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.
You can, and people do, it’s just a terrible idea.
Those animals aren’t domesticated, so it isn’t like bringing a domesticated cat or dog into your house, which have been bred over a long time to live side by side with people. At most, those animals can be tame, which isn’t the same as domesticated. People also have different tame animals like squirrels and foxes, but the difference is that if a tame squirrel or a fox stops being so tame, it can only do so much damage to a human being of toddler size or greater. A wolf, bear, or lion can eat an adult right up.
Watch the documentary Tiger King to see what less-than-professional treatment of tame tigers bred in captivity can do if they don’t like what’s going on. A lot of fatal bear attacks on humans are also from tame bears kept as pets or for circuses. I know wolves and wolf hybrids kept as dogs pose problems as well.
CGP Gray has a great video about why zebras make terrible horses which is kind of related to your question. He goes into detail what domestication really means and why humans domesticated some animals and not others [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wOmjnioNulo](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wOmjnioNulo)
Because you don’t have 10000 years to breed undesireable traits out of them. Dogs (from wolves) have been bred over a long time period to favor certain traits, including loyalty and friendliness. To some extent, so have cats, although they’re not as domesticated.
Wild animals, on the other hand, have not, and so they’ll always have a bit of wild animal in them, no matter how you train them.
You most certainly *can*, but it would take a lot of selective breeding for it to become possible for anyone. If you start now, your grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-(…)-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-children will be able to have a pet lion. By that time it will be probably just called a big cat, but hey.
>Why can’t you make a pet out of a wolf, a bear or a lion?
You can, and people have, but you’re playing with fire.
You might get [Christian the Lion](https://youtu.be/btuxO-C2IzE?si=yiZiIjMnypgeEiRx) but you might just as easily get [Travis the Chimp](https://youtu.be/yqOjG1NiQb8?si=iZ2Ze5ahur2h4VRs) or [Asya the bear](https://youtu.be/vvQaPBxcwck?si=spcnk9Z91rr_JUXI)
Domesticated animals have been bred to be pre-disposed to be docile and friendly. Wild animals can be trained and acclimated to humans, but they’re still wild. In the case of something like a bear or lion in particular, the fact they are so large and powerful makes them especially dangerous. A bear treats everyone else like a bear. The problem is, bears are way tougher and way stronger than us. The way that bear reacted to that woman was the bear equivalent of “Hey, don’t sneak up on me and get outta my space.” He probably wasn’t really trying to hurt her even, just warn her off. But he’s a bear, and doesn’t understand that what would be considered a light warning to another bear is likely to put a human in the hospital.
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.
I volunteer at a rescue that has wolves, bears, tigers, and lots of other animals that were pets until their owners realized what an awful decision they had made. Now a bunch of other people have to work and pay the costs for those stupid pet owners.
Those animals need many acres of space for each very expensive enclosure, plus various water features (bears and tigers are required to have swimming space), plus vet facilities, plus daily feed, plus enrichment tools.
Domestication takes a long time and has certain requirements in animals being domesticated. CGP Grey actually has a video that explains it fairly well. https://youtu.be/wOmjnioNulo?si=E2j5XRqe1jUy9l1j
We did domesticate wolves, and over time, their human friendly forms became dogs. Wolves simply still exist alongside domesticated dogs now.
Same with felines, eventually small wild cats became house cats.
We could do the same with bigger ones, but there really isn’t a need to. And it’s hard to force animals to mate in captivity (Zoo’s have a hard enough time at this) so domestication of these animals just isn’t as easy as wolves and small cats were.
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