Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer by Novella Carpenter
Authors: Novella Carpenter
Ads: Link
freeway. There was an odd assortment at the sanctuary—a pelican with a goiter, a skinny chicken, and now, hopefully, a black-and-white-checked turkey strutting around, trying to mate with a duck.
Harold and Maude commonly took afternoon strolls down Martin Luther King Jr. Way. Though this is a regular thoroughfare for drug dealers, sex workers, and homeless men, the sight of two turkeys strutting down MLK nearly caused car accidents. The turkeys, on the other hand, didn’t seem to mind the cars, the pigeons, or the sketchy pedestrians.
The turkeys were displaying a form of youthful behavior biologists call behavioral neoteny. Dogs, the animals that have been domesticated the longest by man, are considered neotenates: They don’t have a species-specific sense of recognition, which means they will play with cats, goats, chickens, humans, or their own species. Dogs are also very curious, and they exhibit “juvenile care-soliciting behaviors” like begging for food. Other domesticated animals do the same thing.
It’s thought that this is precisely how certain wild animals became domesticated. It wasn’t human will, as many people believe, or that a baby animal of the domesticated species was found and thereafter raised among humans. According to Stephen Budiansky’s argument in his influential book The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose Domestication, animals decided to be domesticated. Neotenates’ behaviors, Budiansky argues, “would all have been powerful factors in inducing wolves, sheep, cattle, horses . . . to approach human encampments and to allow humans to approach them.”
And turkeys probably did the same. Wild turkeys, native to the Americas, were most likely domesticated 2,500 years ago. Like most domesticated species, these birds chose to associate with humans—perhaps begging or following human encampments in South America. The ones who displayed the most curiosity, had the most open minds about different species, and could ask for help—like Harold and Maude—were the most successful. Eventually they were invited to live in human settlements. Their offspring were reared in captivity, fed and sheltered, ensuring an evolutionary future tied to man. It was a good bet.
As I explained my heritage-turkey pursuit the Hillbilly slowly nodded his head. When I started to babble on about how the turkeys were a product of thousands of years of domestication and how I was trying to reconnect to man’s ancient contract with domesticated animals in order to rediscover my place in the natural world, he seemed to be looking at me in a different way. I realized the Hillbilly now had a name for me: the Hippie.
“Hey, you got a turkey over here,” a man I didn’t recognize yelled from the corner.
Harold and Maude had drifted down the 2-8.
“Can you . . . ?” I yelled. And he did. He herded them toward me by getting down into the age-old turkey-wrangling position: crouched low, arms open wide. I found myself making the exact same motions when I herded the turkeys, although no one had ever taught me this method. It’s as if it was in our DNA, an embedded dance move.
The Hillbilly left, and I opened the gate and joined the passerby in convincing the turkeys to come back behind the fence. As we both moved slowly—arms open, hunched over—the man, who turned out to be from Tulsa, looked over at me and asked, “Where are we—Oakland or Oklahoma?” Our laughter persuaded the turkeys to retreat farther into the backyard. An ambulance then went by, and Harold gobbled out a warning.
Your chicken came into my house!” the Vietnamese guy across the street told me. He was very upset. “We had the door open, and it just came in!”
To me, this seemed like a minor nuisance. I mean, I once slept with a sick chicken. (Wrapped up in a towel. His name was Twitchy. He had a leg problem that never righted itself.)
When my neighbor saw I was nonplussed, he added, “It pooped in my house!”
Oh,
Harold and Maude commonly took afternoon strolls down Martin Luther King Jr. Way. Though this is a regular thoroughfare for drug dealers, sex workers, and homeless men, the sight of two turkeys strutting down MLK nearly caused car accidents. The turkeys, on the other hand, didn’t seem to mind the cars, the pigeons, or the sketchy pedestrians.
The turkeys were displaying a form of youthful behavior biologists call behavioral neoteny. Dogs, the animals that have been domesticated the longest by man, are considered neotenates: They don’t have a species-specific sense of recognition, which means they will play with cats, goats, chickens, humans, or their own species. Dogs are also very curious, and they exhibit “juvenile care-soliciting behaviors” like begging for food. Other domesticated animals do the same thing.
It’s thought that this is precisely how certain wild animals became domesticated. It wasn’t human will, as many people believe, or that a baby animal of the domesticated species was found and thereafter raised among humans. According to Stephen Budiansky’s argument in his influential book The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose Domestication, animals decided to be domesticated. Neotenates’ behaviors, Budiansky argues, “would all have been powerful factors in inducing wolves, sheep, cattle, horses . . . to approach human encampments and to allow humans to approach them.”
And turkeys probably did the same. Wild turkeys, native to the Americas, were most likely domesticated 2,500 years ago. Like most domesticated species, these birds chose to associate with humans—perhaps begging or following human encampments in South America. The ones who displayed the most curiosity, had the most open minds about different species, and could ask for help—like Harold and Maude—were the most successful. Eventually they were invited to live in human settlements. Their offspring were reared in captivity, fed and sheltered, ensuring an evolutionary future tied to man. It was a good bet.
As I explained my heritage-turkey pursuit the Hillbilly slowly nodded his head. When I started to babble on about how the turkeys were a product of thousands of years of domestication and how I was trying to reconnect to man’s ancient contract with domesticated animals in order to rediscover my place in the natural world, he seemed to be looking at me in a different way. I realized the Hillbilly now had a name for me: the Hippie.
“Hey, you got a turkey over here,” a man I didn’t recognize yelled from the corner.
Harold and Maude had drifted down the 2-8.
“Can you . . . ?” I yelled. And he did. He herded them toward me by getting down into the age-old turkey-wrangling position: crouched low, arms open wide. I found myself making the exact same motions when I herded the turkeys, although no one had ever taught me this method. It’s as if it was in our DNA, an embedded dance move.
The Hillbilly left, and I opened the gate and joined the passerby in convincing the turkeys to come back behind the fence. As we both moved slowly—arms open, hunched over—the man, who turned out to be from Tulsa, looked over at me and asked, “Where are we—Oakland or Oklahoma?” Our laughter persuaded the turkeys to retreat farther into the backyard. An ambulance then went by, and Harold gobbled out a warning.
Your chicken came into my house!” the Vietnamese guy across the street told me. He was very upset. “We had the door open, and it just came in!”
To me, this seemed like a minor nuisance. I mean, I once slept with a sick chicken. (Wrapped up in a towel. His name was Twitchy. He had a leg problem that never righted itself.)
When my neighbor saw I was nonplussed, he added, “It pooped in my house!”
Oh,
Similar Books
