DOMESECRATION: The process of domestication of farmed animals
Domestication is not ethically neutral. It is a process of shaping sentient beings into tools, stripping away their self-determination and binding their survival to humans. From a vegan standpoint, the goal should not be to 'humanely' domesticate but to end domestication entirely. The process of domestication should be relegated to the history books.
JORDAN CASAMITJANA: Today, domesticated mammals make up around 56% of all land mammal biomass, while wild mammals account for only about 2%, and humans account for roughly 37%. Globally, farmed mammals outweigh wild land mammals by an estimated ratio of about 25 to 1 in mass. Also, the biomass of farmed birds (like chickens, turkeys, and ducks) constitutes approximately 70% of all bird biomass worldwide.
Farmed animals do need protection, and if we are to help them, we need to understand who they are. Most of them, regardless of the species, order, or class, have one thing in common: they belong to domesticated species. Understanding what domestication is and how it affects animals is, therefore, crucial to advocating for farmed animals…
In a nonhuman animal context, domestication is not simply a benign partnership between humans and other animals, as mainstream agriculture wants us to believe. Scientifically, it is defined as a multi-generational process in which humans impose control over the lives, bodies, and genetics of another species to extract predictable resources or services. Over time, this leads to inherited changes in behaviour, physiology, and morphology, all selected to make the animals more compliant or “useful”. Crucially, domestication is not equivalent to taming.
Taming alters behaviour in individual animals during their lifetime, while domestication alters an entire population’s genetic blueprint over generations, so the domesticated animals no longer have the same genetic makeup as the wild counterparts from which they were domesticated, becoming almost a new subspecies — or even species.
In some cases, the wild species from which the domesticated species was created via artificial selection no longer exist, but in others it continues living in the wild — which is useful to understand what genetic, physiological, and especially behavioural changes domestication has brought…
Artificial selection is the core method of domestication. It involves humans deliberately choosing which animals are allowed to reproduce and with whom, thereby forcing certain traits to become more common in the next generation…. The suffering caused by domestication is not just an unfortunate by-product — it is built into the animal agriculture system itself.
The very traits humans select for in animals are almost always those that serve human needs while disregarding the animals’ well-being, leading to systemic, long-term harm. This harm can manifest in physical, behavioural, emotional, and genetic ways, and no species that has been domesticated escapes it…
Domestication is not ethically neutral. It is a process of shaping sentient beings into tools, stripping away their self-determination and binding their survival to humans. From a vegan standpoint, the goal should not be to “humanely” domesticate but to end domestication entirely….
Domestication has spanned thousands of years, but that does not make it inevitable. It is a carnist trait of exploitation rooted in human domination. If we choose differently, if we build the Vegan World, the descendants of today’s farmed animals could live in worlds of their own making, no longer bound by human-designed bloodlines or vicious purposes. The process of domestication should be relegated to the history books. The process of domestication should be relegated to the history books. SOURCE…
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