Why do animals like lions and tigers sometimes “forget” about their previous owners but dogs don’t have that instinct to kill them?
In: Biology
Dogs are the product of thousands and thousands of years of breeding. The dogs that turned on their masters weren’t allowed to breed.
Lions and tigers and bears are still *wild* animals.
I think it has little to do with memory and everything to do with behavior. Domesticated animals like dogs have been bred to not have a “killer instinct” like their wolf counterparts do in nature. They lack the predatory instincts and the desire to act on it due to years and years of living in a domesticated and home environment. Lions and tigers on the other hand are simply wild animals that have been forced to live with an owner. It is only a matter of time before their natural instincts overcome whatever was keeping them docile.
Wild animals still have all their wild instincts. They have maybe a couple of generations where they’ve been raised in captivity. If you’ve got a lion cub, then it’s grandfather or great-grandfather at least was out on the savanna hunting and killing things. That’s not really enough time to breed it and select for particular qualities. It might be a cute lion cub, and if you raise it from when it’s a baby, it might like you. But it’s still a wild animal, just one that kinda likes you.
Dogs don’t act that way because they’ve had *thousands* of generations of breeding to remove those wild traits. Back when humans were living as nomads in tents, we were breeding dogs. And if a dog attacked a human, the tribe would just kill it. Bad dog. The “good dogs” who never attacked people and did what they were supposed to do, those were the ones allowed to breed.
You could do the same thing with lions and tigers if you had a thousand years or so and a bunch of breeding stock.
Dogs, as we know them, are a product of having behavioural neoteny selected for meaning that, even as adults, they are puppies
Wild animals don’t become tame. They learn to tolerate people. They learn that you’re a source of food, they learn that you’re not a threat, they learn you are something they can tolerate.
The thing about tolerance is that it can end. Sometimes it can end real quick over things that a person doesn’t even realise they did.
I have an uncle who cares for reptiles of all kinds. He’s quite knowledgeable and provides zoos with advice. About fifteen years ago he got attacks and completely tore up by some large monitors that he’d been taking care of for years.
Normally those monitors were completely docile around him. The day he got attacked he was bending over near a bucket of raw chicken he was about to feed to the lizards. The angle between him, the lizards and the buckets was such that they perceived him as competition for the food. A mistake that cost him about 400 stitches.
Dogs have thousands of generations of selective breeding to get rid of any undesirable qualities. The big difference between a dog and a wolf is that a dog is selectively bred to crave your approval. A wolf doesn’t give a fuck what you think and if you cross a line with a wolf it will step up in a way your dog won’t even consider.
It’s the difference between a “tame” animal and a domesticated one. A “tame” lion is really nothing more than a wild lion that has been raised around humans so it’s not scared and skittish around them. It still has all it’s lion instincts like attacking when threatened, an urge to hunt, and ultimately not being afraid of humans in a fight.
Dogs on the other hand are domesticated. This means that over the years we’ve bread the friendlier dogs and avoided breading (or killed) the aggressive ones. Over multiple generations this changes them both physically and physiologically. Physicals traits of domestication you can observe in dogs are floppy ears, more curled tails. Physiologically they become more docile, less easily spooked, and more comfortable around humans. These are genetic traits that have been deliberately bred into these animals.
Wild animals that are raised as pets or in sanctuaries are still wild at heart. They haven’t undergone any evolutionary change and are virtually identical to their wild counterparts. A dog is the domesticated wolf, a pet lion is still a still a lion.
There are some people around the world who are actively domesticating animals for various reasons. I know there was a russian(?) team working on domesticating foxes through breeding. I’m also pretty sure I’ve heard of some people who are actually trying to breed wolves into domestication and have been for a while. I think Radiolab might’ve done a piece on it.
Edit: The domestication of cats actually has a pretty interesting history since they kinda self domesticated. In looking into this I found a neat article that suggests leopards might’ve been briefly domesticated to an extent in Neolithic China.
[https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0147295](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0147295)
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