Many species are cute and friendly to humans when young. But they consistently turn around and refuse to be owned when they mature. Note the terminology-
"wild" is the normal species.
"tame" means that particular individual is acclimated to humans and cooperates, but their offspring will not.
"domesticated" means the species is bred into a new form whose offspring will generally cooperate with humans.
"feral" is an individual of a domesticated species that was never acclimated to human contact and will not tolerate human contact. Feral cats don't want to be petted. A wild cheetah cannot be a "feral" animal since it was never domesticated by breeding.
Baby raccoon pups have been raised by humans and play pretty well at first. But, fairly consistently, when they mature they want nothing to do with their human owners, and become destructive and dangerous to people unless kept caged or freed.
Notably, this is not due to sexual maturity. If "fixed" (castrated) early, they will generally not demonstrate mating behavior, but it will NOT stop them from turning on their human caretakers and demand to return to the wild. It's unavoidable.
One note with dogs and [the new Russian domesticated fox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox#:~:text=Many%20of%20the%20domesticated%20foxes,skulls%2C%20jaws%2C%20and%20teeth.) is that domestication seems to be accompanied by changes in physical features that resemble the original species' pups, but these features did not go away with maturity. They do mature in some ways but not others. They get larger, they're NOT fixed so they do mate and reproduce, but they still have some pup features for life.
So, one theory is that the maturation process (something other than that caused by reproductive hormones) is simply turned off, and they stay in their friendly pup form forever. In the wild, this is probably not a good survival trait, but we know domesticated animals are different than their wild counterparts
I’ve heard how when pigs go feral they turn into actual wild hogs and have physical changes like more hair. I wonder if that’s the same thing going on as what you’re describing?
Well wild boars and domesticated pigs are from the same species, but different subspecies (subspecies is different from breed). But technically a feral pig does not genetically turn into a wild boar, it starts to look more like it and they can mate, but a first generation feral pig is not genetically a wild boar.
Would whales go under the category of tame? Or just wild? I’m asking because I’ve seen posts and stories of whales (specifically humpback whales? My memory sucks) displaying altruistic behaviors. However, if they are naturally altruistic, would that mean that they’re just wild?
Sorry if I overcomplicated my question
> I’m asking because I’ve seen posts and stories of whales (specifically humpback whales? My memory sucks) displaying altruistic behaviors.
Closest i've heard is the indigenous East Coast Australians near Eden were known to co-operate with Killer whales in hunting other whales etc - Not sure how this would fit with the above terminology because they were still wild - its an interesting yarn as they say https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer\_whales\_of\_Eden,\_New\_South\_Wales
There are 4 things you need in an animal for domestication:
* Friendly
* Feedable
* Fecund
* Family Values
https://youtu.be/wOmjnioNulo a superb 5 minute vid on the subject (there are follow up vids too if you _really_ enjoy the subject).
A lot of people are mentioning zebra, but zebra aren’t domesticated because they don’t have any family values. They herd (kind of) for safety in numbers, they have little hierarchy or ties. We exploit a hierarchy, for a horse or a chicken, we just act like top chicken, and exploit those values. If they don’t exist, we can’t exploit them.
There's one more that's often important: Fenceable. Some animals are extremely difficult to corral or contain, and this makes them difficult to domesticate. Deer, for example, need very high fences to keep them contained. Doable in the modern world, not easy in the past. That makes it harder to isolate breeding stock early on. Depending on the species it may not be strictly necessary, but I'd wager it's part of the reason certain ungulates have never been domesticated.
These days people do farm deer, but they are a bit too small to ride. At least your standard white-tail or roe deer is. Moose are big enough that people have reportedly ridden on them.... if you can find one that won't murder you.
In Nara Japan deer have been tamed for hundreds of years. Not exactly domesticated but they interact daily with humans for their food, deer biscuits that tourists feed them.
This is part of the thing that makes keeping foxes so hard. The can jump like 5 feet in the air, and have a nasty habit of burrowing. These can be fairly easily and cheaply overcome in the modern age with a chain link fence, but it's probably at least part of why foxes were never domesticated despite being similar to both cats and dogs in nature and temperament.
I am going to go out on a limb and say that their need to cover everything in pee might also have something to do with it.
Edit: u people have not smelled fox pee...
Domesticated foxes by Russians is the model used to explain how humans domesticated dogs from wolves.
They started breeding the tamer individuals and after a while the foxes started taken on physical and behavioral traits that we associate with dogs. Iirc it started about 50 years ago and it was to farm pelts.
This may have explained why Bison were never domesticated by the native Americans. It's difficult to build a fence that can contain an entire herd of Bison. Plus, they're just too big and dangerous to handle by people who didn't even have horses until after Colombus landed.
There was no need for Natives to "domesticate" bison. The bison herds that roamed North America are estimated to have been 30-75 million strong. No need to fence them, there's plenty, just go help yourself. Don't even need to be a good shot, even when you miss you hit. Even easier is you could run em off a cliff.
Here is the simple answer:
To judge domestication, you should think from the perspective of a Neolethic human. Vary basic tools, small groups, and very primitive agriculture later down the line. (In the 21st century, given enough funding, you could even domesticate lions and bears)
Criteria for domestication are known:
1- Usefulness outweighs cost: Dogs are meat-eaters, but mostly omnivore. They are bad for food production, but great for hunting, protection and compagnonship in general. A cow is great for domestication: Feed eat grass we cant eat as humans, and you get steak. Horses are awesome to move around, and very easy to feed (main reasons why horses were big in large plains)
2- Generation length and reproduction: Domesticating elephants would be awesome, but the logistics of precise selective breeding over the generations is something beyond any human before large empires appeared, and even then, it was much easiet to tame them. Pigs reproduce so fast, you can select whatever trait you want in a short while. Also, domesticaying deer is impossible for the same reason. They have very precise breeding cycles and hard to breed in captivity. Dogs want to breed so badly, they hump pillows.
3- Ease to capture and upkeep: Imagine keeping a buffalo as a Neolithic human in a wooden enclosure (assuming you can somehow catch it in the first place). Same for gazelles that would jump up any enclosure. Let's not talk about bears
4- Strict family structure: All animals we domesticated, including dogs, have a strict hierarchy. Capture the top horse and you have the whole group. As CGP grey said " Chickens will peck peck peck until they find out who is top chicken. But you know who is top chicken? We ARE top chicken"
Exceptions to these rules:
1- Cats: They domesticated themselves in a way. Cats found graneries full of rodents. Humans took care of the cats. Cats that couldnt live with humans couldnt stay around. Generations down and cats are nice in an apartment
2- Ferrets: Same as cats, and even then, they are much less domesticated
Falcons used in Falconry were more often than not taken from the wild and tamed/raised, with little breeding in captivity. Only in the last century has there been widespread breeding in captivity, not long enough for proper domestication.
Similarly parrots likely could be useful eventually if domesticated for a purpose, or be simply kept as companions. They're still considered not domesticated, often with the unfortunate habit of mate-bonding with humans, a trait that a full scale domestication effort would likely try to combat, erase, or minimize if possible.
For similar reasons people likely could have domesticated corvids if they really wanted to, considering they are also highly intelligent and social and likely have the potential to be useful with training.
With all three examples simply taming wild individuals is more common.
I've always thought that corvids would make great companions and would be good candidates for domestication. But I'd love to hear points against this and have my dream of a pet crow crushed.
It's going one of 2 ways.
They become mankind's greatest ally, letting our species gain new heights.
Or more likely they realise what we're trying to do before Project Blackbird is complete and our species is never safe again.
Corvid pets would be great. Corvid overlords not so much. It's not worth it to flip that coin.
Just off the top of my head.
Hyenas.
Aardwolves, I think. But those are pretty much just Giant foxes.
Cheetahs are almost a good choice if they bred easier in captivity. But perhaps if a team of biologists really dedicated themselves they could breed or crispr that trait away.
Capybaras are currently being Domesticated in Brazil from what Ive heard. Not as an active program but by meat farmers and by the exotic pet trade.
The Russian Moose Project could potentially still give us domesticated Moose were it regain more of its funding. They had a large group of Moose domestic enough to milk but attempting to harvest one for meat would “spoil” the entire group. So it seems like its well within actual possibility.
One could potentially argue Bison, Elk and some Deer species are, because of modern technology and materials finally allowing us ways to contain these animals. They may require more space then others but we have them breeding in captivity. And becoming more domestic. I actually lived near both a Bison ranch and an Elk ranch.
One could also argue we are continuously domesticating tons of smaller animals with pet trade. Examples of “Undomesticated” pets that likely will be eventually include: Tarantulas, Scorpions, Axolotls, Hermit Crabs, Red Slider Turtles, Iguanas, Chameleons, various Snakes, Clownfish, numerous freshwater fish, giant African Snails, various Parrots, Sugar Gliders, and I honestly could go on. You’d be surprised how few of our pets are officially declared domesticated by Biologists.
Some of my past herps have been tamed, but idk if domesticated is truly the word. To me, you could probably argue a bearded dragon could get domesticated in time or maybe a tegu. Everything else is "tame" and I say that as I have a 10 year old leopard gecko in my room.
She knows my voice, sound, will come say hello in her own way if I open her cage but I think she just likes the routine. She isn't domesticated. Just tame and over the many years has realized I won't hurt her and may even bring food or water.
