Thom Kelt

Libbie Hawker wrote:Bison are ... awesome at repairing land

Would you be able to elaborate some on this?  I'm curious to know how exactly they repair land.

And regarding the fibre, it doesn't have to be a large part of the enterprise.  I just don't care for waste and not using the fibre would be, in my eyes, a glaring waste.  The only things I'm comfortable with wasting are the liver and kidneys, and any other organ used for food that filters crap out of the body.  Pollutants congregate in the Yukon, unfortunately, and it makes offal inedible.  The main focus will still be meat and leather and since meat is damn expensive up there then I think meaty animals such as bison would be an ideal choice for the market.

For quite a while I've been contemplating heading up to the Yukon to do some ranching (since the land is "free" and all).  I'm currently doing a bit of planning and I'm still a ways off, but I want to ranch either buffalo or musk oxen.  I have a feeling that musk oxen may be more economical because they exist in greater numbers and their wool (Qiviut) is superb, but I kind of want to contribute towards the conservation of buffalo and increase their numbers.  If I want to do that latter, then I have to be making sure I use the whole buffalo (at least the ones that aren't going towards conservation, that is) to its fullest potential, and that would mean using its down.  It seems that buffalo wool is rather rare so I can't find much about it, so I'm going to ask here.  Is it suitable for garments and the like and would I be able to make a profit off of it?

Leora Laforge wrote:

Farming is mostly my goal, but I figure domesticated animals are easier to handle.

Domesticated animals are definitely easier to handle.  So why look at wild animals?

Just want to try something new.  I don't think there's anywhere in Canada that farms mountain goats or bighorns.  Plus, I also want to see what potential there is in regards to mountain goat fur for clothing.  I'd imagine it would be similar to wool, but I don't know for sure.  EDIT:  Plus, they look super cool.

Leora Laforge wrote:However I am assuming you are in either the U.S or Canada. In Canada it is illegal to capture animals from the wild and farm them

How is it possible that there are deer, buffalo, moose, etc. farms?  At some point those animals would have had to be taken from the wild.

Devin Lavign wrote:In fact look at the Americas. Only 2 species were domesticated by the indigenous people. Llama, and turkeys. While Europe, Africa, and Asia had huge amounts of domesticated animals. I don't think it was the Native population of the America's not trying either. Since obviously they succeeded with 2 species. They knew the idea and concept, but the majority of animals from the Americas seem resistant to domestication.

Not sure if I agree with you there.  Firstly, natives in the Americas did also domesticate wolves.  They were generally used as the beast of burden since others weren't available.  But as you said, canids are generally more prone to domestication, so this is expected.  More importantly, though, is that many native cultures simply didn't operate in such a way that domestication was needed.  The closest would have been the agricultural societies such as the Iroquois.  For the most part, though, native societies operated in a hunter-gatherer capacity and never truly progressed into an agricultural capacity (except for vegetables, see The Three Sisters).  Because of this, there was simply no need for them to domesticate animals, and it was more rewarding in the short term to just hunt them.

Leora Laforge wrote:How much time have you got?

Most of our domestic animals have taken hundreds or even thousands of years to be changed from wild to domestic. The ancestors of dogs, horses, cattle, sheep, goats, plus a few more domesticated animals had one main common characteristic. They lived in social groups.

If the wild sheep and goats you are thinking of are social then yes it is possible. Start with a large group and select for the most human friendly individuals eventually you could develop a domestic animal.

There are examples of animals that have been domesticated very quickly such as hamsters, lab mice, and rats. These are all very quick to mature and have lots of offspring which allows for very heavy culling.

I know of one experiment on how quickly an animal can be domesticated, this is the Russian domesticated fox. It took approximately 60 years to achieve a human friendly fox by selecting only the 20% born each year who were most human friendly.

With sheep and goat they do not reproduce nearly as quickly, so selection would be much slower. I would estimate it would take 100-200 years of careful selection to achieve a fully domesticated species.

From my knowledge I would conclude that it is possible to start this project, but you would not achieve a domesticated species in your lifetime.

If you want tame animals, you could raise babies who would continue to be friendly as adults, although they will not be predictable.

If you want to farm them you could probably do that too, bison, deer, elk, and wild boar are all wild animals that are frequently farmed.

Farming is mostly my goal, but I figure domesticated animals are easier to handle.  Now, regarding the length of time it takes to domesticate.  You say it took 60 years to breed a human friendly fox.  Silver foxes have a sexual maturity of around 10 months.  This would mean it took ~72 generations.  Mountain goats are 30 months, so it would take 180 years if the 72 generation figure is accurate for the species (no guarantees).  In humans we've seen people reach sexual maturity earlier than in past decades, and this had been attributed to high-fat diets (as far as I know) and this is backed up by a study on rats.  So would it be possible to decrease the length of time it would take for a mountain goat to reach sexual maturity by altering its diet in a similar manner?

Figured someone here might know the answer to this.  I've tried Googling it but putting "goat" or "sheep" and "domesticate" in the same search term just returns stuff about domestic goats and sheep.

Also, I know mountain goats aren't technically goats, but this is the closest section relating to them.  

Thanks!