conuly | Have now finished the 4th Temeraire book

I actually have found my own inaccuracy that caused me to roll my eyes, and this in a book with dragons! All the way in the appendix, so it shouldn't be a spoiler - the appendix discusses the domestication and breeding of elephants to become bigger. First, there is a reason we don't breed elephants despite the fact that they're extremely useful, and secondly I can't think of any megafauna we've bred to become bigger. They all become smaller. If this was a plausible thing, I think somebody in the real world would've tried it by now.

But then, in this series they also breed dragons, which you'd think would have the same problems but eversomuch moreso, so I'll just forget it. This book is much better than the last, you all were right on that front.

*****

Pictures From Youth Climate Strikes Around the World

How the Cats Playing Goose in 'Captain Marvel' Were Trained to Be Professional Actors

Neuroscientists find brain pathway supporting an intersection of taste and pain

Autism tips for teachers – by an autistic teacher

How to Design a Better City for Deaf People

Scarecrow Video Has Survived This Long. Can It Hang On?

At the end of the day, think outside the box about clichés

One Reason Rural Students Don't Go To College: Colleges Don't Go To Them

Fraternities Can Push Boys Toward a Terrible Sort of Masculinity—Or Help Them Resist It

The knitting community is reckoning with racism

The Fertility Doctor’s Secret

My Vagina Is Terrific. Your Opinion About It Is Not. and Your Vagina Is Terrific (and Everyone Else’s Opinions Still Are Not)

Trump 'wall' in desolate stretch of New Mexico has some asking: Why here?

Chinese goths post selfies in protest after subway incident

Let’s Break Up Adobe

Amazon will no longer dictate how sellers price their products

‘Colony of Hell’: 911 Calls From Inside Amazon Warehouses

The science of serial killers is changing

What animals can teach us about politics

The troubled legacy of Guatemalan adoptions

The Coffin Business Is Booming in Central America Due to Gang Violence

While you're still horrified by the mosque shooting, I'm going to share something I don't normally share. Because tomorrow, it won't be so fresh

The Tragedy of Baltimore

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

batwrangler

It depends on how mega your megafauna is? We've breed for huge size differences in dogs and horses on both ends of what would be their normal variation (chihuahua vs great dane, mini horse vs giant draft, some breeds of beef cattle....) and we also get things like the slight mismatch between tigers and lions generically making hybrids (which don't seem to happen in nature) much, much larger than either parent species? So, it's not an extrapolation that bothers me particularly? (I loved the first part of the series, but forget where I stopped reading or why.) Also I've seen breeding trends in a variety of animals where concentrated breeder effort has resulted in favoring large/oversized individuals despite breed standards calling for a much more moderate size?

From:

conuly

Sure, but are domesticated animals large compared to their wild counterparts? Cattle, certainly, do not even remotely compare to the aurochs, I'm told - even the really big cows.

From:

batwrangler

People are trying to make auroch-sized cattle now, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tauros_Programme

I'm not sure whether this supports your point or not?

Even elephants (and tigers) in the absence of human breeding have size differences according to regional populations, so I think available resources may be a big factor in size parameters?

Plus in the Temeraire series, people are basically having the kind of arms race wrt dragons that led to building naval super carriers in our history?

From:

mindstalk

Horses bred for size are much taller and heavier than wild horses (such as remain) or zebras. Wild and feral horses (even ones showing signs of draft ancestry) tend to be 12-14 hands and 300ish kg, draft horses are 16-19 hands and 600-900 kg.

Irish wolfhounds are definitely bred to be bigger than wolves, the largest wild canine alive.

Chicken and turkeys are bred to be larger, though these aren't megafauna.

From:

archangelbeth

caucasian bearhounds (but don't scroll down too far, because there is a sad picture of a dog who hunted a bear and who will hopefully be welcome in Sto'vo'kor.)

I mean, it's true those aren't megafauna either.

YET.

From:

steorra

Draught horses were what came to mind for me too as large animals that have been bred to be larger than their wild predecessors.

From:

conuly

It's phrases like "the largest wild canine alive" or "heavier than wild horses (such as remain)" twig my attention.

From:

mindstalk

I recalled that dire wolves existed. Looking them up now, they weren't larger than gray wolves, though on the high end of that.

I was just referring to wild horses being almost entirely extinct or displaced by feral ones. The wild horses weren't large for horses, just as zebras aren't. And as I mentioned, feral horses revert to a smallish mustang type.

From:

elenbarathi.livejournal.com

??? I'm not sure what you're classing as 'megafauna' here:

In practice, the most common usage encountered in academic and popular writing describes land mammals roughly larger than a human that are not (solely) domesticated. The term is especially associated with the Pleistocene megafauna – the land animals often larger than modern counterparts considered archetypical of the last ice age, such as mammoths, the majority of which in northern Eurasia, the Americas and Australia became extinct within the last forty thousand years.[6] It is also commonly used for the largest extant wild land animals, especially elephants, giraffes, hippopotamuses, rhinoceroses, and large bovines. (Of these five categories of large herbivorous mammals, only bovines are presently found outside of Africa and southern Asia, but all the others were formerly more wide-ranging.) Megafaunal species may be subcategorized by their trophic position into megaherbivores (e.g., elephants), megacarnivores (e.g., lions), and, more rarely, megaomnivores (e.g., bears).
~source (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megafauna)

Since there's that clause "not (solely) domesticated", that lets out all the larger-than-humans animals we have bred to be even bigger: horses, cattle and swine. I have no idea whether keepers of domestic elephants deliberately breed for size - it's my understanding that traditionally elephants were not bred in captivity, but rather captured in the wild, but that may not always have been the case, or may not be the case any more.. I do know that male elephants in musth are extremely aggressive and unpredictable, but capturing wild elephants sounds pretty dangerous too, so... dunno.

Anyway, except for elephants, we haven't really tried to domesticate the remaining megafauna - the bears, moose, hippos, rhinos, gorillas, giant otters and what-not - because they're troublesome, and because we already have enough domesticated species. We did breed lions and tigers together to make ligers (https://bigcatrescue.org/liger-facts/), but that turned out to be a really bad idea.

It's not a major 'cause' with me, but I'm fundamentally opposed to the breeding of freaks: hairless cats, 'toy' dogs, turkeys too heavy to walk, etcetera. It's too late now to say that we should never have domesticated all these species in the first place, but at least we can refrain from warping them totally out of their naturally-evolved forms just to serve our pleasure.

From:

elenbarathi.livejournal.com

Your link to Vianna's statement doesn't work - here's the correct link:

https://twitter.com/GoodwinVianna/status/1106412865408385024

From:

conuly

Thanks, I'll fix it :)

From:

conuly

This is a fictional appendix about a fictional breeding program in a world with dragons. We have never actually bred elephants to be domesticated because they're just not a good candidate for domestication. Their childhood to adulthood ratio is too long.

From:

elenbarathi.livejournal.com

It seems there are a lot of problems even with breeding them for zoos, let alone for commercially-profitable domestic use. That's essentially the problem with all the megafauna except (arguably) bovines: they've never been domesticated because they're way more trouble than they're worth.

Dragons would be at least three times as much trouble, because they can both fly and breathe fire. More than that, if they're also sapient. WAY more than that, if they're more sapient than we are.

From:

conuly

Not all the dragons in this setting can breathe fire. And while they're all sapient (not that every culture really believes that, despite all the evidence) they're not equally smart and not all are smart at the same things humans think are important.