The taming of the dog, cow, horse, pig and rabbit | Hacker News Reader

The taming of the dog, cow, horse, pig and rabbit

phys.org

39 pointsdnetesn28 comments

I've been wondering for ages why we don't continue activally domesticating other species - what better way to protect them than to ensure we can integrate? It may take a while, bit we've managed it in the past with a fragment of our scientific knowledge

We do continue to domesticate animals. The Russian red fox is an obvious example.

That's the only one example I can think of. Are there any others?

Budgerigars have been selectively breed for size and appearance for about 150 years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budgerigar

There are lots of tamed wild animals around.

For example tamed tasmanian devil's.

Or tamed birds like parrots.

But they haven't been especially bred for tameness, just they are naturally tameable.

I mentioned Tassie Devils in another comment.

I'd hazard a guess most the Australian marsupials would make fairly okay pets fairly immediately. Kangaroos, wallabies, pademelons, tasmanian devils (I live here wooo!), quolls, all seem to get by okay in captivity, so that's half the battle won.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_domesticated_animals

Lots of fishes

The Russian fox program also apparently domesticated minks while they were at it. 'Fancy rats' (domesticated pet rats) are barely a century old. Ferrets are very big now and I get the impression they didn't use to be pets, although I don't know to what extent they are domesticated.

A sibling comment linked this[1] Wikipedia entry which claims:

Ferret - 1500BCE, although yeah I've heard there's been an explosion in popularity.

But you're right, Mink 19th century; and Fancy rat and lab rat 19th century.

Domesticated hedgehog 1980s!

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_domesticated_animals

Wouldn't this make these animals totally dependant on us for survival? This would be a massive and complex operation on a world already populated by billions of humans.

If we want to protect these species, we should concentrate our effort in protecting the environment.

I don't think it has to be a binary choice. I've often thought Tasmanian Devils¹ would be a great candidate for domestication, at least while they're under threat from the facial tumour.²

Tassie Devils live and breed in captivity fine, and they're super cute!

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasmanian_devil

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_facial_tumour_disease

Quolls as another candidate:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quoll

People keep sugar gliders as pets but I'm not sure you can ever toilet train them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_glider

Tassie Devils live and breed in captivity fine, and they're super cute!

Oh yeah, they're adorable. From Wiki:

It is characterized by its stocky and muscular build, black fur, pungent odor, extremely loud and disturbing screech, keen sense of smell, and ferocity when feeding. The Tasmanian devil's large head and neck allow it to generate among the strongest bites per unit body mass of any extant mammal land predator

Just the type of pet one would want in an NYC apartment. /s

Of course, one could say similar things about wolves, and yet people are crazy about dogs.

The problem is that they have a crushing bite to break bones and bad character. A extra powerful bite in a cute small animal is a complicated recipe for petting. Sharks have similar issues. They interact with other sharks biting even when they are trying to express romantic interest.

I wonder if the bad character would be bred out. Could take a while. Dogs have a lethal bite too so I don’t see that as necessarily an impediment.

Dogs are of social nature. Tasmanian devils are solitary and oportunist cannibals. With exceptions of females and its cubs, Tasmanian devils only tolerate other devils around when there is a lot of food.

The alternative choice is adoption of invasive species. Ie rabbits, cats, dogs. When people release them for whatever reason despite illegally, these animals go on to destroy the environment.

If Australian animals get released to wildlife, at least it's not destructive animals.

For example, millions of birds are killed by cats: https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-04/cats-killing-one-m...

Its illegal to keep most types of Australian animals as pets. It's insane.

Gwern wrote an essay masquerading as a book review suggesting that we should finish domesticating cats recently.

https://www.gwern.net/Book-reviews#review-of-like-engendring...

The fact that you can make a serious case that cats are barely domesticated suggests there’s just not that much time or energy devoted to it.

Domestication is the work of a career at best. If you wanted to domesticate macaques and you worked for 30 years you’d have ten generations to work with. The bigger the population the better because you have greater variation in the founding population.

There’s just not a lot of demand there so there’s no money. Where there is demand breeding is very healthy, as in agricultural genetics generally, whether for increasing milk yield in cattle or in creating new types fruit trees as in apple varieties.

I have no expertise here, but I recall that Jarod Diamond's book Guns, Germs, and Steel claims that almost all wild animals lack a certain set of characteristics that are essential for domestication. These include the ability to breed when living outside the wilderness (elephants lack this) and to be made tame so they don't attack humans and can be trained for useful work (zebras lack this).

Also, it seems to me that people would not put the effort needed for domestication unless they thought the animal could fill some important niche that none of the present domesticated animals does.

Related specifically to the pig and our relationship to them, the book Lesser Beasts (https://smile.amazon.com/Lesser-Beasts-Snout-Tail-History/dp...) is a great read.

Cats not mentioned. Because they're not fully tamed?

There has been a lot of stuff in recent years arguing that cats domesticated themselves, whereas we domesticated these other animals.

Domestic cats are also still nearly identical to African wildcats physically and in social behavior, with the primary differences being lower aggression levels and greater general sociability. Compare to dogs, where even the most "wild" dog has morphological differences in skull shape and distinct differences in social interactions from wolves [1].

[1]: https://particle.scitech.org.au/earth/eye-contact-between-di...

From the articles linked research: " Recent work comparing dogs and wolves suggests that eye contact is an important behaviour underlying these social bonds; however, it remains unclear how this feature of interspecific social bonding evolved"

Eye contact is a big part of it. There was a documentary about dogs recently, where they did a simple experiment by placing a piece of food inside a cage that could not be opened by anyone but a human. First they let the wolf go at it, and it just went crazy trying to find a way in, inevitably giving up to do something else. The dog on the other hand tried for a bit, and then turn around and looked directly at the human for assistance.

I was under the impression that dogs kind of did that too, at least initially. Basically wolves and foxes and so on following humans around eating scraps and slowly becoming more accustomed to us.

Of course we found them useful enough that we then further trained and domesticated them too.

My theory is that African wildcats were already so well suited for the role they ended up in (hunting vermin without being annoying or dangerous to humans) that there was very little selection pressure on them for anything but general sociability and smaller territories. Most other domestic animals took much more drastic changes from their wild ancestors to become more than marginally useful.

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