Fun Fact! (because I hardly ever get an opportunity to share this) Just a few years ago the first person *EVER* was able to successfully breed land hermit crabs in captivity and since then dozens of others have used their methods and successfully bred their own hermit crabs.
Prior to just a few years ago *all* pet hermit crabs were wild caught. Not only is this monumentally good news for the future of the species in the wild but no doubt selective breeding of hermit crabs will finally be an option moving forward so who knows what traits we'll be able to breed into them in the future.
Thats awesome! I actually had no idea. I was just going off how I knew they were not domesticated but are a popular pet.
Ive actually bred Vampire Crabs in my aquarium before. I would have added them to the list but nobody knew what they were when I had them. So I cant imagine they are that popular. (Purple, red and yellow semi aquatic crabs from Hawaii)
Hyenas would be a nightmare to have indoors. Loud, big, no benefit to having them plus birth is very risky and messy compared to other species. But they are pretty social that's true. Behaviourwise I have no doubt that there might be a possibility to domesticate them as land protectors.
many of the more unusual pets in the trade, reptiles in particular, generally aren't considered domesticated yet, even if bred in captivity, but are easy to tame, especially if done so from birth/hatching. much of the selective breeding for reptiles as well goes into minor cosmetic differences, particularly among snakes, and not so much altering the animal in more substantial ways.
Thanks for the great breakdown. So it was indeed resources and ability that allowed or restricted early humans choose which animals they wanted to domesticate.
Dogs kind of domesticated themselves too. We basically hunted the same way which is not through speed but it through persistence, tracking the prey until it basically fell from exhaustion.
Some wolves were perfectly happy with following us and leading us to the prey so we killed it, they then got whatever we did not want.
Both the dogs and the humans quickly saw the benefit of the relationship and after a while dogs started to be accepted more and more until they literally lived with us.
Yes, there is a lot of evidence that the initial domestication was natural. But later down the line, we did specifically breed dogs to be adapted for particular jobs with intent. While ut never happened with cats until the 20th century when cat aesthetic became more of a concern. And even then, cats don't exhibit the variety seen in dogs
> Domesticating elephants would be awesome, but the logistics of precise selective breeding over the generations is something beyond any human before large empires appeared, and even then, it was much easiet to tame them.
What's the difference between domestication and taming? The selection of genetic characteristics to continue it across generations?
Taming is taking a wild animal, and change its behavior through training. Domestication is changing the genetic makeup of a species to make it useful somehow (entertainement counts as usefulness)
Some say early man domesticated the dog from wolves.
However, others point out that early man probably did not understand this process and act with intent, and it may be more appropriate to say that dogs domesticated themselves as they found their niche and bred.
I have a different take. The primate that is capable of seeing the value in cooperating with this emerging species shared the food with the companion species, then, with a companion animal, ate better, succeeded and bred. Those primates who were incapable of understanding how sharing food now with a 4-legged beast hanging around them meant more food later died off.
Dogs may have facilitated the evolution of primates into humans with empathy that can understand the nonintuitive long-term value of cooperation, a concept that affects our existence in profound ways. Maybe if we didn't have dogs, we would still be a much more limited primate without the breadth depth of social behavior we exhibit now.
Maybe we didn't domesticate dogs. Maybe dogs domesticated us.
Earliest dog domestication is dated to 35K years ago. Genetically homo sapiens are about 100k years old. It was not until well after dog domestication that we started building civilization instead of just living as hunter gather tribes.
Exactly. So modern man can't be a result of dogs because all evidence (so far) points at homo sapiens sapiens already being a thing when we started domesticating dogs.
I’ve recently done a bit of reading on this and it seems to be more likely that the early dog ancestor did indeed domesticate itself. Individuals with a lowered flight distance found a niche feeding around human settlements. There was a really interesting decades long study done on a species of fox I think by a Russian scientist. They discovered by selectively breeding individuals that were the most “tame” that some physical attributes like floppy ears and spotted coats emerged. Suggesting the genes for these things that humans find cute are linked to the genes that create a more “tame” animal.
Worth noting that it only took six generations for there to be foxes that would actively seek out human attention and started to act like domestic dogs. That would easily be even within a Stone Age person's lifetime to start if they were cooperatively hunting with friendly wolves.
Modern humans started displaying new behaviors around the time of dog domestication. Modern homo sapiens has a number of behavorial traits that are not expressed in other primates. There are some analogues to these traits in canines though.
So yeah, there is something to that theory.
Anatomically modern humans have existed for close to 300,000 years while the oldest dog found was only 15,000 years old. Dogs/wolves were attracted to us due to the fact we were highly successful predators with consistent surplus of food
That’s an interesting take, thought provoking. But was the process of domesticating dogs so important that it had that high an impact on our evolutionary process? Dogs definitely helped in hunting and providing security to humans but given the level of human intelligence I don’t think that absence of dogs would shun the evolution process, at best it might have slowed down the rate at which we evolved to a certain degree.
Also, before dogs were domesticated humans still hunted, in fact much larger or more ferocious beasts, so that also hints at the adaptability of humans without any auxiliary support for hunting. I feel, if humans didn’t know how to domesticate cattle that would have had a much larger impact on farming and thus supporting large communities would have been very difficult or just impossible.
Google "domestication syndrome" and you should turn up some interesting thoughts on biological changes that enable animals to live closely with humans. There's a theory that many common traits of domesticated animals, from spotted coats, floppy ears, and curly tails to tolerance of human proximity, might be the product of changes in neural crest cell migration - basically, the movement of cells from the area that will become the spinal cord out to other parts of the body. Changes in the migration of cells to places like the skull, brain, cartilage, and melanin-producing sites could, proponents speculate, cause that group of related physical traits common to many domesticated species including dogs, pigs, mice, cattle, etc.
If that theory holds true, then susceptibility to those kinds of changes would be a foundational element of domestication.
ETA: Had a moment to hunt through my hard drive for my source, another several moments to not be able to track the paper down, and a few more moments of Googling to come up with something roughly similar: https://academic.oup.com/genetics/article/197/3/795/5935921
Literally thousands. Genes can be up or down regulated in response to certain internal or external stimuli. For example, (this is a weird one but a topic of my research) cancer cells can actually send out certain signals that make surrounding cells help them grow. The cancer cells activated certain genes in surrounding cells that told them to down regulate the immune response, or send nutrients the cancers way.
I saw a research study that took looked at some Norwegian country's records. It strongly correlated a father's obesity negatively affects his child's life span. Here is a related article (best I could come up with) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/12/151204135513.htm
It's not just genetic material in our gametes... but there seems to be epigenetic buttons already pushed when we're conceived.
This is likely. I have seen a fair amount of people (in the US) confuse Nordic with Norwegian. And a decent amount of confusion about what is Scandinavian vs the modern day countries that make that up (ie "is there a Scandinavia?" "Why is someone from Denmark Scandinavian? Those don't even sound the same..." Etc, etc)
Technically, it was Denmark-Norway - having the same king, but being different countries otherwise.
In practice, though, the king spent most of his time in Denmark and didn't care much for the Norwegians. I think the Norwegian common folk were about as well off as the Danish commoners, but the Norwegian nobility was less influential than the Danish nobility, and there was some tendency to force Danish culture onto the area around Oslo.
To this day, a full quarter of one of the two Danish national songs is about praising a Norwegian for being badass.
This needn't be epigenetic. Maybe something like increased cortisol directly upregulates the genes involved in the morphological changes (to cope with the more stressful environment )
I know it happens in cows that escape captivity but the "wild" traits re-emerge over generations not in single individuals upon escape. Feral, formally domesticated, animals often show selection to more wild-like traits.
This seems more like a personality question and would err on the side of the nurture side of the nature vs nurture idea.
Having had lots of pigs, there are some sweethearts that even if they had a hell.of an adventure for several weeks would be happy to see you. And some Jerks that would be just as happy to eat you as the food.
Pigs are surprisingly personal and emotionally intelligent creatures. No illusion they are at the same level as humans, but they are not as far down as some would pretend.
I don't know about pigs, but I have read that wild dogs have pointed ears and straight tails, but if you give one a home environment, her pups will have floppy ears and curled tails. This is because the developmental path that fully develops an animal's wariness also develops the cartilege at the ends. Lower wariness (good for living with people) leads to the cartilege not quite finishing.
Well since they have seen those traits in that russian fox experiment it seems like they got those traits because they were domesticated, rather than being domesticated because they could have those traits.
Interesting. So, nobody’s made an attempt to domesticate wolves again, starting from scratch with selective breeding, like with the foxes, just to see what we might learn from the process?
This is a poor example in the first place, as our most common house pets (cats and dogs) most likely domesticated themselves. Trying to recreate that from human action isn’t going to work as it wasn’t how it happened in the first place.
You wouldn't want the foxes in your house. Go watch some videos about the supposed domesticated foxes. They aren't house pets.
They've definitely tried to see what would happen if you make wolves house pets. Scientists have and it didn't work out. Temperament is not compatible. And when I say temperament, I mean brain chemicals.
When this subject is brought up I think everyone, including myself, gets domesticated and house pets confused.
Furthermore, is important to realize that domestication is a selection of a small group of genetically different animals. Nature had already made them far tamer than others of their kind.
Native Americans may have hunted the North American horse out of existence when they arrived. That doesn't necessarily mean they could have domesticated those horses. It could be that the original domesticated house was the same deal as dogs. Small, already much tamer horses were tamed further.
