But none on the list is designated thusly. “Hamster” is on the list, but is the hamster I buy in the pet shop really different from its wild kin?
I’m just wondering if we know how to domesticate animals, or if the process is a “natural” one in which happens all by itself (as animals evolve to live in close proximity to humans), and is too complex for us to reproduce on purpose.
I know about the Russian Fox experiments-- the so-called Domesticated Silver Fox-- but is that really a viable population? Has it stood the test of time?
Just being a hybrid doesn’t make it domesticated. Is it actually considered a domesticated animal? The wikipedia link doesn’t give any detail. My wikipedia link gives a date of 1500BC in Europe, which I wouldn’t consider “recent, historical times”.
According to the Wikipedia article on domestication, hamsters were first domesticated in the 1930s, and some more dubious species domesticated more recently (ball python, hissing cockroach, red deer, sugar glider, etc.)
Another species that’s not on the list is the domesticated House Mouse Mus musculus. They’re certainly as domesticated as Lab Rats, which are on the list. I’m not sure when they were brought into domestication.
My former colleague Nick Smythe, through selective breeding, was able to produce a domesticated strain of the Paca, a large tropical forest rodent that is favored for food in Latin America. They have different behavior than wild pacas, but don’t look different physically. See here.
The lab rat, about a century ago. The hamster, as mentioned above. The Soviets were messing around with moose, IIRC. The salmon, now being farmed on a huge scale. Probably the shrimp for the same reason.
There is also the "African Black Ostrich,"a hybrid domestic variety developed from cross-breeding wild subspecies in South Africa starting in the late 19th Century.
They just took wild foxes and bred the friendly ones and very quickly they had a set of foxes which you could have in the home. I saw a very good BBC documentary about dogs recently and they filmed a family who were asked to care for wild fox cubs to see if they could train them to be domesticated but the foxes were having none of it, eventually they had to stop the experiment because the foxes got too dangerous to live with as they grew bigger. You could easily live with these bred Silver foxes though - they were very affectionate and people already keep them as pets.
Incidentally, from the same stock they also interbred the foxes that showed anti-social traits and you couldn’t even approach them before they started trying to attack you.
