I don’t remember which PBS show I saw this on but the Russians had experimented in domesticating wolves and the wolves would have none of it.
there was an excellent PBS show on a guy who raised a bunch of wild turkeys from birth. Really cool show. Anyway, they treated him like another turkey. When they matured they moved on. One stayed behind and befriended him but eventually there was an incident that involved the turkey attacking him out of the blue and then they parted company.
From the aspect of domestication with humans it appears it would take many generations of breeding (at least of some animals) to create a consistent predisposition to interact on a level we could accept.
I think any animal can be trained to be somewhat friendly to a food dispenser. After that we don’t want to be eaten by the animal and of course there needs to be some understanding about bowel movements in the house.
Obviously some wolves could be, since we have domesticated wolves. It may be rare, but to declare that no wolves can be domesticated is obviously incorrect.
The turkey chicks imprinted on him and treated him like he was their mother. When they outgrew the need for a mother, they left and/or treated him as a competitor.
Well, presumably the domestication didn’t turn any specific wolves into dogs. Presumably over many generations, a population of wolves became a population of dogs. This doesn’t contradict the statement that you can’t domesticate a wolf (or any number of actual, individual wolves) by raising it (them) from birth.
Defining “domestication”, “training”, and “tameness” would be helpful to the discussion.
Any animal can be trained, if what you mean by that is deliberately changing its behavior, because all animals respond to positive and negative stimuli.
Any animal can be tamed, if what you mean by that is becoming inured to the presence of human beings and/or attracted to them because they offer benefits (food, water).
Domestication in the sense of changing the species genetically to become predictably safe to be around, easily manipulated for our own uses, and reproducing the same, is a long and iffy process. Even animals domesticated for ten thousand years (sheep, goats, cattle, pigs) are potentially dangerous and certainly quite wild if not carefully reared from infancy and the males castrated. Intact adult males of all large domesticated species are significantly hazardous.
It is easy to see why the number of species that have successfully undergone this process is very limited.
Yeah, if you can stand another Jared Diamond citation. In The Third Chimpanzee, Diamond argues – IMHO persuasively – that humans are chimps, for taxonomic purposes.
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The title of the book refers to how similar taxonomically chimps and humans are; and that their genes differ by just 1.6%, whereas chimps and gorillas differ by 2.3% (p. 19). Thus the chimp’s closest relatives are not the other apes with which it is classed, but the human (see Homininae). In fact, the chimpanzee-human difference is smaller than some within-species distances: e.g. even closely related birds such as the red-eyed and white-eyed vireos differ by 2.9%. Going by genetic differences, humans should be treated as a third species of chimpanzee (after the common chimpanzee and the bonobo)[1]
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