How do big animals such as Lion, Tiger, Bears, Elephants, etc be “friends” with humans.
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Normally, because they are raised from being babys by humans. The same way that some animals like chickens adopt other animals when their broody and are treated as real mother by the adopted baby. Or how Dogs and Cats are more likely to tolerate one another if raised together.
By growing up with the human, the animal loses it’s sense of seeing them as a threat. They might even consider the human family.
With wild animals however, this is still dangerous. While there are multiple stories of large animals like this living peacefully with humans, there are multiple more where the animals turned on the humans (although this is generally more common in cases where the animal was befriended in a way other than raising it.)
Furthermore you’ll simply here more about animals that befriend humans than the ones that don’t. If you are working at a zoo or wildlife reserve or something and know what you are doing and notice one of the animals being particularly friendly with you, you’d be more likely to try befriend it. If the animal shows no interest you aren’t going to try befriend it so there’s no news story there.
If you were to breed and raise several generations of an animal like a lion or bear by breeding the ones with friendly traits, you could even begin domesticating wild species to be almost always safe to be around in the same way we did dogs. (although when they did turn on their owners the results would likely be much more catastrophic.)
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