Smits Marcel, Joosten Han, Faye Bernard, Burger Pamela
European Camel Research Society, Johanniterlaan 7, 6721 XX Bennekom, The Netherlands.
Microbiologist, Chemin de Crocus 1, 1073 Mollie Margot, Switzerland.
Animals (Basel). 2023 Jun 21;13(13):2050. doi: 10.3390/ani13132050.
Being in an advanced stage of domestication is a newly proposed requirement to decide which animals can be safely kept by humans. Dutch legislators were the first to apply it and other European countries may be tempted to adopt a similar approach. Unexpectedly, the Dutch assessors considered the dromedary () as being insufficiently domesticated and this species will therefore no longer be able to be kept as a production animal from 2024 onwards. In a recent publication on this topic, we showed that the domestication of the dromedary is actually very advanced. In this paper, we apply the same criteria that were used by the Dutch assessors to determine the degree of domestication, taking into account the most recent scientific developments in this area, even though it should be noted that these criteria have neither been peer-reviewed, nor published in an international scientific journal. For the sake of comparison, and in order to validate the procedure, we also applied these criteria to the house cat. The results confirm that the dromedary is highly domesticated, but also that the house cat () is at most semi-domesticated. Obviously, we agree with the decision of the Dutch legislators to place the house cat on the positive list, but our analysis demonstrates that this was decided on false grounds. Our analysis makes it clear that the requirement of being in an advanced stage of domestication is not suitable. Instead of maintaining this requirement, we recommend implementing evidence-based, peer-reviewed methods to decide which animals can be kept by humans, and to include species specific-guidelines in the legislation on how this can be achieved safely.
处于驯化的高级阶段是一项新提出的用于决定哪些动物可被人类安全饲养的要求。荷兰立法者率先应用了这一要求，其他欧洲国家可能也会倾向于采用类似方法。出人意料的是，荷兰评估人员认为单峰骆驼驯化程度不足，因此从2024年起，该物种将不再能够作为生产性动物饲养。在最近一篇关于此主题的出版物中，我们表明单峰骆驼的驯化实际上非常先进。在本文中，我们采用了荷兰评估人员用于确定驯化程度的相同标准，并考虑了该领域的最新科学进展，尽管需要指出的是，这些标准既未经过同行评审，也未发表在国际科学期刊上。为了进行比较并验证该程序，我们还将这些标准应用于家猫。结果证实单峰骆驼已高度驯化，但家猫至多处于半驯化状态。显然，我们认同荷兰立法者将家猫列入正面清单的决定，但我们的分析表明这一决定的依据是错误的。我们的分析清楚地表明，处于驯化高级阶段这一要求并不合适。与其维持这一要求，我们建议采用基于证据、经过同行评审的方法来决定哪些动物可被人类饲养，并在立法中纳入关于如何安全实现这一目标的物种特定指南。
