Eli5: Why can’t you make a pet out of a wolf, a bear or a lion?
In: Biology
The animals that we keep as pets are domesticated. The dogs that we have today started as wolves but we’ve bred selectively, in part for their friendly disposition towards humans. In the case of dogs, this process took thousands of years. It’s possible that we could domesticate a bear but it wouldn’t happen by simply training a bear as they currently exist. We would have to breed a bear that has a disposition to be a pet. A bears/lion/wolf’s instinct is to be a territorial predator. They are not psychologically inclined to be obedient to a human, which is why keeping they as pets doesn’t usually end well.
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Domestication takes many generations to get the “wildness” out of the animal.
And tbh size really makes a difference. If dogs were 300 kg they’d be a lot harder to domesticate, because a single instance of the dog playing a little too rough could end your life. If bears were 3 kg they’d be a lot easier to domesticate, because even when they got ornery they couldn’t hurt you. Dogs and bears don’t range in size from 3-300 kg, but cats do, and there’s a reason we domesticate the little ones and not the big ones.
You’d have to breed them over 100K years and after you’d end up with an animal that doesn’t even resemble the original Bear/Lion/Whatever.
You can make a pet of anything. People have bears, wolves, lions, tigers, crocodiles as pets. But when your cat misbehaves, it may give you a good scratch at most, it could even bleed. If a bear misbehaves, you die.
Lots of people have trained wild animals. You hear about the ones that die of course but plenty have them with no issue.
There are lots of pet bears in Russia for instance.
I know a woman in AL who runs a wolf sanctuary, created because people try to have them as pets, then realize they can’t control it. She has about 30ish wolves last I checked in w her. They love her and let her be around them, but no one else. And I’ll say this, wolves are fucking huge irl if you’ve never seen one. You think, from movies or whatever, that it’s *just a big dog*, but no, they are a whole other beast. And they know it, too. You can see it in their eyes as they approach you with a head bigger than your own.
I believe you can. If obtained as a pup/cub , and socialization begins immediately, they will learn life as we do.
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.
You could make them a pet. But you’d have to train them and theyd ONLY be your pet because of the domestication thing. Animals can form social bonds with humans, without being domesticated
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