ABSTRACT
Against the backdrop of heightened human interest in how humans interact with the rest of the world, this chapter attempts to characterize the process of nonhuman animal domestication, concentrating on those groups in which humans have played an integral role shaping, molding, and supporting. It discusses the methods that have been and are currently being used to produce domesticated species, and considers the ethical implications of human interference, in the form of artificial selection, in the breeding biology of other species. Humans have domesticated many zoological groups ranging from insects to mammals; over 3,000 mammal breeds and strains are partially or wholly domesticated. Domestication is a broad subject encompassing such disparate fields of inquiry as archaeology, organismic and molecular biology, sociology, anthropology, and philosophy. With respect to domestication, a process that deals with populations of animals, individual-oriented theories such as those above may be inadequate.
