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What is Wild?
We talk a lot about wildlife, but what does it mean? What makes an animal wild?
Animals can be divided into three, broad groups: domestic, domesticated, and wild. The distinctions are not always clear; domestication comes more in degrees than in absolutes, but at the other end of the gradient, a species' wildness is fairly definitive.
Domestic animals: a domestic species is one that has undergone considerable physical, physiological, and genetic change as a result of prolonged captivity. Domestic animals are the descendents of wild animals, but over hundreds and thousands of years, they have become better-suited to life in captivity than in the wild. Domestics are the animals that are most familiar to us, either as companions or for their use in agriculture.
Domesticated animals: Domesticated species are those that have been raised in captivity for centuries or even millennia, but their physical and physiological makeup has changed very little, if at all. An example of this is the dromedary camel, which has been used for transportation in North Africa and the Near East for thousands of years, but is more or less identical to its wild ancestors. Domesticated species have typically undergone a behavioral change as a result of captivity, however they can revert to their wild state under the right conditions.
Wild animals: Wild species are those whose physical, physiological, and behavioral characteristics have not been significantly altered by human interference; while many species have been maintained and successfully bred in captivity, their wildness has remained essentially intact.
Hybrids: There are, of course, animals that don't fit into any of our main categories because they are a mixture of two of them. A hybrid is the result of interbreeding between two species; either occurring naturally or through human design. A mule is an example of a hybrid between a domestic and a domesticated species - a horse and a donkey (some would consider a donkey to be domestic, however). In the case of mules, the resulting hybrid is sterile. Wolves and domestic dogs have been crossed with great frequency to create wolf-dogs - animals that are not exactly wild and not exactly domestic.
The controversy: Those who profit from the trade in captive wildlife continually seek to change the animals' designation, in what becomes a series of semantic arguments that may go over well in the legal world, but which do little to address the relevant issue of a given species' welfare. Perhaps the most successful misinformation campaign has been the one conducted by the fur farming lobby. Fur Commission USA maintains that the mink used in fur farming are genetically and behaviorally distinct from their wild counterparts, however no scientific study has proven this to be the case. To support their argument, FCUSA states that captive mink are hybrids, mixtures of multiple mink subspecies. The flaw in their logic is that when subspecies, genetic variations of the same species, interbreed, it is not hybridization, but intergradation - a naturally occurring phenomenon. In the wild, there is not a distinct line that separates one subspecies from the next; wild mink intergrade as a matter of course, allowing genetic material to gradually pass throughout their geographic range over many generations. Intergradation in captivity does not make the resulting animal domestic any more than intergradation in the wild produces a domestic mink; the needs of a mink born from generations in captivity are identical to those of one captured in the wild.
Similarly, crossbreeding two wild species does not create a new, domestic species, but merely a wild hybrid, with all the needs of its wild parents, but often an inability to interact socially with either of them. In some cases, hybridization occurs naturally in the wild, but usually it is only through human intervention that different species will crossbreed.
Hybrids between wild and domestic animals present the problem of determining if the offspring should be treated as one or the other. Wolf-dogs, for instance, often have difficulty interacting with pure wolves and with domestic dogs, and must be placed into their own category, but many breeders claim that they can be dealt with like domestic animals - an argument that is rooted less in fact and more in a desire to sell wolf-dogs. Breeding a hybrid between a wild and a domestic animal does not create a domestic animal that looks wild; it may create a wild animal that is a little easier to handle, or a less predictable domestic animal - again, descriptions that become bogged down in semantics and do little to describe the animal's true nature. Traits are not always blended evenly, either; a hybrid may receive the 'best' or the 'worst' characteristics from each parent, or any volatile combination thereof. For instance, some ranchers insist that the result of crosses between American bison (Bison bison) and domestic cattle, known as 'beefalo', are far more aggressive than either species.
Another argument often used is that a species can be domesticated in a short amount of time, even within just a few generations. The problem with this idea is that when we examine the process by which species have been domesticated in the past, it was long and somewhat unintentional - a process that is in fact ongoing. Another interesting element to domestication is that, at least in the case of carnivores like dogs and cats, the animals may have taken the first steps. Wolves may have learned that human beings were a source of an easy meal well before people discovered the benefit of having a guard dog and a hunting companion. Some scientists believe that the feral dogs, or 'pariah dogs', found in proximity to human habitation throughout the world may not be descendents of domestic animals, but rather the descendents of wolves in an early stage of association with human beings. Cats may have initiated their own domestication merely out of a desire to hunt the rodents that human settlements tended to attract. In contrast, attempts have been made over thousands of years to domesticate ferrets for rodent control, but the arrangement never held up over the long term; today's 'pet' ferrets exhibit little if any of the behaviors that make domestic cats such good companions. This may be due to a lack of inclination among wild ferrets to voluntarily associate with human beings.
Why does it matter? Apart from legal designations, whether or not an animal is wild is important because it defines its niche in the world; should the species live with us in our homes, or is another environment more suited to its needs? Wild animals are ideally suited to life in the wild, just as domestic animals are ideally suited to life in captivity - it seems obvious, but proponents of the wildlife trade have sought to erase the distinction. Few would dispute the cruelty of abandoning a domestic dog in the woods to fend for itself, but forcing a wolf to live as a domestic dog is equally harsh. We can make captive life resemble life in the wild to some degree, and it has its benefits, like safety and scheduled feedings, but wildlife rescuers would prefer it if all wild animals lived in the wild, and keeping our definitions accurate is one way that we can work to that end. For those that tragically must live their lives as captives, we must address their needs as those of wild animals, not attempt to bend them to our own misguided desires.
Posted on July 17, 2006
