The GF and I were watching a program the other day about lions on ABC. This trainer had raised and worked with this pride of lions since their birth and was keeping them on reserve somewhere. Their behavior was similar to what you would see in a large 300 lb housecat. They would playfully pounce on the trainer and he would be wretling around with them and whatnot. The dude was regular person size.
I’m sure you can read all about it in his what will most likely be unfinished biography.
'Zactly. I used to know some wealthy, decadant country weirdos (I mentioned them in a thread waaay back when http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=501143) who kept a puma as a pet. They had found her as a cub on a hunting trip and adopted her. She behaved just like any other housecat; the only difference was that —even with claws removed and teeth kept filed by a vet— if big kitty wanted to playfully swat at you she might knock your ass across the room.
That’s what I would be scared of. I often see lions playing with each other but the difference is they’re used to playing rather roughly with each other, to the point where it could seriously injure a normal human being… But a giant human being might be able to take it.
Born free! As free as the wind blows!
The most famous semi-tamed lioness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsa_the_Lioness
For those who don’t follow the link, an orphaned lion-cub was hand raised and treated like a pet. She was eventually released into the wild. There’s a movie about it.
Lionnesses, hunting cooperatively, are used to going after game that’s much larger and heavier than they are. Water buffalo, for ex. Thus even if you were 8 ft. tall and weighed half a ton, they might see you as simply an upright ungulate or somesuch, to be measured up for the fateful lunge to the neck.
I’m thinking you’d need to be like the 50-ft. woman to intimidate wild lions on the basis of size (and keep your neck and lower abdomen safely out of reach).
That’s “only” several thousand cat generations.
Forget about lions, there are several species of wildcats comparable in size to a domestic house cat. I wouldn’t recommend taking one of them into your home.
ETA: Actually, domestication of cats is now thought to have begun much earlier.
I’ve read about people keeping servals, caracals and fishing-cats as house pets. So obviously it’s possible to do. What exactly separates those wild cats from lions and tigers, in terms of their instincts?
Cheetahs can also, I’ve read, be pretty easily domesticated. But they’re not at the top of the African foodchain; lions are.
Yeah, cheetahs are supposed to make pretty good pets even for normal sized people. They aren’t that aggressive but watch out when they try to chase a car going down the highway. They will catch it. There are way, way more people in the U.S. that have large cats as pets than most people realize. You can buy them online and some, like tigers, aren’t even very expensive at all and you can probably adopt one for free because it costs a lot to feed them. They can be fine until they get in a pissy mood. I played with a pet mountain lion once. It made me a little nervous just because of its teeth and strength but it was only about as evil as any house cat (and probably much less because of a lack of Napoleonic Syndrome).
This is from a pro-exotic-pet source: “Let’s make one thing perfectly clear: exotic cats don’t come litterbox trained! In fact, they often go to the bathroom in “unauthorized locations” even once they are trained. One woman’s pet serval sprays her in the face! While training can be quite successful, if you can’t live with the possibility that this animal may soil your house or don’t have time to devote to litterbox training, your decision should probably be to avoid owning an exotic feline… Male servals mark their territory up to 46 times per hour, and females mark about half as frequently. … spaying or neutering your cat only reduces the chances of spraying; many felines altered at a young age including mine spray or are unreliable in using the litterbox.”
From an exotic-animal vet: "Although a serval wouldn’t attack an adult human, it shouldn’t be left alone with other pets or a human toddler, says Melinda Surrency, an exotic-pet veterinarian at Southwest Animal Hospital in Beaverton. “Although servals aren’t that much bigger than a big house cat, they are much stronger. They have more of a wild instinct and are harder to manage.”
Note these are from sources you might expect to put a positive or neutral spin on exotic-cat ownership. If you look at sanctuary and animal-welfare sites, you can find much stronger language.
Right. You know how regular house cats think it’s the most hillarious thing in the world to jump out at you and bite your ankle? Last summer, a half-grown lion decided to play the same side-splitting joke on me. The results weren’t pretty.
As pointed out earlier, lions are a particularly poor comparison to house cats. Lions live in prides; every other cat species is solitary. A better comparison might be lions:: dogs.
Just some back of the numbers calculations.
An average housecat is about 10 lbs. A lion can be as big as 400 lbs.
So by “giant” human, you might want to be at least 40x your current size. For me, that would be about 8000 lbs or roughly the mass of an elephant. And I’m still not sure that would be big enough.