Domestication | 185 that has been learned from experience of human predation over countless generations A wild animal that has no contact with humans has no fear of them and can be quickly exterminated, as was the dodo on Mauritius This large flightless bird evolved without any predators, so when Portuguese sailors landed on the island for the first time in about 1507 they only had to knock the dodos on the head to get much-needed fresh meat However, for perhaps the past 150,000 years, humans have become so supremely successful at killing other species that there are rather few wild animals left on Earth that not attempt to escape from us as the master predator On the other hand, it is remarkable how many species of wild animals can be tamed, and taming is not a modern phenomenon It has probably always been a very important and essential part of human behavior and an adjunct to hunting Young animals whose mothers were killed in the hunt would have been nurtured and reared by people, and it is not only in modern times that wild animals were captured and tamed as symbols of status, as shown by this anecdote recorded by the Greek writer Diodorus Siculus and written in the first century bc (Oldfather, 1979, pp 2,187) It is about the capture of a python for King Ptolemy’s zoo in ancient Egypt in the middle of the third century bc: Observing the princely generosity of the King in the matter of the rewards he gave, some hunters decided to hazard their lives and to capture one of the huge snakes and bring it alive to Ptolemy at Alexandria They spied one of the snakes, 30 cubits long, as it loitered near the pools in which the water collects; here it maintained for most of the time its coiled body motionless and so, since the beast was long and slender and sluggish in nature, hoping that they could master it with nooses and ropes, they approached it the first time, having ready to hand everything which they might need but the beast, the moment the rope touched its body whirled about and killed two of the men Nevertheless the hunters did not give up They fashioned a circular thing woven of reeds closely set together, in general shape resembling a fisherman’s creed and in size and capacity capable of holding the bulk of the beast and so soon as it had started out to prey upon the other animals as was its custom, they stopped the opening of its old hole with large stones and earth and digging an underground cavity near its lair they set the woven net in it and placed the mouth of the net opposite the opening And when it came near the opening which had been stopped up, the whole throng, acting together, raised a mighty din and so it was caught When they had brought the snake to Alexandria they presented it to the king and by depriving the beast of its food they wore down its spirit and little by little tamed it, so that the domestication of it became a thing of wonder (Bk III, p 36) The Process of Domestication In one sense it can be said that a domestic animal is just one which has lost its fear of humans, like that snake, but true domestication involves much more than this