The 21st-century back-to-the-farm movement stems from our yearning to escape the artificiality of modern urban life. Yet the domesticated plants and animals now found in most gardens and farms are themselves artificial, the results of extensive human meddling, cross-breeding and genetic manipulation. Mankind began engineering what we now call “farm animals,” including cattle, all the way back in the Neolithic period, between 10,000 and 5,000 B.C. Try as you might, you won’t find an untamed Jersey cow that originated naturally in the wild, because no such thing exists — just like there’s no such thing as a wild labradoodle. Cattle...