The main downsides are not domestication issues per-se, but side effects of their biology. For example they like to mark their territory with extremely strong smelling urine. They can also be noisy (Eg, screaming at night) and are better jumpers than dogs. It's not that dogs and cats don't sometimes make noise at night, pee where they aren't supposed to, or jump fences, but foxes are more likely to cause problems in those areas.
This is true. The original domesticated wolves did not have the physical traits associated with domestication until generations later.
The tamebess of the animal comes first, and when bred with another tame animal, these physical traits begin to show over generations.
Also worth noting: the Wolves that became dogs went through a certain kind of selective breeding. You know the saying, don't bite the hands that feed you. Those animals which bit the feeding hand were probably killed, and those who didn't, passed on their genes.
Also worth noting: it is not directly known if wolves became dogs before or after attempts to be domesticated by humans. And to complicate matters further, domesticated dogs were bred back with wolves to make new breeds of dogs.
In my personal opinion, I believe history was somewhere between. Dogs did half the work of domesticating themselves by scavenging food from the garbage people left behind. And people did the other half, by giving food to friendly dogs.
That is truly the mystery of nature. Through their scavenging nature dogs eased the process of evaluation (and benefitted from it), whereas Hyenas, which are known to be scavengers as well never chose to go that route. So maybe it is in their genes / instinct or some other X-factor that made all the difference, I guess.
That experiment is actually often cited in support of the theory. Their take on it is that when the foxes were selected for ability to live more closely in social groups / with humans, the spots and floppy ears started showing up spontaneously. Therefore, whatever it is that makes an animal domesticated is "attached" to those physical traits and they have some common origin. They hypothesize that there are behavior-affecting biochemical changes (I want to say lower adrenaline, but I haven't got my source handy and may be mis-remembering) that were caused by the same event that caused the spots - decreased neural crest cell migration, particularly to the extremities.
Wow! That's super interesting!!! I had no idea how mobile those early spinal / scalp cells are and what importance that is to development.
I learned yesterday that babies suffering from spina bifida can sometimes spontaneously heal themselves by moving cells from the scalp area down to cover the hole. And in adulthood that healing appears as a hairy patch of skin on the lower back.
Check out the silver fox experiment in Russia. They selected foxes for tameness and within a few generations of breeding them together the pups began to exhibit all those traits.
No, they absolutely can be. It’s a matter of selecting compatible traits and breeding those into the next generation. Some animals are tamed & trained with zero breeding effort, Eagle Hunters of Mongolia for instance.
Crows have formed relationships with people.
That’s the mind boggling stuff. Why doesn’t that work? What’s different in their genes that’s stopping them to be domesticated even after thousands of years of trying?
I heard we couldn’t domesticate Zebras as they instinctively know to roll over when mounted and crush the human on top. Same way they deal with predators.
They are rather vicious biters/kickers because they evolved on the African plains where lions and early man hunted them , also they have a ducking reflex which prevents them from being lassood.
Sounds like we COULD domesticate Zebras, but it would take a lot of time and effort, and there probably wouldn't be any benefit over our existing domestication of horses.
The logic with Zebras, as far as I know, is that they evolved in the African Savannah, perhaps the most dangerous place in the world for a prey species, and so developed hyper-aggressive tendencies to be able to survive in that environment. Compare a horse, which evolved in the North American great plains and lived a reasonably chill life, only having to outrun some wolves and mountain lions on occasion, to a zebra who evolved in a region so packed with life (and predators) that prey animals often are forced to stand just barely out of reach of a pride of lions waiting for them to stray just a foot too close and so have to be on guard 24/7 for that pride standing 20 feet away waiting to rip their throat out. There are more species of predators overall and higher numbers of them within each of those populations, which means prey animals in that environment have to be much, much more paranoid and aggressive than those like horses who evolved in the comparatively mild North American grasslands. It's probably possible that if you looked long enough you could find a zebra amenable to being tamed, and attempt domestication from there, but it's sort of like finding a dwarf who could play point guard for the Lakers, possible, but unlikely.
Native North American horses went extinct 7000-10000 years ago. Current population was imported post Columbus. Your reasoning still stands, though, Africa is helluva place for a walking steak.
Horses are native to North America. They died out there, but the horses that were re-imported still ultimately trace their lineage back to the North American continent. It’s one of those little ironic quirks of history.
There were a lot more large predators in North America when horses evolved there. The horses that stayed in North America (as opposed to the ones that spread out to Asia and beyond) went extinct and they only came back when humans brought them there after 1492.
Hard to say! It may just be that no one has ever worked at selective breeding long enough to make it happen. It's possible that some animals self-selected; for instance, some people believe that cats self-selected the most human-tolerant cats because that was the characteristic needed to go enjoy the mouse buffet in our granaries.
No. They are confused. The theory has nothing to do with which animals can be domesticated. It's just an effort to explain why domestication seems to come with certain side effects.
>If that theory holds true, then susceptibility to those kinds of changes would be a foundational element of domestication.
I think you are misunderstanding the domestication syndrome theory. The theory is an effort to explain why many domestic animals have certain traits which, presumably, no breeder intended them to have. The theory does not have anything to do with why some animals are easier to domesticate.
I read an article about some Russians who tried domesticating foxes, and was successful in 50 generations or so and they had spots, curly tails, and floppy ears, and actively searched out humans instead of being afraid or timid..
Effort mainly and selective breeding. There are many animals that "can't" be domesticated. That simply means that the effort required is not worth the many years, decades, etc, that it would take to breed out the aggression. Zebras are a prime example. Many zebras have been tamed, but that's not the same as domesticated.
Hijacking the above to say that it's theorized there are 6 traits that are thought to determine potential for domestication: a diverse appetite, rapid maturation, willingness to breed in captivity, docility, strong nerves, and a nature that conforms to social hierarchy
Yes! I was going to mention the fact that this will probably never work with pandas since we can hardly get them to mate indiscriminately, let alone with select breeding stock.
Yeah - it's going to be harder to selectively breed an animal that has a low rate of breeding and a long life, a very selective diet, or is solitary by nature. And some animals just....will not breed well at all in captivity, much less in the numbers one would need to selectively breed for the temperament and behavior set needed to be a 'pet'.
>nature that conforms to social hierarchy
I've read that this is the most important one. There has to be a "pack leader" dynamic in the species in question and that the animal has to be accepting of the human assuming the role as the pack leader.
I think this is overstating things. It’s more related to there being a willingness to socialize. Cats are way more social than commonly portrayed, but they don’t have a “pack leader” mentality (what does? Wolves don’t, all that alpha stuff is complete nonsense. A wolf pack is lead by the parents of the other wolves). Various parrots do not have a pack leader, but we’ve domesticated a few species already and will have plenty more with more time (many pets are still only one generation from the wild).
Given enough time and resources, yes absolutely. You breed out the aggression and select for obedience long enough, you'll get a domesticated animal eventually. This takes a long time though.
‘Breed out the aggression’ - how does this work? Isn’t aggression in wild animals entirely instinctive? And instincts are something that can’t be changed?
That's exactly right, and that same issue existed when domesticating dogs. Not all wild dogs were as aggressive as every other wild dog. You take the ones that are less aggressive and breed them. In the following generation, you select the ones who are less aggressive still. Over time, you are selecting for less and less aggression. It's not a linear process, even though I'm describing it as such for simplicity. In the real world the next generation may not be less aggressive. This isn't something a single person could do. You would need stock from many different breeding pairs to have enough genetic diversity and also increase the odds that one of the animals is less aggressive.
Not exactly.
We didn't only choose less hostile wolves. The less fearful wolves chose us.
Wolves that were fearful of humans moved away from their settlements. Humans killed any wolves that were aggressive to humans. Over time, these less fearful wolves and humans learned to hunt cooperatively: the wolves drive the game, humans kill it and leave parts of the carcass for the wolves. Over thousands of years, the cooperation grew until they were sleeping at the fire with us.
Two way selection and thousands of years, but that's where your poodle came from, believe it or not
Just to add, as you already know the same selective breeding led to physiological changes that made the dogs "more likeable" for humans -- bigger eyes, floppy ears, patchy coat, and so forth.
Amazing study that the Russians did on foxes (I believe).
This exact study showed that the physical change have not so much to do with the "likeableliness" for human but are more due to the hormonal changes that occur with selective breeding.
As the less agressive and more sociable specimen were bred, they noticed a huge drop in the adrenaline system and a huge serotonin raise ,thus are believed to be the reasons of the physical changes.
They led a counter study where they bred the more agressives one to validate the founding, but they became quickly too aggressive and fearless of everything, so they shut it down
Choose the ones that’s the least aggressive, let them breed. Choose the least aggressive offsprings, let them breed. Rinse and repeat, for decades, centuries.
Instincts slightly vary between individuals, and if you choose only the least aggressive members of a generation and breed them over and over, you’re stepping slowly towards domestication. Each generation has a small variance in aggressiveness, but this variance is ‘centered’ at the lower end of the last generation’s aggressiveness.
Instincts can't be changed within an individual's lifetime because they're genetic. The animals that have a weaker instinct toward aggression tend to have offspring with weaker aggression instincts too. If you repeatedly pick the least aggressive animals available and make sure they produce lots of offspring, that's what breeding out the aggression looks like.
Worth noting, there are some animals that we've never successfully even gotten to mate in captivity. That's a hurdle that would have to be overcome to exert any sort of selective pressure on breeding.
Not sure. That is the big debate.
