Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature 52(2) June 1995 137 On the nomenclature of domestic animals Colin P. Groves Depcirtmeiit of Archaeology and Anthropology. Australian National University, Canberra, A.C.T. 0200. Australia Introduction The scientific naming of domestic animals is a problem. Attention was drawn to it by Bohlken (1958, 1961), and the matter was raised again by Dennler de La Tour (1968). Following on these leads, I (Groves, 1971; BZN 27: 269-272) applied to the Commission to have names given to 'domesticates' excluded from the provisions of the Code. After a few less than supportive comments the proposal sank like a stone. Lost, but not forgotten: Corbet & Clutton-Brock (1984) returned to the question and made their own proposals. In this short review, I will explain what the nature of the problem is, survey the four different solutions that have been proposed, and make some further remarks of my own. What is domestication? One of the founders of modern domestication studies is Charles Reed and it is he (1984) who provides the most authoritative recent discussion of what exactly we mean by 'domestic animals" — those whose breeding is, in theory or in practice, controlled by humans: i.e. not simply tamed, or kept in zoos or laboratories, but controlled such that what is allowed to breed, and what is mated with what, is the criterion. We require also that this process of human control will have been going on for generations, because recently zoos have begun to take the same attitude towards some of their charges, controlling their breeding to maximise diversity for conser-vation purposes. The corollary to Reed's definition is that the domestic animals will have been altered in some ways — morphologically, behaviourally — from their wild ancestors. In each case there may be alterations meeting several human objectives: horse breeds differentially specialised for riding, racing, or pulling; cattle breeds specialised for beef, milk, or draught; and so on. The consequence of all this is that a domestic 'taxon' relative to its wild ancestral taxon (1) differs from it but (2) is readily interfertile with it even though (3) in part sympatric with it; moreover (4) it is heterogeneous with respect to it. Is a domestic 'taxon' — let us call it a parataxon — to be regarded as a different species from its wild ancestor? No; though the two may be, often are, sympatric without interbreeding, it is human vigilance alone that prevents them from inter-breeding, and when this vigilance is relaxed the two simply merge (see Groves, Ziccardi & Toschi (1966) on the ass and, for a very neatly analysed example, French, Corbett & Easterbee (1988) on the cat). In addition, some domesticates may be derived from different subspecies of the wild ancestral species, or possibly from different wild species, so that a domestic 'species' would in effect be paraphyletic. Yet, at base, the domestic parataxon is in some way conspecific with its wild ancestor. Is a domestic parataxon to be regarded as conspecific with its wild ancestor, but a different subspecies? No; a subspecies is a geographically delimited, as well as
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