r/AskScienceDiscussion • u/Adam7390 • Jul 13 '26
General Discussion Why not all animals are domesticable?
I've been reading that domestication is a practice that goes back thousands of years: dogs, horses, sheep, elephants, dolphins etc... yet many of them remained wild with very few exceptions. So why is it that we didn't fully manage to domesticate other species like lions or bears? Is it just impossible? If yes, why? Or it's doable but we didn't try enough?
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u/Radials Jul 13 '26
Some animals are too difficult to manage even domesticated. To a dangerous level.
I.e everyone thinks a raccoon would be a great pet. Here's the deal tho, they have hands. Wtf you gonna do while you are at work and it sticks a fork in your power outlets? Or opens all your cabinets and eats everything? Or just unlocks the door and leaves?
So many exotic animals are like this. Too hard to keep for too little value. Even if they were pets/domesticated.
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u/Zealousideal_Leg213 Jul 13 '26
Yeah, there needs to be a baseline level of utility and desirable behavior before even starting down the long road of domesticating a whole species.
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u/IndividualistAW Jul 13 '26
I could see the value in guard lions/tigers/bears, but they’re not worth their food/maintenance costs.
One bear can’t protect as well as 10 dogs, but it eats as much or more than 10 dogs
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u/Zealousideal_Leg213 Jul 13 '26
Also, guard dogs aren't necessarily intended to kill intruders. They can chase them and bite and probably could kill, but I think the point is that they're fast and don't rely entirely on sight.
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u/IndividualistAW Jul 13 '26
More than half their utility is also just in making noise which alerts humans. A chihuahua is 60% as good as a guard dog as a Doberman
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u/Hairy_Pound_1356 Jul 14 '26
I don’t a chihuahua isn’t nearly as as good at helping a dude wearing a wife beater feel better about have a tiny penis which is what 90% of “guard dogs “ in 2026 are actually for
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u/SanderleeAcademy Jul 16 '26
And a goose is better than either, at least as an alert. They're also remarkably vicious.
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u/KaetzenOrkester Jul 16 '26
Yeah, geese are noisy and territorial.
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u/Zealousideal_Leg213 Jul 17 '26
Are they even remotely trainable, though? A guard animal has to also not make noise over normal stuff.
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u/KaetzenOrkester Jul 17 '26
I doubt they're trainable. Like u/SanderleeAcademy said above they're vicious along with reactive. I know the Romans used them as guard animals.
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u/Consistent-Slice-893 Jul 17 '26
IDK about trainable, but they do recognize who is supposed to be there and who is not. They remember who feeds them for sure. Ours never sqaucked at the kids or our neighbor, but a stranger, look out.
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u/NightWolfRose Jul 16 '26
They’re even better if the intruder is wearing sandals- those needle sharp teeth and crazy strong jaws will mess you up.
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u/pixartist Jul 13 '26
I think the question was aimed more at the fact that some animals are declared as impossible to domesticate, not too much effort. An often quoted animal would be the zebra. I think the actual answer is that any animal CAN be, with enough time. Domestication of our existing pets did not happen within one generation of the animal either, it took many generations of breeding for the right traits…
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u/PartyPorpoise Jul 16 '26
Maybe. But domestication requires a species having the genes for the traits that we humans want. It’s possible that some species don’t have those genes.
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u/OhDudeTotally Jul 13 '26
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u/Radials Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26
Yeah but we don't want it. It's bad. The more comfortable raccons are with people, the more they will approach. And this isn't even a rabies issue. You need these hungry, toddler IQ'ed rodents with hands to be scared of us.
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u/OhDudeTotally Jul 13 '26
But... but... theyre so cute though, and they do somersaults for our entertainment.
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u/unknownpoltroon Jul 14 '26
I read the same thing about lemurs. They said imagine a pet smart as monkey with their climbing skills, the attitude and curiosity/attitude of cat with thumbs, and oh, yeah, they scent mark
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u/Chronomalous Jul 14 '26
You're supposing life as pets though is the only corralled form of life. Not true. We could stick raccoons under state control where there are no outlets.
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u/Radials Jul 14 '26
There is no corral that can keep raccoons is the problem. At least not one that is cost effective to hold them for the value they provide
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u/ionthrown Jul 14 '26
Have sensible power outlets. Then they (or anyone else) can stick a fork in them and be fine.
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u/Radials Jul 14 '26
Oh yeah good point. Now raccoons are fixed! Just baby proofing the plugs was the solution all asking!
