Harmony and Conflict in the Living World - Alexander F. Skutch [48]
No mode of cooperation between animals and plants has had more momentous consequences, not only for us but for the whole living world and the planet that supports it, than agriculture. It would be superfluous to expatiate here upon the advantages, economic and aesthetic, moral and intellectual, that we have derived from cultivating plants in fields, orchards, and gardens. If we measure the success of a species by the number of its individuals and the extent of their dispersion over Earth, cultivars that people have improved and carefully tended for many centuries include some of the most successful of all plants. The association has been highly advantageous to both parties. Even the camp followers of cultivation, the unwanted plants that we call weeds, have profited greatly and spread widely over the world. Regrettably, agriculture has expanded at the expense of vast areas of splendid forests and the creatures they sheltered. By supporting excessively dense human populations, it has created many problems that never troubled peoples who lived as hunters and gatherers on the bounty of wild nature. Plants have responded generously to the care that we have bestowed upon them. It seems to be our turn to show our appreciation of the advantages plants have given us by using them with greater wisdom and moderation, restricting agriculture to soils best suited for it, and showing more concern for all the vegetable and animal species that thrive on uncultivated land without our help but often with mutually beneficial associations of their own.
Cooperation among Animals
Our association with domesticated animals has been less unequivocally commendable than that with cultivated plants. As with plants, some domestic animals are much more numerous and widespread than they might have become in the wild state, and by this criterion they are highly successful species; but with animals that enjoy
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and suffer, the relationship has other aspects that hardly apply to plants, which are less highly organized. Plutarch, defender of animals, held that it is not wrong to domesticate them so that we may be kind to them. When an animal that is gently treated, well fed, and cured when sick or injured pays for all this laborious attention by working for a master, we might regard this as a fair and mutually beneficial arrangement. But the animals that bear our burdens or haul our vehiclesthe horse, the ox, the cameldo not understand why they are compelled to work; for them it is forced labor. Moreover, the situation has all the perils inseparable from arbitrary power. Too often the poor beast is underfed, overworked, its sores neglected. Plants cannot be cudgeled or goaded to increase their yield, as beasts of burden too often are to make them pull or bear loads too heavy for them.
Animals raised for their flesh are cruelly slaughtered, often after being abominably treated during their short lives. Only exceptionally, or in an indulgent mood, can we regard the human association with domestic animals as mutually beneficial cooperation. At best, many generations of compulsion have distorted the animals' hereditary patterns of behavior; they have in most cases been selected for docility rather than intelligence; their spontaneous impulses are thwarted, with the result that people who know only domestic animals tend to underestimate their mindsan assessment that might be corrected by wider familiarity with free ones.
Many examples of cooperation among animals have been given in preceding chapters, especially chapter 4. The first step in the formation of a cooperative society is the association of a male and female in attending their young, which is much more common in birds than in mammals. In many birds the association is very close, the two partners sharing rather equally all the tasks of rearing and protecting their offspring. When the pair remain together throughout the year and their young stay with them after becoming self-supporting, sociality takes a long step forward. This is the origin of cooperative breeding,