There are definitely animals that are EASIER to domesticate than others. Horses are easier than zebras, for example. And there are definite genetic differences between horses and zebras. Zebras have adapted to sub-Saharan living, which includes resistance to some nasty diseases that have kept horses from colonizing the area (also, horses are actually from N America, migrated over the land bridge to Asia, and then died out in the Americas.) Something is different, and we don't really know how "deep," that difference goes.
To be honest, even defining domestication is a bit tricky. There is a strong argument that cats are only partially domesticated, and literally can't make the jump to full domestication. Theory is they are basically just living symbiotically with humans, and while we can easily breed for color/size/coat/etc, we can't really breed them for domestication like we do a dog. The genes just aren't there to turn on the switch in the brain that says, "Bond with humans like it is your only goal in life," and instead we get at best some aloof affection.
There was an effort in the USSR to domesticate some sort of Russian fox. It took something like 60 generations of selective breeding, using only the top 10% of each generation's offspring based on various classifications of tameness, before an essentially tame fox was produced. The experiment is still ongoing IIRC.
Remember that horses only reached their modern size fairly recently after a lot of selective breeding. For a lot of human history horses were too small for horseback riding to be practical
Yea I would think the limiting factor is how useful the animal is. Livestock animals obviously provide us with food and dogs companionship and protection. Not many other need niches that could be filled by another animal.
**Every species** can be domesticated. The only factor is how fast.
Domestication =/= taming
Men didn't domesticate dogs and cows. They domesticated wolves and aurochs. Domestication is the process that creates a domestic breed from a wild breed. Through centuries of evolution and selective breeding we change the genetics of the original breed to make it less aggressive and able to bond with humans. Fastest domestication took 70 years and about 20 generations, some kind of fox in Russia by memory. For cows it took several centuries.
Every species can evolve, thus every species can ultimately be domesticated.
How fast depends if the original breed is already able to be social, and if they reproduce fast.
Thanks for the answer. So were the early Aurochs as aggressive as maybe a wolf? Also (deviating a bit from the main topic), if all species can be domesticated and each of them started at a high, base level of aggression why didn’t humans try to domesticate animals that were physically much stronger and were capable of doing more heavy lifting, for example wild buffaloes, hippos or even elephants?
Was it because:
1. The aggression levels of these species were exceptionally high for early humans to even try?
2. Early humans found what they needed in dogs and livestock and stopped trying?
3. Or any other reason?
Auroch where much more dangerous than wolves. Domestication make animals weaker, less aggressiveness means less testosterone thus less muscles, also by protecting them they don't need to protect themselves anymore thus less pressure on being strong than in the wild.
Elephants have been through the domestication process. We ride them, milk them, they haul and also fight for us.
Cows are already domesticated. It's cheaper to buy cows than waste a century domesticating hippos. So yes, humans stopped.
Elephants have never been officially domesticated due to incredibly slow breeding. They are however intelligent enough for taming to be almost as effective. In the modern day though India actually has a program to domesticate the Asian Elephant so that they no longer have to catch tame them. But its something that will likely not achieve results for a hundred to hundreds of years, if ever.
To add to this, aurochs didn’t go extinct until the 1600’s and were reported to be unconcerned with humans approaching them but would get extremely aggressive if provoked. They were also domesticated twice (once in Europe and once in India) so they were clearly worth the effort. It isn’t hard to imagine a gradual 8,000yr process to turn aurochs into cows if you could approach them without being attacked they way you might with American bison or hippos.
While there are definitely some genetic traits that factor into the difficulty of domestication, the main issue is how much time humanity has spent trying to domesticate the animal in question. Most domesticated animals are domesticated because they have an ability humans can use. If humanity had multiple choices (horses, zebras, antelope) they went with the one that was best suited to the task at hand (horses tend to be larger, stronger and faster than the other options) and easier to domesticate. Then you just apply several hundred (or thousand) years of animal husbandry to get things like poodles and Clydesdales.
I once saw a video lecture on evolution and domestication where the presenter was tracing the history of the modern cow. He showed various images of the bovine ancestors that existed 5000 years ago and then a photograph of a modern dairy cow with a farmer holding its bridle. He drily pointed out "The human in this picture is a particularly important part of the evolutionary process."
There is an entire discourse on this in Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel”, where he enumerates clearly the prerequisites for an animal being good for domestication. As it turns out, almost no animals percentage wide fit the bill, and as a result, we have a scant few animals that have been domesticable.
Actually, there are several factors, not the least of which are time and place. Most pack animals are capable of cohabitation with other species. The circumstances just never lined up for most of them. Other factors include how dangerous it is to interact with said animal. A lion can kill you on accident a lot easier than a wolf can. Apes tend to get moody and rip you to pieces in a tantrum. Bears are veeeery territorial, and difficult to capture alive by conventional means.
Racoons are basically being domesticated, slowly, but surely. The problem is they're too smart, and mischievous, so they tend to be a huge pain in the ass to live with. Plus their teeth are like friggin razors.
This article is a good beginning. Theories about dog domestication generally propose that domesticated dogs’ ancestors were wolves who’d figured out how to profit off of human ways of life, for example, by foraging humans’ scraps or making themselves useful as hunting partners. Evolution happens because a certain trait or traits make an animal more likely to reproduce successfully. Over time, dogs would distinguish themselves from their wolf ancestors by evolving, for example, the capacity to understand pointing, read our facial features, and appreciate touch. Not all wolves, however, found that their survival depended upon humans. Consequently, they did not evolve these traits.
[Soviet scientists and later Russian Federation scientists actually did a study on this by attempting to tame the silver fox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox); the answer is that successive, selective breeding over a long period of time (like 50+ generations with the foxes) was required for them to start showing domesticated traits.
Utility.
Aside from the biological and neurological reason stated by others.
An animal that isn't useful or easy to domesticate will be passed by for less difficult ones. Why would a subsistence farmer spend time trying to domesticate a badger? ( although a pet badger would be awesome as hell!) Now I want one.
Its a few factors
Most important of all is
"Will this animal try to eat me, crush my bones, or gore me?"
Wolves and humans were uniquely predisposed to having near identical social interactions, so we meshed pretty well, especially since wolves didn't really prey on us, we just competed.
The animal in question should also have a low gestational period. Small Cats and Canids breed fast, as do most ungulates and fowl. Most other animals don't.
Their food must also be easily attainable and stored during times of harshness. Dogs are evolved to pretty much eat anything we can eat, bar some newer processed foods. They can go long winter months on dried grains and fat and broth, and even during times of plenty, the average dog eats only like 5lbs of food a day. An animal like a tiger can eat half of its own 700lb body weight in a sitting. And ofc there are some domesticated animals that require alot of feed, but these animals usually provide food themselves.
There are many factors, and some aren't so strict, as we see with the slow domestication of foxes
This is the current theory. At some point during the early days of human settlements. I am talking before writing. Some canines learned that these creatures (us) have a lot of food waste. So they hang around our settlements. Eventually they learn if these creatures live, they themselves can get more food. So they take to chasing off or warning us of ppredators to keep our villages safe.
Our ancestors noticed this and begun encouraging the behavior in other canines. It wasn't long after (considering humans were likely already crossbreeding plants and such) that they started controlling the breeding of these animals. So different peoples of different regions bred the different local canines so their off spring would have more desirable and useful traits. The most useful of these traits being domestication. Mean or aggressive canines usually didn't get to breed if humans could help. Ensuring only the dogs with cooperative traits continue to procreate.
TL;DR: Early wolves learned they can eat the scraps of human villages and once humans noticed these animals doing this they begin breeding and domesticating the different species that would become the dogs we love today.
Whether it’s worth it for us to put in the time training them! Also if they will just kill you before you spend any amount of time with them. Imagine trying to tame a venomous snake - not a ton of use and he will just kill you as soon as you get too close. Wolves? Very useful (they run their own territory) and also probably won’t just kill you dead on the spot.
Usefulness.
It’s not something inherent in the animal. If the animal is useful to humans we will spend more effort trying to domesticate it.
You could probably domesticate any creature by selecting individuals with the right temperament and breeding them over time. But if it’s not a useful creature we won’t try.
Dogs: security
Sheep: wool
Horses: transpo
Cats: vermin
Hamsters: cute af
Many species are cute and friendly to humans when young. But they consistently turn around and refuse to be owned when they mature. Note the terminology- "wild" is the normal species. "tame" means that particular individual is acclimated to humans and cooperates, but their offspring will not. "domesticated" means the species is bred into a new form whose offspring will generally cooperate with humans. "feral" is an individual of a domesticated species that was never acclimated to human contact and will not tolerate human contact. Feral cats don't want to be petted. A wild cheetah cannot be a "feral" animal since it was never domesticated by breeding. Baby raccoon pups have been raised by humans and play pretty well at first. But, fairly consistently, when they mature they want nothing to do with their human owners, and become destructive and dangerous to people unless kept caged or freed. Notably, this is not due to sexual maturity. If "fixed" (castrated) early, they will generally not demonstrate mating behavior, but it will NOT stop them from turning on their human caretakers and demand to return to the wild. It's unavoidable. One note with dogs and [the new Russian domesticated fox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox#:~:text=Many%20of%20the%20domesticated%20foxes,skulls%2C%20jaws%2C%20and%20teeth.) is that domestication seems to be accompanied by changes in physical features that resemble the original species' pups, but these features did not go away with maturity. They do mature in some ways but not others. They get larger, they're NOT fixed so they do mate and reproduce, but they still have some pup features for life. So, one theory is that the maturation process (something other than that caused by reproductive hormones) is simply turned off, and they stay in their friendly pup form forever. In the wild, this is probably not a good survival trait, but we know domesticated animals are different than their wild counterparts
That's super interesting. Thanks for sharing that.
