The animals that are domesticated today are quite diverse, ranging from herbivores such as cows, hogs, horses, sheep, and even elephants, etc, and carnivores such as cats and dogs. Based upon this already broad range of animals that have been domesticated, presumably by the combination of active and passive interactions between man and these animals, I have two questions:
Can all animals in principle be tamed? If not, which animals living now do you suppose (terrestrial mammals/reptiles especially) cannot be tamed?
Do you think that domesticating a species from its wild state is an achievement that requires either deep or specialized scientific knowledge, or could have been/was done more or less through a trial and error process, the people who did it not really understanding what they were doing? Or on the other hand, do you believe animal domestication to be something that could only really have been done by people who knew exactly what they were doing and carried out the domestication in a systematic manner (i.e. “scientifically”)?
Tamed and domesticated are two different things. If an animal is domesticated it means, at a minimum, that it is bred in a manner which is conducive to the control of desirable and undesirable traits. i.e. In captivity. So think of a horse or a cow. A tamed animal is born in the wild, captured and trained/acclimated to human beings. Think an elephant, bear or a leopard.
That depends entirely on how you choose to define “tame”.
At its broadest, all animals can become acclimated to human beings, so they won’t run away and will take food from us. So by that standard all animals can be tamed.
On the other hand, it’s damn near impossible to get most animals to do anything they don’t want to do. So in that sense they can’t be tamed.
My first response is that you have produced a false dilemma. It doesn’t have to be a choice between “deliberate and systematic” and “trial an error”.
My second response is that the answer seems obvious. Since the people who domesticated the first dog had no models to work from, they clearly couldn’t have been domesticating wolves in a systematic manner using specialised knowledge.
So we can say for certain that at least wolves can be domesticated accidentally.
But domestication probably wasn’t a trial and error process. It probably wasn’t deliberate or directed at all. Most likely, the animals that had the lowest tolerance of humans ran away, and were never domesticated, so teh starting stock were already predisposed. When you add in that humans protect and feed animals that have favoured traits, and kill any animals that are aggressive, then in a few hundred generations you will end up with domestic animals without any deliberate intent of any sort.
IOW early domestication was just *natural *selection at work. Animals that showed the least fear of humans reproduced in greater numbers than those that were fearful and aggressive. Humans provided the selective pressure, but the selection wasn’t artificial or directed in any way.
There are lots of animals that people have tried and failed to domesticate, including zebras. That doesn’t mean, of course, that they definitely cannot be domesticated, but it’s useful data nonetheless.
I suspect that many invertebrates, like, say, beetles, could never be domesticated in any meaningful sense of the word, because they just don’t have the brain power to be aware of our existence.
And I get to be the first to point out that Jared Diamond’s book “Guns, Germs, and Steel” talks about this quite extensively. He proposes a list of characteristics that makes an animal species a good candidate for domestication. One of them is that they need to have a strong herd instinct, naturally looking to a group leader. We can then coopt this instinct and put humans in the leadership position.
I believe most reptiles and amphibians can become acclimated to handling, so they no longer bite or flee, but that hardly counts as “tame,” much less domesticated.
It’s been established that chimpanzees cannot be trained or domesticated. Even if they are raised from birth in a human environment, as adults it’s their nature to turn savagely violent for no reason, as the unfortunate case of Travis demonstrated.
They don’t “turn savagely violent for no reason”. They do have reasons, it’s just that, not being chimpanzees (or other critters), humans don’t perceive the world as they do and often don’t realize that many mannerisms we find friendly, such as making eye contact, other animals regard as threatening or the prelude to a fight.
Yeah, nonhuman chimpanzees can be (and have been) trained. And what Broomstick said is true – miscommunication might be the main, or only, reason behind such attacks. The fact that there have been incidents does not establish the nature of the species (otherwise World War II would mean we human chimpanzees are irredeemable).
Whether it’s ethical to keep chimpanzees in captivity or “train” them is another question.
Depends on how you define it. If the chimp salivates to the sound of a dinner bell, that could be considered “training.” However, that is very different from being tamed or domesticated.
