Eli5: Why can’t you make a pet out of a wolf, a bear or a lion?
In: Biology
The short answer is basically that you can make a pet out of those – and we did with wolves – but its an evolutionary process, that takes a REALLY long time. Meaning that you cannot domesticate one animal, because its lifetime is not long enough and by all accounts, its genetic material wouldn’t predispose it. Domestication happens on the breed level, not the animal level. I don’t know if you have feral cats where you live, but they are really quite different than a domesticated cat. Shelters will not re-home a stray cat because it literally cannot live contentedly with humans, but if they are able to get stray kittens within the first few weeks of birth, they can be raised to be okay. But thats still ONLY because the have the genetic material available to BE domesticated.
I’d look up the famous Russian fox breeding experiments if you’re interested – its a decades long program where within each litter of foxes that were born, they selected only the friendliest/least aggressive foxes to breed. After many generations, around 3 out of 4 foxes are born friendly enough to be considered somewhat “domesticated” or tame, might be a better word. But they still dont have anywhere near the level of connection that other domesticated animals do.
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