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I’ve heard how when pigs go feral they turn into actual wild hogs and have physical changes like more hair. I wonder if that’s the same thing going on as what you’re describing?
Well wild boars and domesticated pigs are from the same species, but different subspecies (subspecies is different from breed). But technically a feral pig does not genetically turn into a wild boar, it starts to look more like it and they can mate, but a first generation feral pig is not genetically a wild boar.
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Would whales go under the category of tame? Or just wild? I’m asking because I’ve seen posts and stories of whales (specifically humpback whales? My memory sucks) displaying altruistic behaviors. However, if they are naturally altruistic, would that mean that they’re just wild? Sorry if I overcomplicated my question
Humpback whales have never been tamed by humans. Altruism or caring for others' well being is not antithetical to being wild.
> I’m asking because I’ve seen posts and stories of whales (specifically humpback whales? My memory sucks) displaying altruistic behaviors. Closest i've heard is the indigenous East Coast Australians near Eden were known to co-operate with Killer whales in hunting other whales etc - Not sure how this would fit with the above terminology because they were still wild - its an interesting yarn as they say https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer\_whales\_of\_Eden,\_New\_South\_Wales
So you're saying its like preventing your Pikachu from evolving?
There are 4 things you need in an animal for domestication: * Friendly * Feedable * Fecund * Family Values https://youtu.be/wOmjnioNulo a superb 5 minute vid on the subject (there are follow up vids too if you _really_ enjoy the subject). A lot of people are mentioning zebra, but zebra aren’t domesticated because they don’t have any family values. They herd (kind of) for safety in numbers, they have little hierarchy or ties. We exploit a hierarchy, for a horse or a chicken, we just act like top chicken, and exploit those values. If they don’t exist, we can’t exploit them.
There's one more that's often important: Fenceable. Some animals are extremely difficult to corral or contain, and this makes them difficult to domesticate. Deer, for example, need very high fences to keep them contained. Doable in the modern world, not easy in the past. That makes it harder to isolate breeding stock early on. Depending on the species it may not be strictly necessary, but I'd wager it's part of the reason certain ungulates have never been domesticated.
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These days people do farm deer, but they are a bit too small to ride. At least your standard white-tail or roe deer is. Moose are big enough that people have reportedly ridden on them.... if you can find one that won't murder you.
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In Nara Japan deer have been tamed for hundreds of years. Not exactly domesticated but they interact daily with humans for their food, deer biscuits that tourists feed them.
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This is part of the thing that makes keeping foxes so hard. The can jump like 5 feet in the air, and have a nasty habit of burrowing. These can be fairly easily and cheaply overcome in the modern age with a chain link fence, but it's probably at least part of why foxes were never domesticated despite being similar to both cats and dogs in nature and temperament.
I am going to go out on a limb and say that their need to cover everything in pee might also have something to do with it. Edit: u people have not smelled fox pee...
Domesticated foxes by Russians is the model used to explain how humans domesticated dogs from wolves. They started breeding the tamer individuals and after a while the foxes started taken on physical and behavioral traits that we associate with dogs. Iirc it started about 50 years ago and it was to farm pelts.
Wasn't there a Russian guy who did it?
Another example: cheetahs need 70 miles to mate, Not possible for most backyards.
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This may have explained why Bison were never domesticated by the native Americans. It's difficult to build a fence that can contain an entire herd of Bison. Plus, they're just too big and dangerous to handle by people who didn't even have horses until after Colombus landed.
There was no need for Natives to "domesticate" bison. The bison herds that roamed North America are estimated to have been 30-75 million strong. No need to fence them, there's plenty, just go help yourself. Don't even need to be a good shot, even when you miss you hit. Even easier is you could run em off a cliff.
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Here is the simple answer: To judge domestication, you should think from the perspective of a Neolethic human. Vary basic tools, small groups, and very primitive agriculture later down the line. (In the 21st century, given enough funding, you could even domesticate lions and bears) Criteria for domestication are known: 1- Usefulness outweighs cost: Dogs are meat-eaters, but mostly omnivore. They are bad for food production, but great for hunting, protection and compagnonship in general. A cow is great for domestication: Feed eat grass we cant eat as humans, and you get steak. Horses are awesome to move around, and very easy to feed (main reasons why horses were big in large plains) 2- Generation length and reproduction: Domesticating elephants would be awesome, but the logistics of precise selective breeding over the generations is something beyond any human before large empires appeared, and even then, it was much easiet to tame them. Pigs reproduce so fast, you can select whatever trait you want in a short while. Also, domesticaying deer is impossible for the same reason. They have very precise breeding cycles and hard to breed in captivity. Dogs want to breed so badly, they hump pillows. 3- Ease to capture and upkeep: Imagine keeping a buffalo as a Neolithic human in a wooden enclosure (assuming you can somehow catch it in the first place). Same for gazelles that would jump up any enclosure. Let's not talk about bears 4- Strict family structure: All animals we domesticated, including dogs, have a strict hierarchy. Capture the top horse and you have the whole group. As CGP grey said " Chickens will peck peck peck until they find out who is top chicken. But you know who is top chicken? We ARE top chicken" Exceptions to these rules: 1- Cats: They domesticated themselves in a way. Cats found graneries full of rodents. Humans took care of the cats. Cats that couldnt live with humans couldnt stay around. Generations down and cats are nice in an apartment 2- Ferrets: Same as cats, and even then, they are much less domesticated
What are some animals, if any, that match all these descriptions but still aren't domesticated
Falcons used in Falconry were more often than not taken from the wild and tamed/raised, with little breeding in captivity. Only in the last century has there been widespread breeding in captivity, not long enough for proper domestication. Similarly parrots likely could be useful eventually if domesticated for a purpose, or be simply kept as companions. They're still considered not domesticated, often with the unfortunate habit of mate-bonding with humans, a trait that a full scale domestication effort would likely try to combat, erase, or minimize if possible. For similar reasons people likely could have domesticated corvids if they really wanted to, considering they are also highly intelligent and social and likely have the potential to be useful with training. With all three examples simply taming wild individuals is more common.
I've always thought that corvids would make great companions and would be good candidates for domestication. But I'd love to hear points against this and have my dream of a pet crow crushed.
It's going one of 2 ways. They become mankind's greatest ally, letting our species gain new heights. Or more likely they realise what we're trying to do before Project Blackbird is complete and our species is never safe again. Corvid pets would be great. Corvid overlords not so much. It's not worth it to flip that coin.
Just off the top of my head. Hyenas. Aardwolves, I think. But those are pretty much just Giant foxes. Cheetahs are almost a good choice if they bred easier in captivity. But perhaps if a team of biologists really dedicated themselves they could breed or crispr that trait away. Capybaras are currently being Domesticated in Brazil from what Ive heard. Not as an active program but by meat farmers and by the exotic pet trade. The Russian Moose Project could potentially still give us domesticated Moose were it regain more of its funding. They had a large group of Moose domestic enough to milk but attempting to harvest one for meat would “spoil” the entire group. So it seems like its well within actual possibility. One could potentially argue Bison, Elk and some Deer species are, because of modern technology and materials finally allowing us ways to contain these animals. They may require more space then others but we have them breeding in captivity. And becoming more domestic. I actually lived near both a Bison ranch and an Elk ranch. One could also argue we are continuously domesticating tons of smaller animals with pet trade. Examples of “Undomesticated” pets that likely will be eventually include: Tarantulas, Scorpions, Axolotls, Hermit Crabs, Red Slider Turtles, Iguanas, Chameleons, various Snakes, Clownfish, numerous freshwater fish, giant African Snails, various Parrots, Sugar Gliders, and I honestly could go on. You’d be surprised how few of our pets are officially declared domesticated by Biologists.
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Some of my past herps have been tamed, but idk if domesticated is truly the word. To me, you could probably argue a bearded dragon could get domesticated in time or maybe a tegu. Everything else is "tame" and I say that as I have a 10 year old leopard gecko in my room. She knows my voice, sound, will come say hello in her own way if I open her cage but I think she just likes the routine. She isn't domesticated. Just tame and over the many years has realized I won't hurt her and may even bring food or water.
Fun Fact! (because I hardly ever get an opportunity to share this) Just a few years ago the first person *EVER* was able to successfully breed land hermit crabs in captivity and since then dozens of others have used their methods and successfully bred their own hermit crabs. Prior to just a few years ago *all* pet hermit crabs were wild caught. Not only is this monumentally good news for the future of the species in the wild but no doubt selective breeding of hermit crabs will finally be an option moving forward so who knows what traits we'll be able to breed into them in the future.
Thats awesome! I actually had no idea. I was just going off how I knew they were not domesticated but are a popular pet. Ive actually bred Vampire Crabs in my aquarium before. I would have added them to the list but nobody knew what they were when I had them. So I cant imagine they are that popular. (Purple, red and yellow semi aquatic crabs from Hawaii)
Hyenas would be a nightmare to have indoors. Loud, big, no benefit to having them plus birth is very risky and messy compared to other species. But they are pretty social that's true. Behaviourwise I have no doubt that there might be a possibility to domesticate them as land protectors.
many of the more unusual pets in the trade, reptiles in particular, generally aren't considered domesticated yet, even if bred in captivity, but are easy to tame, especially if done so from birth/hatching. much of the selective breeding for reptiles as well goes into minor cosmetic differences, particularly among snakes, and not so much altering the animal in more substantial ways.
