DOMESTIC ANIMALS are those which, in order to turn them to his use, man has tamed or reduced in a greater or less measure from their natural wildness, and which he makes the objects'of his care, and in a living state his property. Many animals are useful to man, which he has never thus appropriated. Such are the deer and other game which the hunter pursues, and fishes generally, whether of the sea, lake, or river. Mau has not yet found it possible to domesticate them, or has not found it necessary or desirable to do so. Individuals, indeed, of some species may have been domesticated, and become very tame, but these are exceptional instances. In general, those only are called domestic animals which have existed from one generation to another in a state of domestication. Of almost all of them, domesticated races exist, considerably differ ent from any that are now found in a state of nature; the peculiar circumstances in which they are placed by domestication exercising a modifying influence, like that of cultivation in plants. Domestic animals mostly belong to the classes of mammals and birds. Of mammals, those which have been domesticated are exclusively of the com mon quadruped form, and mostly herbivorous. The greatest number, and these among the most important, belong to the order of ruminants; some of them being valuable for their flesh, their milk, their hair or wool, their hide, etc., or as beasts of burden and of draught, some even on all these accounts. To this order belong the ox, buffalo, and yak, the sheep, the goat, the reindeer, the camel, and the llama and alpaca. Of other herbivorous quadrupeds, the most important are the horse and ass, the elephant and the hog. Of the elephant, however, although for many ages it has been much employed for various purposes in India, no domesticated race exists; the individuals which man reduces to his service being still taken as at first from among the wild denizens of the forest. Domesticated races exist of two comparatively unimportant quadrupeds of the order of rodents, the rabbit and the cavy or- Guinea-pig.—Of carnivorous quad rupeds, there are only two which have been generally and thoroughly domesticated, the dog and the cat. The uses to which these animals are destined are very different from those in order to which herbivorous quadrupeds are kept in a domestic state. Analogous to one of the uses of the dog is that to which the cheetah or hunting-leopard is applied by some of the princes of India, but, like the elephant, it is only individually domesticated.' The same remark may be made concerning some other animals—the otter, the civet, etc.—which in different countries are tamed or kept in confinement to meet certain purposes for which man finds it convenient to employ them. The domestication of the ferret is rather more complete.—Of birds, the most important domestic species belong to the gallinaccous order, and to the family anatidm among web-footed birds. To the former- belong_the,common_domestic fowl, the turkey, the peacock, the Guinea-fowl, etc.; to the latter, the goose, duck, etc. Of other birds,
none can be said to be truly domesticated, except, perhaps, one or two species of song birds, particularly the canary. The birds used in falconry are domesticated only in the same sense as the cheetah; but it is not uninteresting to observe that man has been able to make both birds and beasts of prey his servants.—Reptiles are quite capable of being tamed, and in some countries some of them are occasionally kept in houses for killing flies, or even for killing mice and rats; but none of them can be enumerated among domestic animals. Nor, perhaps, can any species of fish be so regarded, although arti ficial ponds have long been in use, and some species of fresh-water fish are to a certain extent the objects of care and of a kind of culture on the part of man.—In the lower divisions of the animal kingdom, only a few species ever receive such culture, or in their living state are claimed by man as his property. All these belong to the class of insects—viz., two or three species of bee, two or three species of silk-worm moth, and two or three species of cochineal insect. These may perhaps more fitly be described as cultivated than as domesticated.
Many animals not yet domesticated might probably be added with advantage to the number of domestic animals. Adaptation to particular climates and situations might probably be found to recommend species allied to those in which great part of the wealth of mankind has long consisted, and from which still more of it has been derived. It is not impossible, also, that as the waste places of the world become peopled, animals already becoming scarce may be advantageously domesticated on account of their fur or other products for which they are now pursued by the hunter.—The principal domestic animals, however, of the present day have been domestic animals, and highly valued as such, from time immemorial. We have no record of the domestication of the ox, the horse, the camel, the dog, etc. Even the llama and alpaca, although known only to the inhabitants of the Andes and adjacent regions, were found in a state of domestication there when South America was first visited by Europeans, and their sub jection to man is probably to be referred to the earliest periods of Peruvian civilization. The limitation of seine domestic animals to particular countries and climates—of which we have notable instances in the camel of the Asiatic deserts, the reindeer of the arctic regions, the yak of the steep and snow-clad Himalaya, the buffalo of tropical marshes, and the South American quadrupeds just mentioned—forbid us to suppose that all the important domestic animals were domesticated by the same people and at the same period, or that they have all spread in a state of domestication from a common center or source. Yet there are many circumstances which point to the same Asiatic region as that in which the greater number of them were first domesticated, which is commonly regarded as the cradle of the arts and sciences, and even of the human race.