Check out “Guns, Germs, and Steel” for a good discussion on this topic. There are many animals (lions, tigers, zebras, cheetahs) that can be kept by humans with great difficulty. However, they are so difficult and dangerous to handle that you could never consider them “tamed” in the same sense as a dog or a cat. For instance, you never see Africans riding around on zebras, do you? It can be done, but it is so hard that it’s not practical.
Another good example are the gray Siberian foxes. Foxes are too skittish and hostile to train in their wild state. Some scientists were able to breed them to be docile, like dogs. However, in the process they acquired traits that makes the final animal not very similar to a fox at all.
So while you can “train” an animal (in the sense that it behaves semi-predictably in response to stimuli) there are very few that can be “tamed.”
Assuming the OP meant domesticated, as opposed to the much simpler “tamed,” the answer is, hardly any animals can be domesticated, if you consider the proportion of un-domesticated species.
Jared Diamond points out in Guns, Germs, and Steel that only 14 large animals (which he defines as over 100 pounds) have ever been domesticated so far in human history, despite considerable effort in some cases (such as zebras). And his count of 14 includes some animals we might consider fairly fringe cases, such as variants of cattle.
While there are indeed more species domesticated under the 100-pound size he picked, there are still millions of species that have not been domesticated and probably never will be.
He goes into several reasons for this. Off the top of my head (and there may be some I’m missing), generally the animal must have a hierarchical social structure amenable to human husbandry (i.e., we can make ourselves the herd or pack leader), be relatively nonviolent toward humans, survive in captivity, and breed in captivity. The last reason is a biggie – for example, individual captive (wild-caught) cheetahs have been tamed repeatedly throughout history, but they don’t breed worth a damn in captivity – it turns out that during the courtship ritual, the male and female range over vast distances of many, many miles. Apparently they aren’t able to breed successfully without all that room. That makes it impractical to breed them in any useful way (even zoos have had fantastic difficulty getting cheetahs to breed, and that’s despite their willingness to lose money on the proposition, something impractical for large-scale domestication).
Animal domestication was most likely achieved by natural selection based on interaction with animals who displayed a shorter flight distance than their peers. The attraction to humans for these animals may have been most likely the abundance of food as a result of crop domestication for herd animals or in the case of wolves, even earlier at the local garbage dumps.
In both cases intereaction of the naturally tamer members of each species in the vicinity of human habitations resulted in a natural breeding program that successively resulted in a morpholgically different species.
The mechanism of selection for short flight distance was deliberately employed in Russia in the last half century resulting in a dog like fox called the Siberian fox
I guess I used the wrong terminology. The point is, as I understand it from listening to an NPR segment on the subject, that there’s no way to raise and train a chimpanzee so that it won’t turn violent against humans as an adult, if it gets the chance. While there are instances of domesticated animals such as dogs turning violent, I’d think its part of the definition of domestication that it’s the exception. For chimps its the norm. Hence the need for chimp retirement centers where chimps used for research or entertainment when young can live out there natural lifespan.
I don’t know about this, but I have heard that you can’t work with adult chimps. All the training and work is with juveniles. From the Jane Goodall Institute
In theory, any animal can eventually become domesticated; given adequate time and resources to conduct the necessary breeding programs. Whether or not those factors are reasonable is the main driving factor behind domestication rather than inherent difficulties. For example some megafauna like elephants, hippos and rhinos simply breed too slowly, and cost too much to properly domesticate. The pay off isn’t worth the program. Other animals, like deer or raccoons, breed quickly but would take a long time to properly domesticate and they wouldn’t benefit us in any demonstrable manner.
Wolves cannot be domesticated even if raised from birth around human beings. Their descendant (the dog) can, of course. Those who say they have wolves as pets are usually talking about wolf hybreds. Unfortunately, they don’t make good pets as a whole. They have a lot of the strength, but none of the evasiveness that wolves have.
Those wolves around garbage dumps aren’t domesticated any more than the polar bears who visit the local dumps in Alaska.
Did you check out my cite for the domestication of the Siberian Fox suggesting the mechanism for the transition from wolf to dog ?
If you are talking about modern dumps, aren’t they several miles out of town and nowhere near sleeping humans? I don’t see why natural selection would work there either.