this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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"Like real pashmina, shahtoosh is also from the Himalayas—it was a choice wrap for the 16th-century Mughal emperor Akbar the Great—but instead of goat hair, shahtoosh is made from the underfur of the chiru, a species of antelope indigenous to the Tibetan Plateau in China. The problem is that these majestic animals must be killed before their wool can be removed. As a result, since 1975, the species has been classified as endangered."
No explanation in the article about why they "have to be killed before their wool can be removed." Wikipedia only says, "As undomesticated wild animals, the chirus cannot be shorn, so they are killed for this purpose."
I have to think that there is a way to harvest the wool without killing the animals, but that the people who want to harvest the wool don't have the resources to do it.
Himalayas makes me think cold. So maybe they freeze to death if you release them naked like that? If you keep them around until it regrows, well that's domestication.
The solution here would be to just domesticate them.
Shouldn't take more than a few thousand years
You can actually do it on a much shorter time scale, depending on the species in question. A Soviet scientist in the 50s started it with foxes and had noticeable results by the 4th generation, less than 2 decades later.
The real catch here is in the semantics, defining your terms and expectations. How much genetic drift you're aiming for, and what traits you select, what results are functionally "good enough", etc...
In this example, we probably don't need fully domesticated animals, some tamed generations should be good enough.
But foxes are canines and have a great record, thanks to those fox experiments, of being rapidly domesticated. But canines have lots of pups quickly. Sheep are so much slower on that front which dramatically increases the length between generations. Even "domestic" rams with thousands of years of breeding are still barely "tame".