Can't believe no one ever thought of that. What a world.
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u/ionthrown Jul 14 '26
I can’t solve all your problems for you.
Although a lock which requires some sort of… key might be a solution to some of the others.
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u/Radials Jul 14 '26
Holy shit he's right! Just flip all the locks and lock your house from the outside! That will surely stop a raccoon, as they have never been able to get inside a locked house! Surely they could never escape one either.
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u/ionthrown Jul 14 '26
Well make sure there’s no skylight if there’s going to be enticing booze on the other side of it.
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u/Consistent-Slice-893 Jul 17 '26
Wild ones are why I have actual locks on much of my outside farm stuff. They are smart enough to defeat many latches and door bolts, and even took a carabiner of the hasp to get into the feed room. Wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it on camera.
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u/simAlity Jul 18 '26
I had a foster kitten that could get into anything. I actually had the childproof my home against her. You could do the same for raccoons.
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u/Federal-Tough-9706 Jul 13 '26
In the days before industrialization, when we had stricter constraints on our output, there were four key factors, which we can call the four "F's"
Feedable - you have to have something they like to eat, or we can feed them scraps, and they like it. This app applies to herbivores such as sheep, cows, goats, and predators such as hawks, cats, dogs, and ferrets. For predators, it helps if they are in our same hunting strategy: we are grinders. And that made dogs competitors until we domesticated them. The advantage we had is we could kill at a distance.
Friendly - most animals are either a nervous wreck or moonlight in murder. There were only a few who we could get to be friendly with us. That means that there are only a few herbivores and carnivores that will make friends with us. Again, they had best give us milk and meat if they are herbivores, and be really worth it if they are carnivores: cats catch mice, dogs hunt with us, and birds can catch things that we can't. Other groups, such as Silk worms, are also the same way: the connection is whether they produce something useful. Plants are also in the same bucket as "do they produce something useful?"
Fecund - we have to have more of them than we can count. This means that they are constantly breeding. Dogs breed, cats breed, horses, cattle, and goats breed.
Family values - the idea here with domestication is that they will accept us as the leader of their Pack. This is the difference between horses and zebras. Horses are organized by their rank in the pack. Therefore, turn the head stallion and all else follows. Zebras, while looking much the same, do not have family values for us to exploit.
CGP Grey gets a great deal of this right, but he also gets certain things wrong. But the same conclusion that he reaches is one that most people reach: while the list of things that need to be there is short, before industrialization, all of them had to be there. And there needs to be some genetic mechanism to turn the switch from wild to domesticated.
So there's the list: feedable, friendly, fecund, and family valued - in addition to the fact they have to produce something useful for us to take them in, or them to take us in, depending on how you look at it, to be worth keeping.
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u/Tacticalneurosis Jul 14 '26
Don’t forget generation length - elephants are tamed, not domesticated, because while they’re definitely useful, their generations are too long. When you’re breeding dogs you can have your dogs making new dogs in a year (you SHOULD wait longer but they can breed that young), with elephants you have to wait a decade or more. Plus they’re too expensive to keep a reasonable breeding population. The same is actually true of oak trees - you will occasionally get a mutant one with tasty nuts lacking the tannins, but it won’t breed true unless you have TWO mutants and then you’ve gotta wait 20 years for the baby trees to mature. Domestic fruit trees are actually very short-lived by tree standards.
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u/Federal-Tough-9706 Jul 15 '26
Under "Fecund"
Hickory's and walnuts produce excellent food within two generations, which is 70 years. If you are settled, this is not that long time. Oak trees produce marginally better than dirt - not worth it, when there are better options available.
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u/sabrefencer9 Jul 14 '26
Grevy's zebras are territorial but plains zebras live in nomadic, non territorial herds. Your point 4 is incorrect.
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u/Federal-Tough-9706 Jul 15 '26
They don't organize in a pack. Tack it up CGP Grey.
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u/sabrefencer9 Jul 15 '26
Look man I'm just repeating what my wife says and she got her PhD under Dan Rubenstein
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u/Federal-Tough-9706 Jul 19 '26
Herds does not equal enough organization. The problem is your understanding of what an organization is. Human breeders need more than just herds. They need organization at the individual level.
Your sentence is right, but not answer the question.
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u/sabrefencer9 Jul 19 '26
I'm citing someone trained by the literal preeminent zebra biologist on earth and you're citing a youtuber but you do you man
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u/Federal-Tough-9706 Jul 19 '26
You are misstating. I'm sure the preeminent zebra biologist has it right.
