Can’t just walk up to a deer or a raccoon, most times not even an elk, moose, or bison (Don’t try this! Some seem to invite you in just because they enjoy that crunchy sensation under their hooves). Certainly not a pronghorn. Even mountain lions, wolves, coyotes, and birds usually will have no fraternization with humans. Supposedly this is because they have “learned to fear humans.” Sciency types will sometimes talk about “naïve” critters who, when humans enter their territory for the first time in, like, ever, show none of the fear or skittishness we’d really expect to see.
So if they learned it as a behavior (as opposed to evolution, as humans have evolved a natural and entirely justified horror of spiders, which would be harder to overcome) how many generations would it take for them to unlearn it? Like, how long would humans have to stay out of North America before the critters would look at us (upon our return, of course) and think, “Meh…weird it’s going on two legs but doesn’t look all that dangerous to me.”
First point, we don’t know how much of it is learned and how much of it is evolved. We do know that it is some of each, but it could be 99% genetic and 1% learned or vice versa.
We can be fairly sure that it is to some extent genetic because seals, seabirds and *some *other birds on remote islands showed an instinctive fear of humans, even though they would be unlikely to have ever encountered a human. Land animals on the same islands often showed no fear of humans. Seals and seabirds will have a constant inflow of genes from individuals that have been hunted by humans. Some birds will also have limited gene flow from inhabited landmasses, providing genetic adaptations to human hunting. Other birds won’t. Generally waterfowl were more likely to show fear of humans than other bird, which makes sense given that vagrant waterfowl are likely to provide constant genetic inflow to islands.
How long it would take to breed out that genetic fear depends on a lot of factors, including how it was bred in and how detrimental it is to the animals survival.
The “fear” of a predator can evolve in a great many ways. It may manifest a generic fear of any moving object over a certain size until the animal learns that the object is safe, ie the default reaction is fear. This is the type of fear that horses primarily exhibit. It may exhibit as an avoidance of certain habitats types favoured by human hunters. This is a type of fear that humans have evolved. It may manifest as genetic fear of certain smells, movements etc. It may exhibit as a change in behaviours or physical structure, so the young may mature earlier to allow for more rapid reproduction, or the adults may become smaller to make them less desirable targets. A plethora of creatures have evolved such adaptions
The point is that animals don’t “fear” humans in one single way. They are no different to humans in that regard. Humans fear tigers. We fear them because we see fangs, wide mouths, claws, forward facing eyes etc. as inherently fearsome. We have evolved to fear those trait. Even if an animal doesn’t look much like anything we have ever seen, we have evolved to instinctively fear those traits. But we also instinctively fear the dark: we have evolve to avoid situations that favour tigers.
Animals likewise evolve to “fear” humans on lots of different levels. How long it would take to breed those traits out depends on how they a re encoded and how detrimental they are. A default fear of all novel, large moving objects may not be particularly harmful since novel large moving objects aren’t commonly encountered. It may never disappear naturally.
The portion of the behaviour that is learned can be undone in just one or two generations. Just hand feed the parents so they raise their young with no fear of humans. Most animals learn fear from their parents. If the parents show no fear of humans, the young won’t either.
I was outside with my dog the night before hurricane Sandy happen , we were in my back yard . We outside at 12AM , I have a small dog and I looked down to see if he doing anything and there was a coyote sniffing my dog’s butt! My dog was not moving and looked frighten , I let a yell out and the coyote took off and my dog started to bark at it. The coyote was standing right next to me , I could had touch it ! I called up a wildlife expert in the morning and the woman said it looks like someone may had been feeding the coyote and that was NOT a good thing to do . She said if she got two more calls like this the coyote would have to be killed b/c it’s losing it fear of people . This WAS NOT a dog
it was a coyote and I had no idea how long it was sniffing my dog b/c I did not hear it coming up behind us. If someone was feeding the coyote I wonder how long they been doing it. I also called the ACO in my city and he never heard of a coyote getting so close to a person and he said the same thing ,
that someone has to been feeding it. I would love to find the damn fool if this is true. Only an idiot would feed a wild animal right their own back yard!
I’ve been around deer in areas where hunting is either prohibited or hasn’t happened for a couple years. Those deer are remarkably fearless even now. I’ve had them approach me to get where they wanted to go. They keep an eye on you but aren’t so freaked out that they won’t break eye contact to go about their business. I’ve also seen deer eating calmly at a tank range near a main gun target. Giant guns going off with really big projectiles flying past them at over the speed of sound to slam in to plywood targets nearby didn’t phase them. Mostly they weren’t even curious enough to look up at the target or the tank.
I doubt it would take long for most to keep calm and eat on.
I belong to a gun club with several rifle and pistol ranges. The club owns approximately 700 acres. We don’t allow hunting on the property. There are times when we have to go down range and shoo deer away from the targets so we can continue to shoot.
You’re mixing two different types of animals together, and they have different reactions.
“A deer, a raccoon, elk, moose, or bison, pronghorn, and birds” are prey animals. They have evolved to be very leery of any strange, unknown animal, and assume it wants to catch & eat them. So they run or fly away quickly. (The ones who didn’t were eaten, and didn’t leave descendents to reproduce.
“Mountain lions, wolves, coyotes” are predator animals. But they are well aware that there are other, bigger predators who might catch & eat them. So upon seeing a strange animal, they have to quickly decide either to catch it to eat it, or run away before it eats them. Often a quick look (is it bigger than me?) makes their decision. (Which is why they often stand on their hind legs, rais eup their fur, etc. – ways to make themselves look bigger.) Some of this is instinctive, some is learned behavior (learned from prior fights, or from watching their parents).
In either case, it would take several generations of breeding & raising in proximity to humans to move them from ‘tamed’ to ‘domesticated’. They did this with silver foxes in Russia – I believe that took about 50 generations.
I am glad I saw the coyote when I did as I had no idea if it wanted to made a
meal out of my dog or a playmate! It had his nose right on my dog butt one bite would had killed my dog .
Something I have witnessed first hand is the evolution of jack rabbits in Lancaster area of California. As A kid 50 years ago I hunted these rabbits and they would flush almost right under your feet. Now after several generations of being hunted with 22’s they have bred to flush at over 300 yards of so. Out of the range of even a good shooter with a 22.
Conversely a small population of foxes and rabbits behind the Los Angeles airport in a small isolated field maybe 3 square miles at the most seemed to become less weary of humans as the field has been closed off for many years from the public,
Don’t forget that some of these “naive” animals lived on islands where there were no land predators at all. It wasn’t just that they lost their fear of humans, they lost their fear of all land animals. They might still be afraid of predatory birds, or ocean creatures, but animals that walked around on land didn’t trigger any fear. So you could walk up to a dodo and club it on the head, and the rest of the dodos would just look at you. If they lived in a place where some animals were dangerous they’d at least have the idea that if one of the group got hurt it was a good idea to run away.
