Domesticated Animals and Beasts of Burden || Society & Culture Worldbuilding Guide Part 3

Welcome to the third part of my societies and culture worldbuilding guide series, which is a sort of season 2 of my worldbuilding guide series. These videos build off the physical world building we've already done. Part 3 will include talking about the availability of domesticated animals and beasts of burden!
Worldbuilding Guide Playlist: • Worldbuilding Guide
Worldbuilding Guide Blog: www.madelinejameswrites.com/b...
----- LINKS -----
Website: www.madelinejameswrites.com/
Ko-fi: ko-fi.com/madelinejameswrites

[@jaycee945]

Loving the stuff you're doing now in this series. I'm a bit behind with my own world but these latest editions are pushing me to try and catch up. Can't wait for the next one!

[@madelinejameswrites]

I'm so glad, you can do it!

[@StoryGirl83]

That was interesting to hear about why zebras aren’t domesticated. My sister likes zebras and might know this, but I never considered it and find it interesting.

[@Jellybabyfang22]

Thanx

[@GreyBearcub]

Cats domesticated themselves, at least to some extent. Farmers needed a way to control plagues (like rats) and cats needed food, so... besides, cats are not that big, are innate hunters, mature rapidly, can feed themselves, in summary, they meet some criteria for domestication. Excelente vídeo, Madeline! Sigue así! Keep going!

[@madelinejameswrites]

Thank you!!! That definitely makes sense 😂

[@4984christian]

Again, thank you for your videos! I do something with pokémon but it plays in the past where they couldn't domesticate anything other then small normal type pokémon. There is an "industrial" revolution when they find out how to evolve domesticated evees by giving them stones which let's them make use of the elemental powers.

[@madelinejameswrites]

Oh that's a lot of fun!

[@JustinCycling]

Yes, I am definitely interested in the discord! Going to your website right away :)

[@MrVlandus]

That's a very cool intro. I really need to update mine. Good job. In my fantasy world it's very similar to our world. I would not put it passed people of my world taming a dragon and stuff.

[@Earth2Stephen]

This is great. Thank you so much for posting these videos! This is exactly what I need as a busy writer!

[@TheOokamiChan]

Amazing food for thought ❤

[@chris12412345123]

I noticed that you basically didn't mention invertebrate domestication like silk worms, bees or cochineal even though silk worms and bees are incredibly important. Like silk defined the armor, clothing, art, textiles, trade, and even wars for huge cultural regions in our world. If one were to talk about domestication and ignore them would be really inappropriate. How would you incorporate and make rules for invertebrate domestication?

[@madelinejameswrites]

We are only talking about domesticable beasts of burden in this part, there are definitely plenty of other animals that have a large impact on societies.

[@Jpteryx]

Cows also had very aggressive ancestors, the aurochs. Before they went extinct, aurochs were famously bad-tempered, so it's pretty impressive to me that humans managed to domesticate them. Also, if you want, in addition to human migration you could consider wild animals' migrations. On Earth, all the continents except Australia and Antarctica were connected less than a million years ago, which is why some land animal families like cats, dogs, and deer are ubiquitous. But on a world like yours, where none of the major continents seem to have had recent land bridges, each continent might have its own mammal families. Maybe one continent might have dogs, bears, and antelope but not cats, pigs, or deer, and maybe it's the opposite on another continent, while a third continent might have monotremes and marsupials instead, like Australia.

[@madelinejameswrites]

Yes! Very true. I'm working on an update for this part that takes a good bit of this into consideration. It'll only be for the blog post those and I'll make a note here that I have updates!

[@HelotOnWheels]

Very enlightening video! I had no idea transhumance worked that way; I had always assumed that the whole community packed up and moved back and forth with their animals. Do young men “graduate” at some point from moving with the herds to settling down and becoming marriage-eligible? I suspect another huge effect of domesticating livestock animals is ending, or at least reducing, human sacrifice. Human sacrifice is basically the idea that gods like to eat flesh and blood just like predators and scavengers do, so if you offer them some flesh they’ll do you a favor or at least leave you alone. It’s revolutionary to have a cow or a sheep to offer them instead of your firstborn son, a female virgin, or a war prisoner (what do all three have in common? None of them can fight back). The version of the Iphigenia story where Artemis saves the girl by offering a goat or deer in her place, the Mithras cult’s bull sacrifice, and of course the Judeo-Christian-Islamic story of the sparing of Isaac (or Ismail, in the Muslim version) all suggest the impact of livestock domestication in ending human sacrifice.

[@madelinejameswrites]

I think it really depends on the individual society and beliefs. I believe in some societies animal sacrifice was done frequently but human sacrifice was considered a greater form of sacrifice. So human sacrifice would be more for special occasions if you will... And I believe the Andean region domesticated animals before plants, and they had animals for sacrifice pretty early on.

[@HelotOnWheels]

@@madelinejameswrites Agreed, and there are certainly cases of agricultural, livestock-raising peoples who still sacrifice some humans - the pre-Christian Norse, the Carthaginians, and the Aztecs, for starters - which often alienates them from their neighbors who’ve abandoned or sublimated the practice. And fantasy adds its own wrinkles; in my world of Firma, a female elf can live 800 to a thousand years and have two hundred or more babies during that time, so as elves developed advanced healing arts and child mortality went down, child sacrifice was adopted for a time to keep the population in check; later, the struggle over ending child sacrifice split elven society in two. I’m still curious about how marriage works in those transhumance societies. Do the herdsmen ever get to settle down and tie the knot, or are males divided into marriage tracks and herding tracks from childhood? And is their eligibility for marriage determined at all by whether their parents were married or not (and is the answer the same for boys and girls?).

[@madelinejameswrites]

@@HelotOnWheels honestly I haven't done that in depth of research on transhumance societies, but I suspect it will differ by society.

[@xevira]

Cats aren't domesticated. We're the ones who are domesticated to cats. We're their servants, beasts of burden, if you will.

[@madelinejameswrites]

Precisely!!