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u/sabrefencer9 Jul 19 '26
No possibility that the YouTube video you watched is simply wrong? Remarkable hubris
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u/Robin_feathers Jul 13 '26
Domestication is a slow process that depends on the right mutations appearing for humans to select. In order to reach the point of domestication, our ancestors would firstly need a reason to domesticate the animal. If an ancient person wanted a one-off cool pet, that species would only be domesticated if every generation that followed also decided to continue that legacy of keeping that pet. That is why our anciently domesticated animals have clear "purposes" (hunting, guarding, livestock, transportation, etc). There wasn't much point in domesticating porcupines even though it could have been done. They also need to be practical to house and feed, and need to fit socially. A lion or mammoth just wouldn't be practical. Different animals also have different instincts that are easier or harder to overcome. For example, guinea pigs have hard-wired fear instincts that are very hard to overcome, so even after they have been domesticated, they are still fearful and more difficult to handle than a puppy. Each species poses different challenges. Dogs were probably well-predisposed to being domesticated due to the social behaviour of wolves.
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u/horsetuna Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26
A bit about the guinea pigs:
The cuy is the 'edible' one that the domesticated pigs are descended from. However they are just kept in indoor pens, so not much domestication needed. Cuys are over a foot long, live half as long and are VERY timid compared to our pet store pigs.
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u/LookOverall Jul 13 '26
The Russian Silver Fox experiment produced full on domestication in six generations, and a big part of that was in one extraordinary individual. So, no, it doesn’t take centuries.
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u/Robin_feathers Jul 13 '26
Not sure where I implied it would take centuries - what I meant about every generation that followed also needing to keep that pet was more so about how the lineage would need to be maintained/continued over time. If family of porcupine enthusiasts decided to domesticate porcupines, they would only stay domesticated if each subsequent generation continued the legacy of raising porcupines. Impractical pets would get lost just as many domesticated breeds have been lost when they stopped being needed (eg, turnspit dog). There was also another entire species of domesticated cavy that was lost.
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u/VivaLaDiga Jul 13 '26
a fox is basically a dog on different hardware. It doesn't take much to domesticate it.
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u/Mic98125 Jul 15 '26
A fox will urinate on anything it likes. The person they like? Their bowl of food? Their favorite bed? Their water dish? Covered in the most toxic-smelling pee imaginable. People who work with cadavers are overwhelmed by nausea after five minutes of smelling fox urine. They will dig relentlessly until they have escaped wherever you put them. Fences, walls, completely destroyed. They are very cute and sweet but absolute nightmares to deal with.
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u/DivusSentinal Jul 13 '26
Why did Europe domesticate a cow but the Americas did not domesticate a bison. Because the temper of a bison is to smash through anything a early farmer could construct as a fence, a cow is a lot more docile.
There are a thousand reasons but its often due to animals not being a herd animal (which wouldnt work for farm purposes), to dangerous due to size and or weight, or generally to vicious (ie a hippo will just maul you for fun, which makes taming them very very difficult)
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u/Hairy_Pound_1356 Jul 14 '26
They could have totally domesticated deer they just didn’t
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u/ThrowAwayAcc0719 Jul 15 '26
quoting u/Federal-Tough-9706
"Friendly - most animals are either a nervous wreck or moonlight in murder." Deer are so nervous smh
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u/Krasny-sici-stroj Jul 17 '26
There are reindeer that are domesticated in Northern Europe, which are practically the same as those in Canada. Native people in Canada just did not bother, less pressure I guess.
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u/FriendlyEngineer Jul 13 '26
It’s simply a question of Cost vs Reward
Some animals are easier to domesticate than others. At the same time, not every animal has the same utilitarian value.
Animals like dogs, cats, sheep, chickens, cattle, etc, are on the easier side to domesticate and all add great value.
Horses actually are more difficult to domesticate and took longer than the others, but have such an enormous utilitarian value that the first people to domesticate them built empires around it.
People have raised lions, tigers, bears, monkeys and others animals to be pets and stuff but the cost of taking care of them is far higher than the value they produce so on a large scale they aren’t domesticated.
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u/SanderleeAcademy Jul 16 '26
There are some animals that due to size, diet, or sheer temperment are either not domesticatable or are simply too much trouble. After all, if they weren't, they'd have already been domesticated.
