About 300. A nice little squirrel army.
(You had to see the episode…best sub-plotline ever).
Ava
I’m sure I will see it eventually (takes a slow boat a long time to get here).
Right. And if pigeons came in different colors, we’d have them in cages.
Squirrels are rats with fluffy tails, and pigeons are rats with wings.
Correction: Seagulls are rats with wings.
Seagulls are far too noisy to be rats.
A lot of people like rats for pets. I can’t get past the creepy tails myself.
I love seagulls. Quit bashin’ them!
My WAG is that the reason nobody ever domesticated squirrels has nothing to do with their colorings and everything to do with them not being of much use to humans. Dogs were originally domesticated because they helped with hunting and could guard the cave. Cats were domesticated because they killed mice and rats.
Personally, I’d be first on the list for a groundhog. They are so cute…I’ve spent many of evenings, sitting in my car (they run away if I get out of the car) and watching them at a nearby grounds.
But, squirrels? Urgh. Rats with furry tails.
This jogs a very old memory of a paper I wrote on the domestication of animals. The details are more than a little vague but, IIRC, “domestication” largely boils down to extending many of the traits of a juvenile animal over its entire lifespan. That makes sense, because many “wild” animals like raccoons make perfectly good pets as youngsters, but once they hit maturity, watch out. The physical features of domesticated animals also display more “young” looking appearances, with larger, wider set eyes and shorter noses than their wild counterparts. (Though whether those changes occur solely because of humans selectively breeding for features they find “cute” is open to some debate).
Floppy ears are a characteristic of very young foxes, and I’ll be willing to bet that spotted coats are another juvenile feature that disappears with age (or at least assures that the young fox wearing such a coat gets picked off by predators very early).
I like seagulls, too. Not the way they poop on you at the beach but they are just comical to watch. They’ll just be standing around nonchalantly and then all the sudden they have to look down at their feet like they’re checking. This is what I imagine goes on in their brain;
Seagull thinking: “Hmm, nice day today. There’s a lovely breeze, it’s a good day to be flying. Wait a minute am I flying or on the ground? I don’t seem to be flapping but if I am flying I could be plummetting to the earth right now! Better check.”
looks at feet
“Whew! I am on the ground what a relief.”
looks around a bit
“Hmm, nice day today. I like the beach, I like to feel the sand between my toes. Wait a minute I can’t feel the sand between my toes! Maybe my feet are gone!”
looks down
“There they are. Oh yeah, I have webbed feet, that’s why I can’t feel the sand between my toes.”
looks around a bit
“Hmm, nice day today. … What the hell is “plummet”?”
As for squirrels, I’ve raised a few and once they reach that age where they run up and down your body you know it’s time to let them go. I know some people who have kept them as pets but they can get aggressive (have you seen the nuts on them!) and they get into things if let run loose. Also, I’ve noticed that a lot of squirrels kept as pets end up with a neurologic disorder. I think it may be due to something lacking in their diet … or maybe it’s just Mad Squirrel Disease.
Wild squirrels are easy to somewhat tame. If you feed them on a regular basis they get braver and braver and eventually come up to you for food. My mom used to feed the squirrels at her old house, so that one of them started coming up to the house looking for food. He’d climb on the air conditioner and look in the window. Eventually, he started coming to the door and knocking on it. I kid you not, he’d tap on the screen door.
Squirrels as pets…ick. Needle sharp claws…huge nut-crushing teeth…omnivorous…no thank you.
Back in the early 80’s a guy at the university I was attending lured a squirrel close with peanuts and then grabbed it. It tore him up something awful. Dozens of stitches were required. If you want a small, furry pet that is a genuinely good pet, get a ferret. Ferrets rilly rawk.
I can’t believe anyone would impugn the lovely oppossum. They’re so…so…sparsely hairy, and pointy nosed, how could you not like them? My sister says they look like a bag of grease with hair. I love them, though…when they’re young, they’re quite appealing in a gremlin sort of way.
