The Civil Animal

Category: Back-breeding

  • The quest to revive the Aurochs: a brief history of how and why

    This Auroch skeleton from Denmark dates to around 7,500BC. The circles indicate where the animal was wounded by arrows. Malene Thyssen./Wikimedia, CC BY-NC Rewilding and restoration of land often rely on the reintroduction of species. But what happens when what you want to reintroduce no longer exists? What if the animal in question is not…

  • Land Abandonment in Europe

    We usually think of the American and African continents as the places of big, untouched, wilderness. Whatever the merits of this view (amply and ably  disputed), it at least serves to make a negative point: in Europe, the kind of nature that superficially looks untouched doesn’t really exist. What Europeans call nature is a deeply…

  • The tangle of resurrection

    I ended my first blog post by asking what the point of reviving (or trying to) extinct species might be. Here, I want to take this question up and puzzle over it some more. It makes intuitive sense that, in the age of massive human-induced extinctions, the idea of reviving those already gone is gaining ground.…

  • Looking back to go forward

    Before humans domesticated wild animals, meaning before we managed to control the reproductive cycle of animals with the goal of using their abilities for our gain, there was a wealth of beasts that might have become servants of the human project. Only a fraction of them were amenable to domestication (as Jared Diamond has argued…