ANIMALS - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 79

shooting elk contained within fences was not the kind of hunting that Montanans wished
to be associated with, and that allowing the practice within the state gave Montana hunt-
ers a poor image.
Thus, within four years, the same voters acted to reinforce what they viewed as a cul-
tural tradition of hunting wild elk while serving notice that they considered elk farming
dangerous and without merit. With these two votes, Montana's largely rural electorate
made clear that it had no difficulty at all in distinguishing between free-ranging and
captive elk despite their being fundamentally the same animal. Shortly after the election,
unhappy at having been deprived a source of income by the newly phased-in prohibition
of elk farming, an organization representing farm owners sued, claiming the state had
no right to prohibit raising captive elk. In denying the elk farmers' claim, the presiding
judge in the case noted that the prohibition on elk farming advanced “legitimate non-
illusory state interests in protecting Montana wildlife.” In phasing out captive elk farming,
the state could legitimately claim it was protecting elk even as it continued to advance
hunting them in the wild. Evidently, elk were not protected by being fenced and fed.
Instead, they were protected by their freedom to roam Montana's hills and mountains,
exposed to its frigid winters and its scorching summers, and stalked by predators, dis-
eases, and—for five weeks each fall—Montanans themselves. To citizens, politicians,
and judges alike, the distinction between animals in the wild and those within fences
never seemed in doubt.
Domestic animals are those that have been “bred in captivity for purposes of economic
profit to a human community that maintains total control over its breeding, organization
of territory, and food supply.” 7 They have been “transformed into something more useful
to humans,” which in turn requires “human selection”—via breeding and culling—“of
those individual animals more useful to humans than other individuals of the same spe-
cies,” and that they respond primarily to the “altered forces of natural selection operating
in human environments.” 8 Crucial here is that domestic animals have been totally trans-
figured, molded into something new that natural selection would never have created, and
that these human-selected characteristics are not necessarily adaptive in wild settings. In
contrast, wild animals are subject to natural selection, and they interact with mankind as
they would with any other species with the potential to kill them. Wild species, depending
on their own innate characteristics, may flee from humans, confront them as competitors,
or even consider them not worth bothering with, but they almost never regard people as
being in any way beneficial.
There is also the nebulous category of “tame.” It seems accurate to define a tame animal
as one that is subject to human manipulation at the level of the individual animal (although
not genetically, on a population level), and has been taught to react to stimuli in order to
obtain a reward. Jared Diamond uses Asian elephants as an example of animals that have
been tamed but never domesticated: captive breeding is rare and, in any case, elephants
have never been artificially molded by selective breeding or culling. Many wild species,
if captured sufficiently early in their development, can learn to live among humans if
trained to do so—sometimes, as with Asian elephants, in the service of mankind, more
often as exotic pets.