… not necessarily a coincidence, if evolving with us meant evolving strategies to resist us 
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For many years, when I drive up or down Rt. 15 just south of Thurmont, MD, on the east side of the roadway there’s a horse farm that inexplicably sometimes has a zebra just hanging around in the pasture and I always check to see if it’s out that day as I zip by. Probably associated with the nearby Catoctin Zoo. Makes me wonder how those owners manage it after reading about this sort of thing.
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Well, that explains why dingos don’t have poisonous spines.
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Just wait 10,000 years.
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More than that, he suggests that Europe developed so far and fast specifically because of winning the genetic lottery on domesticatable animals.
That said, Jared Diamond has since been pretty discredited as a hack, and most of his writing is ideological in nature and not generally in line with the scientific consensus on such things. He’s kinda the Malcom Gladwell of anthropology, with a souçon of racism sprinkled in.
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Or Anthropology Classic™ as the marketing department call it.
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Yeah, I’m aware that Diamond isn’t much respected any more. And some of his arguments in “Guns, Germs and Steel” struck me even when I read it as ‘Just-So stories’.
That said, I liked his observation that different parts of the world offered quite different opportunities in terms of the domesticable plants and animals present there. And while that argument and its implications are not unproblematic, it struck me as an interesting and probably well-intentioned counter to the hoary old racist claims about the innate superiority of white Europeans (claims that require you to ignore giant chunks of actual history, of course, but then racists have always been selective in the evidence that they allow).
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Keeping Zebras as pets? It’s all part of the Rothschilds’ New World Order. Ohio’s in on the game, sheeple.
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Yah racist hacks are still right sometimes and I can believe there is something to the theory that good luck with domesticated animals plays a role in the success of a group. That said, I’m not an anthropologist so maybe the idea is full of holes that I don’t know about, or is already well known and Diamond was just playing to the lay crowd for cheap points. Who knows. 
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At the next full moon he will be a werezebra.
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A biologist friend once said “Dogs are domesticated. Cats fall somewhere between ‘tame’ and ‘still considering their options’.”
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I love this image.
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An excellent book that I can see from where I’m sitting here in my office at home. Of course I can’t get up to go get it because a cat has me pinned. She’s probably not considering eating my eyeballs so long as I continue to provide petting and body heat. She’s much safer than a zebra, at any rate.
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Caitlin Doughty is a real treasure; funny, informative and rocking some serious Bang game. She’s got me interested in composting. Plus, she loved her cat, and gave it a death-positive send off.
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She’s the best!
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I think dogs were domesticated before the migration to America. Conveniently in Siberia, so on the way there.
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“A moose once bit my sister”
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Oh yeah, Zebras are always pissed off about how government suppresses folk ivermectin wisdom. What an empathetic…or not, animal.
They had me at the guy lost his arm but it was considered not life-threatening.
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