Of course, I love animals in general. I tend to keep to dogs and cats and birds in the house, although I love rats too.
So maybe if we domesticated squirrels, THEN we’d have dalmation-spotted ones, eh? Not that I want to be a squirrel tamer–my brother raised a couple, and before he let them loose he said they were 6 or 7 pounds of pure muscle and energy, absolutely uncontrollable.
Racoons–love to look at them, and the babies are adorable, but the big ones are just scary. Those mothers are BIG, and are just vicious should they decide to attack. No thank you.
Interesting input from everyone. I still want a skunk. 
Ever see a possum with its mouth open? It looks like a fake special effect for a horror movie. There are a lot of teeth up in there - it dosen’t look like it should be able to close its mouth. (Not to mention the naked tail and the fact that they look like they had half a pelt to go around so they had to stretch it.) We grow them real big around here - there’s one I see sometimes that I at first confused in the distance for one of those really big fat cats until I saw how it moved and its revolting tail.
We recently seem to have acquired a raccoon in our neighborhood - we’ve never had such a thing before. It’s a big fat one that seems to live in the storm drains, and I suspect it eats the food the neighbor lady leaves out for the feral cats. (Which is a rant for another day.) Are they really vicious? I know they can carry rabies, but are they naturally aggressive - say, to a terrier-sized dog? We’ve been having to tie my dog to a tree in the back yard recently because we’ve been doing a lot of construction - granted, mostly in the daytime, but could the raccoon be dangerous? I know the possums can be, but they’re pretty live and let live. I’d hate to have to call and get the raccon removed - it’s soooo cute!
Is there any ongoing (or finished, for that matter) attempt to duplicate the Russian fox results that anybody knows of? I found it so fascinating, but understood that there were supposed to be some methodology problems? Or was that misreported?
Also I’ve read an article about feral street dogs that when dogs breed indiscriminately in the wild and have to fend for themselves, they acquire a uniform “yeller dog” look rather than the wolflike appearance you might expect of extreme mongrelization.
I saw the same documentary and have referred to it on previous threads about this topic. You hit on the two most interesting points. 1) It only takes a very few (like three or four) generations to domesticate a canine. Previously the consensus was that it might have taken orders of magnitude more than that. 2) With domestication comes much more variety in looks.
They did this experiment for the fur industry. If the foxes were calm, they could keep them in a large open pen instead of individual cages which would have been much easier. As it turned out, the fur of the “nice” foxes was useless due to the nonuniformity.
This was probably the only reasonable, truthful and unbiased Fox documentary I have ever seen. 
Haj
I think possums are adorable! I’ve always wanted one, although according to my mom, they bite and are very aggressive. I have no idea how she knows this–maybe she was just hoping to scare me so I wouldn’t attempt to tame one and bring it home.
See, this is why we trolls don’t like you yoopers.
How could you like a skyrat?
The most common variety of squirrel to be kept as pets are prairie dogs which are a species of ground squirrel. Of course, one of the problems with them is that they can carry bubonic plague. They even have their own language
There are a family of possums that live in my backyard and usually one of them comes each night to eat leftovers from my cat on the front porch out of his bowl :eek:
They have become increasingly bold so that many times I can get as close as a foot away and they keep on eating, but I would never entertain the idea to touch one, much less domesticate them. They look like they could easily shred through your hand with those teeth. :eek:
Well, you’re not supposed to keep them in your pants. That could be part of the problem right there, I reckon.
I don’t think we’d have domesticated squirrels unless we could tech them to guard our granaries and keep them free from vermin.
On the skunk note…my girlfriend had a de-scented skunk as a pet when she was a little girl. She said it was affectionate, like a wierd little cat.
We had possums infesting our fraternity house when I was in college. They were sort of hideous-cute.
I’m nuts about animals, but I want no pet that can talk shit about me behind my back.
Prairie Dog 1: Where’s dinner?
Prairie Dog 2: Fat ass stopped at DQ again, so it’s late.
Prairie Dog 1: Like she needs DQ.
PD1 & PD2: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: