I think squirrels are adorable. I suspect my cats would think they’re tasty (especially my ex-stray junior cat, who can catch flies in mid-air and once brought down a dragonfly and carted it inside).
Did you know raccoons hiss much like cats do? Found that out in my teens when my grandfather trapped one in the back yard.
When I was in college, almost everyone seemed to like the squirrels running around campus, as they were a bit of nature in an urban neighborhood. Except me and seemingly one other person.
I didn’t like them because they ate the insulation from our telephone wire, where it crossed our backyard from the pole in the alley, and the phone became static-y after rain until the wire dried out again.
Squirrels also got into our attic under the eaves and ran around up there at odd hours until one rolled down the stairs. Stupidly, one of us opened the attic door. A squirrel rocketed through the living room and dove under the sofa right where my mom was drinking her morning tea. Utter. Chaos. Ensued. We thought we chased it out the front door, but it actually ran into the hall closet. When someone opened the closet some days later, More. Chaos. Ensued.
A fellow student who worked in the university daycare center hated the squirrels because when she took the kids out on the lawn to have fun, they kept approaching the cute squirrels and getting nipped or scratched, so she’d have to take them to Student Health, file an injury report, etc.
Maybe we should revisit that ‘castrate the dangerous males’ technique.
We have introduced red squirrels here in Cali and some fox squirrels. The fox squirrels are a hoot! One of them will climb a telephone pole when a red tail hawk is circling above challenging him to a fight. he will also Prance right through the middle of a bunch of cats completely fearless. He would play some kind of tag with my lasso apso. They have personality.
I didn’t say I didn’t like squirrels. I didn’t say I did like them. I respect them. They are wicked smaht. And when it comes to stealing from bird feeders… they can’t be bargained with, they can’t be reasoned with. They don’t feel pity, or remorse or fear and they absolutely will not stop… ever… until they eat all the bird seed!
Here are a couple videos in which an engineer, frustrated at the squirrels eating from his birdfeeder, tried to thwart them, to no avail. Very entertaining videos, and no squirrels were harmed in the making:
There’s domesticated, and there’s tame.
I think the vast majority of animals kept as pets (aside from cats / dogs / pot bellied pigs) are tame, rather than domesticated. Farm animals (sheep, horses, cows etc.) are presumably similarly domesticated, if not to the point of adoring us hoomans and wanting to be close to us.
A tamed animal (e.g. the budgie a few feet away from my desk; though it’s arguable whether he’s been tamed!) can learn to tolerate and possibly even enjoy human companionship, but there’s not the same level of dependence.
To choose something to be domesticated, I’d have to think of what it would be used for. Food (cows/sheep/chickens)? pets (dogs/cats)? Work (horses, elephants, dogs)? Something else?
A big cat has some appeal - but would be useless for any kind of labor. Nor do predators make good eating, I gather. Possibly as a hunting companion, as dogs have been, though that’s less useful these days. And they’re a bit too large to be practical simply as pets. There would need to be many generations of selective breeding to eliminate the worst of the predator instincts, as well, or Fluffy might wind up eating the dog (or the baby).
A potential food animal that required less resources than, say, cattle, would be a good candidate. Someone upthread mentioned deer as one possibility.
The silver fox domestication experiment is fascinating reading. I don’t know if the foxes are as thoroughly human-oriented as a dog is, but they seem to be on their way.
My personal candidate would be some kind of bird. There are numerous species of parrots kept as pets, but I do think they are tame, versus domesticated. A few generations of very selective breeding might well bring them closer to that line. Imagine a bird that genuinely loves people, has at least some of its destructive tendencies bred out, and can talk (either via simple mimicry, or even some basic conversation).
Owls might be useful pets as ratters, I don’t know how intelligent they are but they do seem to become attached to their owners and become very affectionate. I can see where crows might be useful for many tasks if selectively bred. Planting seeds, security details, many, many small jobs a crow could lkely handle. It might take 100 generations for meaningful results to start appearing.
