Sheep weren't always this fluffy. We fluffified them by breeding the fluffiest in each generation.

This is domestication, sculpting wild animals for better human use.

As we saw in part one, for early man, animals were powerful tools, food, clothing, transportation, tractors.

Yet though there were animals everywhere, only a handful were domesticated in the pre-modern world.

What made these different?

Let's make a domestication checklist, shall we?

First up, feedable.

A cow is a machine that turns grass into steaks and a tiger a machine that turns

steaks into tiger.

Ten pounds of grass make a pound of steak, and ten pounds of steak make a pound of tiger. But these have the same number of calories, so you might as well just eat the cow and save

yourself a lot of work. So pure carnivores, you're not going to domesticate just because

of thermodynamics. You're looking for herbivores that aren't picky, they should eat something

that's everywhere that you can't eat. Any omnivores better be happy eating whatever and better be super worth it.

We are, however, putting the pig before the pen here, because first we need to catch something that's friendly.

Okay, obviously catching a carnivore is a bad idea anyway because their day job is murder,

but plenty of omnivores like Grizzlies moonlight in murder.

No safety in vegetarians either.

Buffalo are terrifying tanks for all the reasons mentioned before.

Hippos hold the murder high score in Africa.

Giraffes look real dorky until you consider their striking range.

Lions mostly leave them alone.

Animals, it would be awesome to domesticate are not coincidentally

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