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
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.
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