Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 96 The small group of Romney-Perendale that Tim started with in 1988 to produce
his astonishing breed. (Courtesy Tim Short.)
Domestic sheep are astoundingly diverse morphologically. It is possible in
just a few generations to produce a new sheep variety, as I discovered when I
visited Tim Short's eco-reserve on New Zealand's North Island and encoun-
tered his spectacular Mount Tutu breed.
The partial taming of the Asian elephant
The aurochs and many of the possible ancestors of goats and sheep are now
gone, driven to extinction during the same period that their domesticated
descendants began to change the world. The details of their domestication
have largely been lost. But sometimes we can still catch a domestication in
progress.
In South and East Asia, elephants have repeatedly been tamed to serve
as laborers and as fearsome engines of destruction in warfare. The tamed
elephants were recruited from the herds of wild elephants that were once
plentiful throughout the Asian tropics.
The landlocked country of Laos is at the very center of what used to be the
wild elephant distribution. It encompasses the heart of the Lan Xang empire,
which thrived from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The empire's
 
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