Eli5: Why can’t you make a pet out of a wolf, a bear or a lion?
In: Biology
You can, but it’s hard and risky.
Dogs see humans as food source.
Lions see humans as food, *the source*.
Animals have some psychological constraints to eating others, like a momma tiger is unlikely to eat their cubs, but male tiger can easily eat the cubs – even their own, and where the fine line goes, is pretty shaky. And human owner isn’t even seen as a cub, and takes a lot of work to make animal think so.
That’s the long and short of it. It’s possible, but it might take pretty cruel measures to do so, and you wouldn’t have tens of thousands of years low-risk guarantee as you’d have with domesticated/bred animals like cows or dogs.
Even cats that we’ve domesticated so long ago can become pretty aggressive at random.
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