The “Commodification” of Animals

The basic precondition for the transformation of animals into “commodities” – defined as useful articles or facilities – is their immediate availability for the intended purpose. This is certainly not the case for animals living free in the wild. Domestication – or at least taming – is therefore the basic precondition for human use of live animals for whatever purpose. Research into the origins of animal domestication has a long tradition, which began with Charles Darwin (1868) and continues to the present day (e.g. Clutton-Brook (1999); Hongo et al. (2009); Conolly et al. (2011)). Definitions of domestication vary, but there is basic agreement that – in biological terms – domestication can be understood as separation of a domestic sub-population from the original wild population of the same species. Domestication must therefore be seen both as an anthropogenic and a biological process.