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
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.
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