I think if we want an intelligent animal that could be useful. We might try dolphins. They could lead to schools of fish for the fishing industry. They could mind boundaries of swimmer and surfer areas on beaches. To warn of sharks or drownings.
Maybe octopus species could be used. I have a tiny knowledge (I watched a show on PBS), they are very intelligent. I’m not sure what they could do. I hear they’re tasty.
I love crows. I’m working with a weird one at the moment. He’s a little of an outlier. Apparently his own kind don’t like him. So he hangs with us, the dogs and other wild birds. Not fond of my garage cats. So he torments them for his own paranoid reasons.
I don’t think you’d ever get them to care enough about anything but themselves to be trustworthy at any task.
They are very self serving.
Planting seeds? Nope, they’d eat them all.
Are you kidding? Crows will bring you cash money.
I wouldn’t recommend that if any of the cats is like my Newest Addition. He’s been taking squirrels. (We have way too many of them and they keep trying to move into the attic.)
If they’re well treated, quite a lot of sheep, horses, cows etc. do appear to want to be close to us. (Watch out for your buttons!)
My father, many years ago, was tempted to acquire a cheetah. Then he thought better of it. He said that for the same number of pounds of cat we could have several domestic cats, each with their own personality, while the cheetah would only be one.
(I also suspect that the cats and dogs of our household, and also my mother, were all opposed to the idea of adding a cheetah.)
“One for the cutworm
One for the crow.
One to rot
And one to grow.”
Wow. I like that. I gotta get Poe better trained.
I scrolled through this whole dang thread to see if Beck would suggest possums.
Cows, if they haven’t been mentioned yet. They play with toys like dogs, love their people, can be trained. If we could just stop eating them!
Possums are lazy bums. The hobos of the animal world.
Clarence was special. In many ways. If I had asked him to work for his Cheerios he would’ve balked and flashed me that adorable possum grin😀
Not at all as birds go. Falconers sometimes disagree (hobbyists can get defensive about their hobbies), but raptors generally aren’t considered very bright by the way humans tend to define things (the Crested Caracara is a notable exception to this rule). They don’t have the adaptability and problem-solving abilities of birds like corvids, psittacines or even some egrets and herons. What they are is superbly adapted killing machines.
It’s a stretch and perhaps a bit too apples to oranges, but very generally comparing a hawk to crow is a bit like comparing a shark to a dolphin.
I agree with you about hawks, I dabbled in falconry and as you say they are killing machines. They lose their fear of us and tolerate us well but never bond in any sense. Owls I have had a bit less experience with. I rescued an injured horned owl one time and kept him in an empty cell of my pigeon loft while he recovered. I had a distinct feeling he liked me and enjoyed being petted. I only had him a short time before he was released. But he seemed a lot different than the hawks.
As milk producers and draft animals (as well as for meat), they already are. And I have a friend who used to ride one; though I think they’re a slow and not very comfortable ride.
If you mean as house pets: I don’t think they can be housebroken. Cow dung is large, frequent, and frequently messy.
I was once at a summer farm conference where they held a game of cow pie bingo. A field gets marked off in numbered squares; people buy a ticket for one or more squares. Then they let a cow loose in the field; person holding a ticket for the first square shat on wins.
Someone standing near me, who didn’t know much about cows, said ‘What if it’s a really long time before the cow gets around to it?’ and somebody else answered her ‘That’s why they play this with cows, not with cats.’
I think it was in Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel where he mentions domestication of plants and animals.
His theory was that pretty much all the various plants and animals that could be domesticated have been domesticated for various reasons. And this is why certain cultures had an advantage in that they had more of these “potentials” nearby, so that made them achieve civilization faster than others.
For example, zebras are closely related to horses. Why were they not domesticated? They are different enough; very hard to catch, get very antisocial with age, they are ferocious biters, and don’t let go once they latch on. In general, African herbivores were just too antisocial and nasty for humans to start to try to control them.
Meerkats come to mind. Probably not a good idea though.