Jerry Cagle

“Caltech brain researcher John Allman says that through agriculture and other ways of reducing daily hazards of existence, humans domesticated themselves. We now depend on others to provide food and our shelter. We’re a lot like poodles in that regard.”
― Carl Safina, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel

“Animals under early domestication received shelter, a diet altered by agriculture, and protection from predators through relative confinement. This reduced their sensory needs, facilitating further domestication. As our domesticated animals settled in for a life of reduced activity and stimulation, so did humans. As people provided safer, more sedentary conditions for their livestock, they did the same for themselves. The confinement was mutual. By moving out of nature and settling onto farms, we became in a real sense just another farm animal.”
― Carl Safina, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel

“Wolves and humans can understand each other better. That’s one reason why we invited wolves, instead of chimpanzees, into our lives. Wolves and dogs and us; it’s not surprising that we found one another. We deserve one another. We were made for one another.”
― Carl Safina, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel

“Domestic creatures don’t need to live by their wits. It behooves them to be accepting of their lot, not uppity. Cows and goats don’t seem very alert to their surroundings; they don’t have to be. And neither do the people who keep them. Archaeologist Colin Groves writes, “Humans have undergone a reduction in environmental awareness in parallel to domestic species and for exactly the same reason.” He explains that domestication is a kind of partnership in which “each partner is, to a degree, sheltered by its association with the other.” Groves says security has cost us a certain dulling of senses, explaining that brain changes have caused in humans “the decline of environmental appreciation.”
― Carl Safina, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel