Should We Decide To Domesticate More Animals

As we assimilate more animals there are many things that must be considered if we do decide to domesticate them. How will we feed these animals? How will we shelter them? How will we take care of those that are given up or are strays? How will we provide medical care to them? And the biggest question of all, can we even afford it financially to support these new animals? Many things about the current state of the world’s economy suggest that we can’t even properly care for the animals we have now. Perhaps before we begin to reach out to other animals, we should get our own house in order. An issue we never had to consider with the domestication of our current pets was finances. We have had our traditional domesticated creatures around for millenniums,
If we created a new area where we needed specialized animals to take over, than domesticating new ones may not seem like such a bad idea. People could employ animals for jobs that could otherwise be expensive or inaccessible for humans. An excellent example of this is Felicia the ferret. She was “hired” by Fermilab in 1970’s in order to clean four miles of pipes that the energy beam would travel through(Fermilab History and Archives Project.). She was hired because she was cheap, efficient, and effective. If we could discover the potentials that other animals could provide for us while domesticated, we could start an entirely new market to tap into. People didn’t have to waste time and resources engineering the perfect robot to clean the pipes at Fermilab because nature already had the perfect thing for it. There could be many jobs available in the world today for animals if we just learned which ones were needed for each. However, people wouldn’t have to worry about having their job outsourced to a dog. The careers we choose to provide animals could be things that were meant for robots or other devices, not unlike that of Felicia the ferret at Fermilab. New legislation could be created with the purpose of protecting the jobs of humans, while also providing laws on work for animals. It would cost time and money to create things like
We do not have nearly enough space. We do not have nearly enough money. We certainly do not have enough perspicacity. Yet at the same time we need to start to take responsibility for the situations we have pushed on to the natural world. We destroy the environment, and we consistently fail to change our actions that lead to destruction. We also have created the idea of an economy, and we let it hurt those who have no control in it. Humans also seem to causing an entire mass extinction through the extinguishment of biodiversity by just living our regular day to day lives. It is time for us to realize our culpability for the state of the world, whether or not we decide to domesticate new animals. There need to be some very drastic changes in nearly every aspect of modern human life. Domestication should not be a last-ditch effort to try to save what is left of nature. Whether modern domestication should occur does not seem a question of “Are they ready for us?”, but instead a question of “Are we ready for them?”. At this moment in time, there is much work to be done by humans to repair what damage we have done and for us to recognize the sheer power we hold over our planet. Only after we successfully create a world where all animals can live safely can we decide to domestic new ones. If that