Eli5: Why can’t you make a pet out of a wolf, a bear or a lion?
In: Biology
I think you are talking about the domestication side. Domestication is breeded into the animal. This is general, but a long time ago wolves hung out and killed our ancestors. In general, wolves were wild animals with traits that humans did not like because it tended to kill. However, *some* wolves had a disposition for calmness and less aggression in conjunction with the wolves sociability. Those wolves probably hung out around where people lived and people came to like *those* specific wolves. If you have a couple of those kinds of wolves, they would breed and pass on those genetic traits (calmness, less aggressive) and over time that became *THE* dominant trait. The descendants of those wolves changed into the precursor of the dog. The wolf was domesticated from a small sample of essentially less aggressive wolves.
Bears and lions….while they can be trained, they aren’t domesticated for a few reasons…lack of sociability, the raw power they posses, and lack of need to domesticate them. I am sure overtime you could breed a more domesticated version of them as a pet, but what if that pet accidently does something playfully to you but at the same time is highly dangerous and injurious to you. Its not something pet owners would really want to have in a pet.
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