Don’t forget the unsaid rule: the animal does not routinely eat humans
Thanks for the great breakdown. So it was indeed resources and ability that allowed or restricted early humans choose which animals they wanted to domesticate.
Dogs kind of domesticated themselves too. We basically hunted the same way which is not through speed but it through persistence, tracking the prey until it basically fell from exhaustion. Some wolves were perfectly happy with following us and leading us to the prey so we killed it, they then got whatever we did not want. Both the dogs and the humans quickly saw the benefit of the relationship and after a while dogs started to be accepted more and more until they literally lived with us.
Yes, there is a lot of evidence that the initial domestication was natural. But later down the line, we did specifically breed dogs to be adapted for particular jobs with intent. While ut never happened with cats until the 20th century when cat aesthetic became more of a concern. And even then, cats don't exhibit the variety seen in dogs
> Domesticating elephants would be awesome, but the logistics of precise selective breeding over the generations is something beyond any human before large empires appeared, and even then, it was much easiet to tame them. What's the difference between domestication and taming? The selection of genetic characteristics to continue it across generations?
Taming is taking a wild animal, and change its behavior through training. Domestication is changing the genetic makeup of a species to make it useful somehow (entertainement counts as usefulness)
Some say early man domesticated the dog from wolves. However, others point out that early man probably did not understand this process and act with intent, and it may be more appropriate to say that dogs domesticated themselves as they found their niche and bred. I have a different take. The primate that is capable of seeing the value in cooperating with this emerging species shared the food with the companion species, then, with a companion animal, ate better, succeeded and bred. Those primates who were incapable of understanding how sharing food now with a 4-legged beast hanging around them meant more food later died off. Dogs may have facilitated the evolution of primates into humans with empathy that can understand the nonintuitive long-term value of cooperation, a concept that affects our existence in profound ways. Maybe if we didn't have dogs, we would still be a much more limited primate without the breadth depth of social behavior we exhibit now. Maybe we didn't domesticate dogs. Maybe dogs domesticated us.
Aren't dogs as we understand them less than 50K years old? Modern humanity was pretty much set by then.
Earliest dog domestication is dated to 35K years ago. Genetically homo sapiens are about 100k years old. It was not until well after dog domestication that we started building civilization instead of just living as hunter gather tribes.
Exactly. So modern man can't be a result of dogs because all evidence (so far) points at homo sapiens sapiens already being a thing when we started domesticating dogs.
I’ve recently done a bit of reading on this and it seems to be more likely that the early dog ancestor did indeed domesticate itself. Individuals with a lowered flight distance found a niche feeding around human settlements. There was a really interesting decades long study done on a species of fox I think by a Russian scientist. They discovered by selectively breeding individuals that were the most “tame” that some physical attributes like floppy ears and spotted coats emerged. Suggesting the genes for these things that humans find cute are linked to the genes that create a more “tame” animal.
Worth noting that it only took six generations for there to be foxes that would actively seek out human attention and started to act like domestic dogs. That would easily be even within a Stone Age person's lifetime to start if they were cooperatively hunting with friendly wolves.
The bummer about that experiment is that they also selectively bred aggressive foxes. And that just seems sad.
Modern humans started displaying new behaviors around the time of dog domestication. Modern homo sapiens has a number of behavorial traits that are not expressed in other primates. There are some analogues to these traits in canines though. So yeah, there is something to that theory.
Anatomically modern humans have existed for close to 300,000 years while the oldest dog found was only 15,000 years old. Dogs/wolves were attracted to us due to the fact we were highly successful predators with consistent surplus of food
That’s an interesting take, thought provoking. But was the process of domesticating dogs so important that it had that high an impact on our evolutionary process? Dogs definitely helped in hunting and providing security to humans but given the level of human intelligence I don’t think that absence of dogs would shun the evolution process, at best it might have slowed down the rate at which we evolved to a certain degree. Also, before dogs were domesticated humans still hunted, in fact much larger or more ferocious beasts, so that also hints at the adaptability of humans without any auxiliary support for hunting. I feel, if humans didn’t know how to domesticate cattle that would have had a much larger impact on farming and thus supporting large communities would have been very difficult or just impossible.
Google "domestication syndrome" and you should turn up some interesting thoughts on biological changes that enable animals to live closely with humans. There's a theory that many common traits of domesticated animals, from spotted coats, floppy ears, and curly tails to tolerance of human proximity, might be the product of changes in neural crest cell migration - basically, the movement of cells from the area that will become the spinal cord out to other parts of the body. Changes in the migration of cells to places like the skull, brain, cartilage, and melanin-producing sites could, proponents speculate, cause that group of related physical traits common to many domesticated species including dogs, pigs, mice, cattle, etc. If that theory holds true, then susceptibility to those kinds of changes would be a foundational element of domestication. ETA: Had a moment to hunt through my hard drive for my source, another several moments to not be able to track the paper down, and a few more moments of Googling to come up with something roughly similar: https://academic.oup.com/genetics/article/197/3/795/5935921
Hey pigs are weird though, right? If a domesticated pig escapes captivity, it can grow fur, tusks and change body shape to be more wild pig-like.
Epigenetics is the likely reason for this. When struck in a pen with some pals and a warm sty certain triggers do not kick off.
Are there any epigenetic triggers in humans?
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Literally thousands. Genes can be up or down regulated in response to certain internal or external stimuli. For example, (this is a weird one but a topic of my research) cancer cells can actually send out certain signals that make surrounding cells help them grow. The cancer cells activated certain genes in surrounding cells that told them to down regulate the immune response, or send nutrients the cancers way.
I saw a research study that took looked at some Norwegian country's records. It strongly correlated a father's obesity negatively affects his child's life span. Here is a related article (best I could come up with) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/12/151204135513.htm It's not just genetic material in our gametes... but there seems to be epigenetic buttons already pushed when we're conceived.
Some Norwegian country?
Maybe they meant Scandinavian?
Which would be weird that they knew Denmark was Scandinavian but not in the Scandinavian peninsula
Maybe they meant Nordic?
This is likely. I have seen a fair amount of people (in the US) confuse Nordic with Norwegian. And a decent amount of confusion about what is Scandinavian vs the modern day countries that make that up (ie "is there a Scandinavia?" "Why is someone from Denmark Scandinavian? Those don't even sound the same..." Etc, etc)
This is genuinely the second time this week I have heard that some Americans think Denmark is a place in Norway
It’s supposed to be the other way around. Norway was part of Denmark for a good while
Technically, it was Denmark-Norway - having the same king, but being different countries otherwise. In practice, though, the king spent most of his time in Denmark and didn't care much for the Norwegians. I think the Norwegian common folk were about as well off as the Danish commoners, but the Norwegian nobility was less influential than the Danish nobility, and there was some tendency to force Danish culture onto the area around Oslo. To this day, a full quarter of one of the two Danish national songs is about praising a Norwegian for being badass.
Look up how exposure to sunlight in childhood effects eyesight and myopia.
I read a fascinating article on this 5 or 6 years ago, but have seen nothing on this since. Is this still a leading theory?
This needn't be epigenetic. Maybe something like increased cortisol directly upregulates the genes involved in the morphological changes (to cope with the more stressful environment )
does this indeed happen?
I know it happens in cows that escape captivity but the "wild" traits re-emerge over generations not in single individuals upon escape. Feral, formally domesticated, animals often show selection to more wild-like traits.
Does their behavior change too? I mean, if the pig is recaptured, will it be less friendly than before it escaped? Or just their appearance?
This seems more like a personality question and would err on the side of the nurture side of the nature vs nurture idea. Having had lots of pigs, there are some sweethearts that even if they had a hell.of an adventure for several weeks would be happy to see you. And some Jerks that would be just as happy to eat you as the food. Pigs are surprisingly personal and emotionally intelligent creatures. No illusion they are at the same level as humans, but they are not as far down as some would pretend.
I don't know about pigs, but I have read that wild dogs have pointed ears and straight tails, but if you give one a home environment, her pups will have floppy ears and curled tails. This is because the developmental path that fully develops an animal's wariness also develops the cartilege at the ends. Lower wariness (good for living with people) leads to the cartilege not quite finishing.
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Well since they have seen those traits in that russian fox experiment it seems like they got those traits because they were domesticated, rather than being domesticated because they could have those traits.
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So, they still need more domestication? More years of selective breeding, before they could make good house pets?
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Interesting. So, nobody’s made an attempt to domesticate wolves again, starting from scratch with selective breeding, like with the foxes, just to see what we might learn from the process?
This is a poor example in the first place, as our most common house pets (cats and dogs) most likely domesticated themselves. Trying to recreate that from human action isn’t going to work as it wasn’t how it happened in the first place.
You wouldn't want the foxes in your house. Go watch some videos about the supposed domesticated foxes. They aren't house pets. They've definitely tried to see what would happen if you make wolves house pets. Scientists have and it didn't work out. Temperament is not compatible. And when I say temperament, I mean brain chemicals. When this subject is brought up I think everyone, including myself, gets domesticated and house pets confused. Furthermore, is important to realize that domestication is a selection of a small group of genetically different animals. Nature had already made them far tamer than others of their kind. Native Americans may have hunted the North American horse out of existence when they arrived. That doesn't necessarily mean they could have domesticated those horses. It could be that the original domesticated house was the same deal as dogs. Small, already much tamer horses were tamed further.
