Falconry has existed for at least 2000 years. Despite this, no form of hawk, eagle, falcon, or other commonly used bird is domesticated. They’re still considered tame wild animals.
Humans domesticated cats, ferrets, horses, pigeons, chickens, and rats. So why is there no domesticated form of falcon or hawk yet?
In: Biology
Weren’t pigeons technically domesticated at one point?
You don’t necessarily need to domesticate an animal you can tame reliably. Domestication is, generally, the process of making an animal more tractable and docile, and more willing to obey human commands and domination. That comes at a trade off. A loss of hunting instincts, or significant physiology changes. Look at dogs; compare the bite strength of a domestic breed to a wild dog or a hyena. It’s just not in the same class.
Raptors might lose their hunting instincts. They might lose grip strength in their talons, or see changes to their beak structure – or have their eyesight get weaker. None of those are things you want to happen in a hunting bird, and if you can tame it and it will obey you as it is, then why risk essentially ruining the species by trying to domesticate it? Dogs weren’t domesticated to make them better as a species. They were domesticated to make them more USEFUL to humans, by being able to be trained for tasks we wanted them to do beyond hunting.
And many species simply can’t be domesticated anyway. Zebras are the famous example; we domesticated horses, why can’t we domesticate zebras? Because they’re not social the same way horses are, and our methods of domesticating them don’t work.
[This](https://www.reddit.com/r/Falconry/comments/1angdzq/why_no_domestication_over_the_millennia/) is an interesting thread on r/Falconry. The tldr is “although we have been using raptors in hunting for thousands of years, breeding raptors in captivity is extremely recent and thus there has not been enough time for the domestication process to really start.” [This article](https://faculty.washington.edu/toby/baywingdb/Genetics%20of%20captive-bred%20raptors.pdf) from 2009 puts the length of time that raptors have been captive bred at about 50 years, although I’m not sure if this is in general or just that specific program.
The number of trained raptors is minuscule in comparison to the number of chickens (also a bird). All of the bazillion chickens are selectively bred to have desirable traits, as result of domestication. Raptor breeding is a tiny fraction of the size.
Also, many of the traits that make good hunting birds might be lost in domestication, and that would be unhelpful.
Partly the answer is why bother? A captive bird can live for 20 years and it’s pretty easy to trap and train one and historically you could even trap a seasoned hunter and just have to train it to hunt with you which is even easier.
Breeding raptors is kinda a pain, they are quite territorial and don’t lay a lot of eggs per season, you can get more with modern tools like incubators but it’s still pretty hard to breed birds of prey.
One thing a lot of domesticated animals share is that the juveniles are watched over and taught by the parents basic strategies on how to feed itself. Most birds don’t have such close relationship between parent and juvenile. Once the juveniles leave the nest they may hang around and watch the parents for a short while, but they won’t stay for long.
Without that long time of interaction between parent and offspring, they never really learn the strategies of relying on humans or build on the strategies of the previous generation to further domesticate themselves.
Mostly people stole eggs in the wild and raised those, it can be really finicky to breed them in captivity.
This means they haven’t been selectively bred by humans for companionship the same way something like dogs or livestock have.
Domestication involves breeding an animal to live alongside humans. Falconry has mostly just tamed a wild animal from scratch over and over again.
CGP Grey covers this very well: [Why Some Animals Can’t be Domesticated (youtube.com)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOmjnioNulo)
There is at the end of the day just perhaps 20 species that works good with domestication. We can tame a lot of animals to not rip off our faces, but its a lot of hit and miss as they just dont have the right “attitude” to be domesticated. As someone else mentioned in a comment, famous is zebra vs horse, you can not domesticate a zebra. You might be able to tame one if you have it from birth, but any large scale domestication will not happen. And that goes for most animals, you can not get a herd of buffalo to calmly walk where you want them to, it just wont happen.
You can especially not domesticate predators – just think of a cat… how domesticated is it really? It has accepted that humans are for the most part nice to me, they give me food and a warm place to sleep – but training a cat to ie. stop killing birds, good luck. Its a small tiger living in your house – whereas the dog sees you as a bit weird dog, thats a good leader of the flock because somehow you magically always have food, and you praise me like Ive been conditioned for 10.000 years to like.
I worked at a raptor rescue, and raised some captive bred barn owls from chicks and compared to other birds I’ve worked with, they respond quite differently. Even when raised by hand, some still quite happily wander off into the wild when given the chance, they don’t seem to really become as dependant on their people (except for Leo, who thought he was a dog and followed you around). From what I’ve seen, there’s often some kind of reciprocal behaviour in other human/animal relationships that birds of prey don’t really seem to have.
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