Domestication is the process of adapting wild plants and animals for human use. People domesticate plants for food, for the production of wool which in turn is used in making clothes, and for medicinal purposes. Animals are domesticated for food, work such as the camel, and some as pets e. g dogs. Domestication involves taming, training and breeding. When attempting to domesticate an animal or a plant, you have to pay attention in grooming them and interrupting the bad habits by inculcating more desirable ones. The domestication of plants and animals has created room for larger production of both and has encouraged their co-existence and most importantly human survival.
One very important step in the plant domestication process is specialized domestication. Over a long period of incidental domestication, both plants and humans rely on each other for survival. Humans may substitute their hunter-gatherer behaviors with camping in areas where they know edible plants normally grow. They begin by relying on the presence of these edible plants to survive and will in turn, tend to engage in activities that encourage the said plants to flourish. Additionally, apart from saving edible plants from animals such as the deer and disrupting the local soil, humans may start to weed out unwanted plants, watering these same plants during the dry spells, which provides an even better environment for plant growth and reproduction.
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Agricultural domestication is the other step in the process of domesticating plants. At this juncture humans have tamed the wild plants. They prepare the soil, plant seeds, safeguard and take care of growing plants. Eventually they harvest the produce and set aside seeds to plant the nest planting season. They then select only the largest and best seeds for replanting.
Domesticating animals can be a challenge, and this may only be overcome with the engagement of a whole wealth of knowledge on the part of the domesticators concerned. This usually tends to pertain both to nature and to the selective breeding process. For example here, the less demanding animals to domesticate are herbivores that feed on vegetation as they are easiest to feed. They do not require humans to hunt other animals to feed them or to grow special plants. Cows for instance are easily domesticated. Herbivores that eat cereal are more strenuous to domesticate than herbivores that graze because cereals are costly and also need to be domesticated.
On the other hand, selective breeding is a form of selection in which humans keenly pick out which characteristic should be passed on to the offspring. Farmers pick out cattle with favorable traits such as larger size or producing more milk and make them breed knowing that all the advantageous traits could be heritable. The offspring will get to be more and more with each generation. Hunting is also a form of selective breeding with the genes that humans desire being separated from the gene pool enabling the less wanted genes to be embraced in the next generation by expanding their odds of mating in contrast to the hunted species.
In conclusion, through the long process of plant domestication, the size of edible seeds means more food per seed, thus leading to a greater production of plants and animals enabling the survival of humans over the years.
