
Your dog receives food and
shelter; you enjoy compan-
ionship, protection, and a
very close relationship with
your local carpet-cleaning
outfit. Your horse gorges on
free hay and carrots; you
cross the prairie cowboy-
style, or impress the ladies
w ith your polo prowess. Your
swine get disgusting slop;
you get delicious bacon. Talk
about a deal.
Human-supplied perks
stack the deck for species’
survival, too: Domesticates
tend to reproduce faster and
survive at higher rates than
their wild counterparts.
Thus the dearth of dire wolves, versus the proliferation of dar-
ling dachshunds.
But not just any old beast can make the jump to humanspace.
“The vast majority of mammal species have been impossible to
domesticate,” says Pulitzer Prize–winning author and UCLA
geography professor Jared Diamond. In his book Guns, Germs,
and Steel, Diamond argues that to be domesticated, animals
must possess six characteristics: a diverse appetite, rapid matu-
ration, willingness to breed in captivity, docility, strong ner ves,
and a nature that conforms to social hierarchy. Melinda Zeder,
a zooarchaeologist and anthropology curator emeritus at theSmithsonian, puts the prerequisite more succinctly: “What you
want is an animal that doesn’t freak out when a human is around.”
Which is likely why early attempts to domesticate the notoriously
skittish gazelle (seriously) didn’t succeed.
Still, careful selective breeding, ideally of animals that move
at less than a mile a minute, can make significant inroads. In one
ongoing experiment that began in 1959, researchers in Siberia led
by the late Dmitry Belyaev bred only the most docile silver foxes
(a variant of standard red foxes, not George Clooney and his ilk).
Fifty-odd generations later—the blink of an eye in evolutionary
terms—they’ve managed to produce a population of affectionate
silvery-hued canids that wag their tails and readily put up with
people. Russians, even.
The Siberian team
recently sequenced the
fox DNA, and is getting
closer to pinpointing the
specific genes responsible
for friendliness. If scien-
tists can ever isolate the
genes—which may vary
by species—that control
Diamond’s six traits and
combine that knowledge
with techniques like arti-
ficial insemination, many
of the barriers to domesti-
cation should disappear.
“Knowing what genes
control the behaviors that
you’re interested in manip-
ulating is the future of domestication, for good or ill,” Zeder
says. “Once you begin to apply gene editing, eventually we would
be able to domesticate almost anything.”
Just because we could doesn’t necessarily mean we should,
however. Domestication in the true sense is irreversible, and
leads to a variety of permanent changes in the animals affected—
including, notably, accelerated reproduction. So, unless you
want to see a crash—yes, a “crash”—of feral rhinos trampling
your petunia patch, or old ladies tossing bags’ worth of stale
termites to overly friendly aardvarks in the park, it might be
wise to exercise a little restraint.Are there animals that
wou ld be i mpossible to
domesticate?