Eli5: Why can’t you make a pet out of a wolf, a bear or a lion?
In: Biology
We made pets out of wolves. We just call them dogs. We made pets out of animals related to lions – we call them house cats.
The reason you can’t just take a single animal out of the wild and make it a pet is because it’s temperament and instincts are still wild, and incompatible with domestic life. It may grow to trust you, but it’s still a wild animal, and those instincts may assert themselves in ways that are either inconvenient or dangerous to you. Not every single animal will do this, but with enough people keeping such pets over time, some of them will.
In general, given somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand years, we could probably make pets out of bears. We’d probably have to breed them to be smaller, to be in any way practical, and the real part of it is breeding just the animals that show some friendliness, interest and affinity towards us.
There’s very little reason to put in the effort, though, unless we can think of a use for them. It takes a lot of time and effort and expense to house something even as large as a large dog. A bear would be multiples of that, and there’s no immediate problem for which they’re the best solution. Hell, if it were today, we probably wouldn’t see much use in domesticating dogs, either. Most of the things we used them for are not as common these days, though there are some highly specialized areas where they still see some work.
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