Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

by Jared Diamond

That social structure is ideal for domestication, because humans in effect take over the dominance hierarchy. Domestic horses of a pack line follow the human leader as they would normally follow the top-ranking female. Herds or packs of sheep, goats, cows, and ancestral dogs (wolves) have a similar hierarchy. As young animals grow up in such a herd, they imprint on the animals that they regularly see nearby. Under wild conditions those are members of their own species, but captive young herd animals also see humans nearby and imprint on humans as well. Such social animals lend themselves to herding. Since they are tolerant of each other, they can be bunched up. Since they instinctively follow a dominant leader and will imprint on humans as that leader, they can readily be driven by a shepherd or sheepdog. Herd animals do well when penned in crowded conditions, because they are accustomed to living in densely packed groups in the wild. In contrast, members of most solitary territorial animal species cannot be herded. They do not tolerate each other, they do not imprint on humans, and they are not instinctively submissive. Who ever saw a line of cats (solitary and territorial in the wild) following a human or allowing themselves to be herded by a human? Every cat lover knows that cats are not submissive to humans in the way dogs instinctively are. Cats and ferrets are the sole territorial mammal species that were domesticated, because our motive for doing so was not to herd ...