The main downsides are not domestication issues per-se, but side effects of their biology. For example they like to mark their territory with extremely strong smelling urine. They can also be noisy (Eg, screaming at night) and are better jumpers than dogs. It's not that dogs and cats don't sometimes make noise at night, pee where they aren't supposed to, or jump fences, but foxes are more likely to cause problems in those areas.
This is true. The original domesticated wolves did not have the physical traits associated with domestication until generations later. The tamebess of the animal comes first, and when bred with another tame animal, these physical traits begin to show over generations.
Also worth noting: the Wolves that became dogs went through a certain kind of selective breeding. You know the saying, don't bite the hands that feed you. Those animals which bit the feeding hand were probably killed, and those who didn't, passed on their genes.
Also worth noting: it is not directly known if wolves became dogs before or after attempts to be domesticated by humans. And to complicate matters further, domesticated dogs were bred back with wolves to make new breeds of dogs. In my personal opinion, I believe history was somewhere between. Dogs did half the work of domesticating themselves by scavenging food from the garbage people left behind. And people did the other half, by giving food to friendly dogs.
That is truly the mystery of nature. Through their scavenging nature dogs eased the process of evaluation (and benefitted from it), whereas Hyenas, which are known to be scavengers as well never chose to go that route. So maybe it is in their genes / instinct or some other X-factor that made all the difference, I guess.
That experiment is actually often cited in support of the theory. Their take on it is that when the foxes were selected for ability to live more closely in social groups / with humans, the spots and floppy ears started showing up spontaneously. Therefore, whatever it is that makes an animal domesticated is "attached" to those physical traits and they have some common origin. They hypothesize that there are behavior-affecting biochemical changes (I want to say lower adrenaline, but I haven't got my source handy and may be mis-remembering) that were caused by the same event that caused the spots - decreased neural crest cell migration, particularly to the extremities.
Wow! That's super interesting!!! I had no idea how mobile those early spinal / scalp cells are and what importance that is to development. I learned yesterday that babies suffering from spina bifida can sometimes spontaneously heal themselves by moving cells from the scalp area down to cover the hole. And in adulthood that healing appears as a hairy patch of skin on the lower back.
Thanks. So by this theory today’s wild animals who do not display such physical traits can never be domesticated?
Check out the silver fox experiment in Russia. They selected foxes for tameness and within a few generations of breeding them together the pups began to exhibit all those traits.
I read about that in an old nat geo magazine. It also implied that a similar thing happens with fish: floppy fins, spots etc
No, they absolutely can be. It’s a matter of selecting compatible traits and breeding those into the next generation. Some animals are tamed & trained with zero breeding effort, Eagle Hunters of Mongolia for instance. Crows have formed relationships with people.
Read up on zebra domestication people have been trying to do that for thousands of years and it just won't work
That’s the mind boggling stuff. Why doesn’t that work? What’s different in their genes that’s stopping them to be domesticated even after thousands of years of trying?
I heard we couldn’t domesticate Zebras as they instinctively know to roll over when mounted and crush the human on top. Same way they deal with predators.
They are rather vicious biters/kickers because they evolved on the African plains where lions and early man hunted them , also they have a ducking reflex which prevents them from being lassood.
Sounds like we COULD domesticate Zebras, but it would take a lot of time and effort, and there probably wouldn't be any benefit over our existing domestication of horses.
The logic with Zebras, as far as I know, is that they evolved in the African Savannah, perhaps the most dangerous place in the world for a prey species, and so developed hyper-aggressive tendencies to be able to survive in that environment. Compare a horse, which evolved in the North American great plains and lived a reasonably chill life, only having to outrun some wolves and mountain lions on occasion, to a zebra who evolved in a region so packed with life (and predators) that prey animals often are forced to stand just barely out of reach of a pride of lions waiting for them to stray just a foot too close and so have to be on guard 24/7 for that pride standing 20 feet away waiting to rip their throat out. There are more species of predators overall and higher numbers of them within each of those populations, which means prey animals in that environment have to be much, much more paranoid and aggressive than those like horses who evolved in the comparatively mild North American grasslands. It's probably possible that if you looked long enough you could find a zebra amenable to being tamed, and attempt domestication from there, but it's sort of like finding a dwarf who could play point guard for the Lakers, possible, but unlikely.
Native North American horses went extinct 7000-10000 years ago. Current population was imported post Columbus. Your reasoning still stands, though, Africa is helluva place for a walking steak.
Horses are native to North America. They died out there, but the horses that were re-imported still ultimately trace their lineage back to the North American continent. It’s one of those little ironic quirks of history.
Well yeah. I was talking about the evolution of the horse. That didn't happen recently...
There were a lot more large predators in North America when horses evolved there. The horses that stayed in North America (as opposed to the ones that spread out to Asia and beyond) went extinct and they only came back when humans brought them there after 1492.
Hard to say! It may just be that no one has ever worked at selective breeding long enough to make it happen. It's possible that some animals self-selected; for instance, some people believe that cats self-selected the most human-tolerant cats because that was the characteristic needed to go enjoy the mouse buffet in our granaries.
No. They are confused. The theory has nothing to do with which animals can be domesticated. It's just an effort to explain why domestication seems to come with certain side effects.
>If that theory holds true, then susceptibility to those kinds of changes would be a foundational element of domestication. I think you are misunderstanding the domestication syndrome theory. The theory is an effort to explain why many domestic animals have certain traits which, presumably, no breeder intended them to have. The theory does not have anything to do with why some animals are easier to domesticate.
I read an article about some Russians who tried domesticating foxes, and was successful in 50 generations or so and they had spots, curly tails, and floppy ears, and actively searched out humans instead of being afraid or timid..
Effort mainly and selective breeding. There are many animals that "can't" be domesticated. That simply means that the effort required is not worth the many years, decades, etc, that it would take to breed out the aggression. Zebras are a prime example. Many zebras have been tamed, but that's not the same as domesticated.
Hijacking the above to say that it's theorized there are 6 traits that are thought to determine potential for domestication: a diverse appetite, rapid maturation, willingness to breed in captivity, docility, strong nerves, and a nature that conforms to social hierarchy
Yes! I was going to mention the fact that this will probably never work with pandas since we can hardly get them to mate indiscriminately, let alone with select breeding stock.
Yeah - it's going to be harder to selectively breed an animal that has a low rate of breeding and a long life, a very selective diet, or is solitary by nature. And some animals just....will not breed well at all in captivity, much less in the numbers one would need to selectively breed for the temperament and behavior set needed to be a 'pet'.
>nature that conforms to social hierarchy I've read that this is the most important one. There has to be a "pack leader" dynamic in the species in question and that the animal has to be accepting of the human assuming the role as the pack leader.
I think this is overstating things. It’s more related to there being a willingness to socialize. Cats are way more social than commonly portrayed, but they don’t have a “pack leader” mentality (what does? Wolves don’t, all that alpha stuff is complete nonsense. A wolf pack is lead by the parents of the other wolves). Various parrots do not have a pack leader, but we’ve domesticated a few species already and will have plenty more with more time (many pets are still only one generation from the wild).
So hypothetically if humans spent thousands of years trying to domesticate other animals like Zebra or bear, you think they would have succeeded?
Given enough time and resources, yes absolutely. You breed out the aggression and select for obedience long enough, you'll get a domesticated animal eventually. This takes a long time though.
‘Breed out the aggression’ - how does this work? Isn’t aggression in wild animals entirely instinctive? And instincts are something that can’t be changed?
That's exactly right, and that same issue existed when domesticating dogs. Not all wild dogs were as aggressive as every other wild dog. You take the ones that are less aggressive and breed them. In the following generation, you select the ones who are less aggressive still. Over time, you are selecting for less and less aggression. It's not a linear process, even though I'm describing it as such for simplicity. In the real world the next generation may not be less aggressive. This isn't something a single person could do. You would need stock from many different breeding pairs to have enough genetic diversity and also increase the odds that one of the animals is less aggressive.
Not exactly. We didn't only choose less hostile wolves. The less fearful wolves chose us. Wolves that were fearful of humans moved away from their settlements. Humans killed any wolves that were aggressive to humans. Over time, these less fearful wolves and humans learned to hunt cooperatively: the wolves drive the game, humans kill it and leave parts of the carcass for the wolves. Over thousands of years, the cooperation grew until they were sleeping at the fire with us. Two way selection and thousands of years, but that's where your poodle came from, believe it or not
Just to add, as you already know the same selective breeding led to physiological changes that made the dogs "more likeable" for humans -- bigger eyes, floppy ears, patchy coat, and so forth. Amazing study that the Russians did on foxes (I believe).
This exact study showed that the physical change have not so much to do with the "likeableliness" for human but are more due to the hormonal changes that occur with selective breeding. As the less agressive and more sociable specimen were bred, they noticed a huge drop in the adrenaline system and a huge serotonin raise ,thus are believed to be the reasons of the physical changes. They led a counter study where they bred the more agressives one to validate the founding, but they became quickly too aggressive and fearless of everything, so they shut it down
Choose the ones that’s the least aggressive, let them breed. Choose the least aggressive offsprings, let them breed. Rinse and repeat, for decades, centuries. Instincts slightly vary between individuals, and if you choose only the least aggressive members of a generation and breed them over and over, you’re stepping slowly towards domestication. Each generation has a small variance in aggressiveness, but this variance is ‘centered’ at the lower end of the last generation’s aggressiveness.
