Reading about the experiments that resulted in the tame silver foxgot me thinking- what other animals have been or could be domesticated? With a similar experimental framework, could black bears be domesticated? Hyaenas? Big cats? Baboons? Big apes?
Are there any unusual domesticated animals, just used in small parts of the world (or mostly forgotten parts of history)?
The majority of land mammals can and have been kept as pets – until they reach puberty. Then they tend to get unpredictable, and the larger and more predatory they are, the more dangerous this unpredictability is going to be.
This is still true of male domesticated animals with few exceptions, which is why gelding/neutering is so widely practiced.
Deer and such can be tamed and kept in paddocks although here again, unaltered males are responsible for a surprising number of human deaths.
I nominate hedgehog, ferret, sugar glider, and (descented) skunk as unusual but not utterly ridiculous mammal pets. Probably many native rodents can be tamed.
Speaking of rodent-y things, guinea pigs are popular pets in many places. They’re *also *raised for food in parts of South America.
The paca, a large tropical forest rodent and favored game species, was successfully domesticated in Panama in the 1990s. However, raising them for food has not really been commercially viable to date, probably due to relatively low reproductive rates.
There are also programs to domesticate the capybara, the world’s largest rodent.
It is mainly social animals that have been successfully domesticated, since humans can exploit the existing social behaviors. There are some exceptions, however, like the house cat.
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… ferret …
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Actually, ferrets have been domesticated for more than 2,000 years.
Trumpeters are birds that are frequently kept as free ranging pets in Amazonia and which could probably be domesticated.
Cheetahs are generally non-aggressive towards humans and have been kept successfully as pets for thousands of years across several different cultures. Unfortunately, they are also endangered and have very little genetic diversity because of an extreme population bottleneck they once went through so it limits their ability to be bred with even more desirable traits for full domestication.
I believe that there are some basic traits that would make an animal more of a candidate for domestication. This would obviously heavily depend on what we wanted to do with it. If it were being raised in pens for food the requirements would be much different than an animal we wanted to include in out family as a house pet. Being prolific speeds up the process of selective breeding which is an enourmous help. I believe that ravens could possibly be selectively bred and make excellent house/yard pets. Bears might take a couple of hundred years to successfully produce a reliable pet worthy breed. Wild common black rats are remarkably tame when handled as babies. Bobcats are another animal that seems to fit right into a family but still remains somehwhat of a risk. I have a facination with Badgers and have been trying to aquire one for some time now. Digging might be a major problem with them. I think an animal might require some kind of a job that mimics what it is bred to do naturally. As dangerous as a wolverine is I have a feeling it might be a decent candidate for domestication . But I see no real use for it beyond a novelty. I would use my badger to hunt squirrels.
NM. Just a silly joke and now I’ve realized what forum I’m in.
10 points to Gryffindor.
The fact that we ever domesticated the aurochs is absolutely insane.
Genetic diversity isn’t a huge issue in terms of plasticity ( kennel-driven disease might potentially be a different matter ) as really nature has already done the heavy lifting with cheetahs. They are about as well adapted for their primary function as it is possible to get and they are already easily tamed as you note. If cheetahs could have been domesticated one can assume that gazehounds would never have been developed because no greyhound or saluki is ever going to seriously compete with a cheetah either in a sprinting race or to functionally course game.
The bigger issue as to why they proved impossible to domesticate is because they simply could not be captive bred. It wasn’t until recently that the issues with that have been worked out at a few facilities and it is still not exactly simple.
Among marine animals: seals, dolphins (including the orca). I read a children’s book about a tamed swordfish used for spearfishing but that’s not likely.
Bats weren’t domesticated but they were very nearly used as a weapon for war.
Scorpions are encouraged to stay in some south American households to hunt cockroaches.
In South Africa, one farmer kept a lion in his farm to deter terrorists.
To expand upon this: Dolphins have been used, not only for entertaining dolphin shows and various kinds of research, but also as working animals in the open ocean.
Sea Life Park in Hawaii was originally (and may still be?) a research organization as well as a public dolphin show place – they used the profit from the shows to help fund research. They took a trained show dolphin out to sea with them to assist scuba divers – mostly to carry tools and messages from one diver to another, or between divers and the boat.
They didn’t want to reward the dolphin with dead fish out there, as that would attract sharks. So they trained the dolphin to accept “tokens” (little plastic pieces), which the dolphin then put into a basket. Later, the dolphin could trade in the pieces for fish. Dolphins can learn to understand abstractions like that.
Underwater messages were written on a grease-pencil-board with a grease pencil. The dolphin took the board from one diver to another until he found a diver who would give him a token for it. But the divers also often pointed to the person the message was meant for. The dolphin quickly figured out what that meant, and took the board directly to the person pointed to.
Dolphins also have excellent echo-location abilities, and this has been exploited also. A dolphin can locate a dime buried in the mud. Dolphins have been used to locate underwater mines, and other hidden stuff. When they find something, they plant a flag on a stick by it to mark the spot.
No, dolphins are not used to blow up ships or get themselves blown up when they locate mines. They are WAY too expensive to keep and train for anybody to let them be used as disposable like that. I heard this directly from a Navy dolphin trainer.
Sources: Mostly from Lads Before The Wind by Karen Pryor, one of the founders of Sea Life Park and their head trainer and curator of mammals. Also The Porpoise Watcher by the late Ken Norris, modern-era grandaddy of dolphin research. Both fun reads.
I’ll add the Hippo to the list. (In case you don’t know, Hippos are one of the most aggressive and dangerous animals).
But where the Swedes failed, the Soviets did succeeded (kind of):
It’s hard to bring up a baby.
A while back I heard that Saudi Arabia was attempting to farm raise the wild oryx antelopes-this would involve some degree of domestication-has it been done?
Its an interesting question for which I have no answers. However the reverse is worth noting. Some animals are just too cussed to reliably domesticate. The African water-buffalo for example is down-right dangerous rivalling hippos for attacks on humans.
The other animal which looks cute and take-home (if you have the space) is the zebra but alas, they do not take kindly to orders.
Tigers have very sharp corners. And they are loners. On the other hand lions are sociable creatures but generally the big cats - much as I’d love one - are not interested in being pets.
Great movie, but that’s a leopard named Nissa ;). And apparently they’re one of the more difficult to tame and train big cats. They’re kind of the anti-cheetah in terms on temperament.
I’m surprised chipmunks and squirrels haven’t been domesticated.
We’ve domesticated other rodents. Squirrels and chipmunks are used to living around human beings. And they’re cute so you’d figure there would be a market for them as pets.
Does anyone know if there have been failed attempts to domesticate them? Maybe they lack the genetic potential for domestication.
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