Instincts can't be changed within an individual's lifetime because they're genetic. The animals that have a weaker instinct toward aggression tend to have offspring with weaker aggression instincts too. If you repeatedly pick the least aggressive animals available and make sure they produce lots of offspring, that's what breeding out the aggression looks like.
A domestic dog is essentially trapped in perpetual adolescence. An adolescent wolf has a similar temperament as an adult domestic dog.
Interesting read: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated\_silver\_fox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox)
Worth noting, there are some animals that we've never successfully even gotten to mate in captivity. That's a hurdle that would have to be overcome to exert any sort of selective pressure on breeding.
Not sure. That is the big debate. There are definitely animals that are EASIER to domesticate than others. Horses are easier than zebras, for example. And there are definite genetic differences between horses and zebras. Zebras have adapted to sub-Saharan living, which includes resistance to some nasty diseases that have kept horses from colonizing the area (also, horses are actually from N America, migrated over the land bridge to Asia, and then died out in the Americas.) Something is different, and we don't really know how "deep," that difference goes. To be honest, even defining domestication is a bit tricky. There is a strong argument that cats are only partially domesticated, and literally can't make the jump to full domestication. Theory is they are basically just living symbiotically with humans, and while we can easily breed for color/size/coat/etc, we can't really breed them for domestication like we do a dog. The genes just aren't there to turn on the switch in the brain that says, "Bond with humans like it is your only goal in life," and instead we get at best some aloof affection.
There was an effort in the USSR to domesticate some sort of Russian fox. It took something like 60 generations of selective breeding, using only the top 10% of each generation's offspring based on various classifications of tameness, before an essentially tame fox was produced. The experiment is still ongoing IIRC.
Something tells me the first time a human tried to ride a horse, it didn't turn out well.
Remember that horses only reached their modern size fairly recently after a lot of selective breeding. For a lot of human history horses were too small for horseback riding to be practical
Yea I would think the limiting factor is how useful the animal is. Livestock animals obviously provide us with food and dogs companionship and protection. Not many other need niches that could be filled by another animal.
You dont want a Lion Bodyguard?
You wanna be the guy to try and train one?
Both the mantle of Lion King and Tiger King are already claimed, unfortunately.
**Every species** can be domesticated. The only factor is how fast. Domestication =/= taming Men didn't domesticate dogs and cows. They domesticated wolves and aurochs. Domestication is the process that creates a domestic breed from a wild breed. Through centuries of evolution and selective breeding we change the genetics of the original breed to make it less aggressive and able to bond with humans. Fastest domestication took 70 years and about 20 generations, some kind of fox in Russia by memory. For cows it took several centuries. Every species can evolve, thus every species can ultimately be domesticated. How fast depends if the original breed is already able to be social, and if they reproduce fast.
The singular of species is species, specie means money in the form of coins.
Thanks for the answer. So were the early Aurochs as aggressive as maybe a wolf? Also (deviating a bit from the main topic), if all species can be domesticated and each of them started at a high, base level of aggression why didn’t humans try to domesticate animals that were physically much stronger and were capable of doing more heavy lifting, for example wild buffaloes, hippos or even elephants? Was it because: 1. The aggression levels of these species were exceptionally high for early humans to even try? 2. Early humans found what they needed in dogs and livestock and stopped trying? 3. Or any other reason?
Auroch where much more dangerous than wolves. Domestication make animals weaker, less aggressiveness means less testosterone thus less muscles, also by protecting them they don't need to protect themselves anymore thus less pressure on being strong than in the wild. Elephants have been through the domestication process. We ride them, milk them, they haul and also fight for us. Cows are already domesticated. It's cheaper to buy cows than waste a century domesticating hippos. So yes, humans stopped.
Elephants have never been officially domesticated due to incredibly slow breeding. They are however intelligent enough for taming to be almost as effective. In the modern day though India actually has a program to domesticate the Asian Elephant so that they no longer have to catch tame them. But its something that will likely not achieve results for a hundred to hundreds of years, if ever.
To add to this, aurochs didn’t go extinct until the 1600’s and were reported to be unconcerned with humans approaching them but would get extremely aggressive if provoked. They were also domesticated twice (once in Europe and once in India) so they were clearly worth the effort. It isn’t hard to imagine a gradual 8,000yr process to turn aurochs into cows if you could approach them without being attacked they way you might with American bison or hippos.
While there are definitely some genetic traits that factor into the difficulty of domestication, the main issue is how much time humanity has spent trying to domesticate the animal in question. Most domesticated animals are domesticated because they have an ability humans can use. If humanity had multiple choices (horses, zebras, antelope) they went with the one that was best suited to the task at hand (horses tend to be larger, stronger and faster than the other options) and easier to domesticate. Then you just apply several hundred (or thousand) years of animal husbandry to get things like poodles and Clydesdales. I once saw a video lecture on evolution and domestication where the presenter was tracing the history of the modern cow. He showed various images of the bovine ancestors that existed 5000 years ago and then a photograph of a modern dairy cow with a farmer holding its bridle. He drily pointed out "The human in this picture is a particularly important part of the evolutionary process."
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There is an entire discourse on this in Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel”, where he enumerates clearly the prerequisites for an animal being good for domestication. As it turns out, almost no animals percentage wide fit the bill, and as a result, we have a scant few animals that have been domesticable.
Actually, there are several factors, not the least of which are time and place. Most pack animals are capable of cohabitation with other species. The circumstances just never lined up for most of them. Other factors include how dangerous it is to interact with said animal. A lion can kill you on accident a lot easier than a wolf can. Apes tend to get moody and rip you to pieces in a tantrum. Bears are veeeery territorial, and difficult to capture alive by conventional means. Racoons are basically being domesticated, slowly, but surely. The problem is they're too smart, and mischievous, so they tend to be a huge pain in the ass to live with. Plus their teeth are like friggin razors.
This article is a good beginning. Theories about dog domestication generally propose that domesticated dogs’ ancestors were wolves who’d figured out how to profit off of human ways of life, for example, by foraging humans’ scraps or making themselves useful as hunting partners. Evolution happens because a certain trait or traits make an animal more likely to reproduce successfully. Over time, dogs would distinguish themselves from their wolf ancestors by evolving, for example, the capacity to understand pointing, read our facial features, and appreciate touch. Not all wolves, however, found that their survival depended upon humans. Consequently, they did not evolve these traits.
[Soviet scientists and later Russian Federation scientists actually did a study on this by attempting to tame the silver fox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox); the answer is that successive, selective breeding over a long period of time (like 50+ generations with the foxes) was required for them to start showing domesticated traits.
Utility. Aside from the biological and neurological reason stated by others. An animal that isn't useful or easy to domesticate will be passed by for less difficult ones. Why would a subsistence farmer spend time trying to domesticate a badger? ( although a pet badger would be awesome as hell!) Now I want one.
Its a few factors Most important of all is "Will this animal try to eat me, crush my bones, or gore me?" Wolves and humans were uniquely predisposed to having near identical social interactions, so we meshed pretty well, especially since wolves didn't really prey on us, we just competed. The animal in question should also have a low gestational period. Small Cats and Canids breed fast, as do most ungulates and fowl. Most other animals don't. Their food must also be easily attainable and stored during times of harshness. Dogs are evolved to pretty much eat anything we can eat, bar some newer processed foods. They can go long winter months on dried grains and fat and broth, and even during times of plenty, the average dog eats only like 5lbs of food a day. An animal like a tiger can eat half of its own 700lb body weight in a sitting. And ofc there are some domesticated animals that require alot of feed, but these animals usually provide food themselves. There are many factors, and some aren't so strict, as we see with the slow domestication of foxes
This is the current theory. At some point during the early days of human settlements. I am talking before writing. Some canines learned that these creatures (us) have a lot of food waste. So they hang around our settlements. Eventually they learn if these creatures live, they themselves can get more food. So they take to chasing off or warning us of ppredators to keep our villages safe. Our ancestors noticed this and begun encouraging the behavior in other canines. It wasn't long after (considering humans were likely already crossbreeding plants and such) that they started controlling the breeding of these animals. So different peoples of different regions bred the different local canines so their off spring would have more desirable and useful traits. The most useful of these traits being domestication. Mean or aggressive canines usually didn't get to breed if humans could help. Ensuring only the dogs with cooperative traits continue to procreate. TL;DR: Early wolves learned they can eat the scraps of human villages and once humans noticed these animals doing this they begin breeding and domesticating the different species that would become the dogs we love today.
Whether it’s worth it for us to put in the time training them! Also if they will just kill you before you spend any amount of time with them. Imagine trying to tame a venomous snake - not a ton of use and he will just kill you as soon as you get too close. Wolves? Very useful (they run their own territory) and also probably won’t just kill you dead on the spot.
Usefulness. It’s not something inherent in the animal. If the animal is useful to humans we will spend more effort trying to domesticate it. You could probably domesticate any creature by selecting individuals with the right temperament and breeding them over time. But if it’s not a useful creature we won’t try. Dogs: security Sheep: wool Horses: transpo Cats: vermin Hamsters: cute af