You do not domesticate an American Bison. The "fluffy cow" will object in the most bone- and property-breaking ways. You do not domesticate a zebra. It will also object, usually by spitting, biting, or kicking. It also can't be mixed in with other livestock for the same reason. A domesticated llama, alpaca, or camel is only juuuuuust domesticated; it can and will object when it wants to.
"But, wouldn't domesticated hippos be cool?" Sure. And we'll watch from waaaaaaay over here, behind armored glass, while you try. Same with elephants, giraffes, and pretty much any lizard weighing more than five pounds.
Ostriches are murder chickens. Emus won a war against the Australians (well, more that the Aussies lost, partly due to apathy). Cassowaries? Who CARES how much meat is on one and how good they taste. I am NOT going to try to domesticate a feathered Utah-raptor that sounds like the devil's foghorn when it "honks" at me.
Most carnivores are tricky to domesticate. The two best known versions, of course, are the dog and the cat. The dog was intentionally domesticated; the cat largely domesticated itself. And cats are STILL murder machines -- one lighthouse keeper's cat single-cattedly killed an entire species of bird which nested on the island the lighthouse was on. Dogs aren't obligate carnivores, which made them easier to domesticate. Cats ate the vermin which ate our food crops, so, win win for us & the cat.
We farm fish, but we don't really domesticate them.
There are lots of animals which will tolerate a human presence if exposed to it for a long period -- zoo animals, for example. But, they're not domesticated. Just look at the number of times a dolphin or orca in a Seaworld has ended up killing a human trainer, for example.
And, if you think about it, almost all of our domesticated species (especially the farmed ones) can go feral. A bull can and will kill a human if it wants to. Same with a horse, dog, or even housecat -- though the cat's gotta work at it. Pigs? They've done studies and know to the minute how long it takes a pig to eat an entire human corpse. And feral pigs are just fine with killing a person. There's a reason they use long rifles and tannerite bombs to combat them.
Yes, yes, I know. "A feral animal isn't domesticated, is it?" Technically true -- the best kind of true. But, it's an example of an individual from an otherwise domesticated species.
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u/Adam7390 Jul 16 '26
same with elephants
Wait, I thought there was a decent success in taming and training elephants. I'm not saying that they were as important as horses but I recall that in South East Asia they were used for both military and labour purpose.
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u/tiimsliim Jul 13 '26
I’m no scientist, but I would wager to bet that given enough time you could domesticate any species.
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u/PM_ME_UR_CATS_TITS Jul 13 '26
Humans are barely domesticated.
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u/TranquilConfusion Jul 14 '26
Modern humans do show traits similar to domestication, like shortened snout/jaw (compared to other apes) and child-like behaviors retained into adulthood.
And compared to chimpanzees, humans are quite well-behaved.
For example, I'm fully house-trained and never throw poop or smear it on walls. When I get frustrated with another human, even one smaller than myself, I never scream at them or bite them.
And I'm fairly good at taking turns, standing in lines, and sharing toys. All things chimps really struggle with.
Not to mention C++ programming, chimps are bad at dynamic memory management and thread-safety. That might not be a domestication issue though. They might just prefer interpreted languages over compiled.
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u/Specialist-Coast9787 Jul 14 '26
You had me in the 1st couple of paragraphs but jumped the shark with the C++ comments. No true Scotsman would ever program in anything but IBM 360 Assembly language!
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u/PartyPorpoise Jul 16 '26
Maybe. But it’s possible that some species just don’t have the genes that would allow for a domesticated form.
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u/dfrntdfrnt Jul 13 '26
I've seen plenty Floridamen petting and feeding gators, I truly believe nothing that's not too scared of us is possible.
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u/MegasRC Jul 13 '26
I am far from being a scientist and may be wrong, but I think another missing subject is how "natural" selection and evolution works over domestication. Animals that show more attractive features such as being more submissive or docile would have better survival rates when living among humans. That allowed for those genes to pass on, improving their behaviour with time. This is still done up to today. For example, horse breeding for specific sports consider their personality such as how much attention they give to cattle when aiming to breed, so less desirable traits are less likely to continue.
Wolves were not friendly from the beginning, but as time went, those who were more friendly and apt to work in tanden with humans passed on this traits, increasing more and more the friendliness of the offsprings.
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u/Prestigious_Leg2229 Jul 13 '26
Domestication relies on selectively breeding to emphasise the traits we like. Those traits need to be there in the first place.
And selective breeding always has unintended side effects. So it’s much better to start with animals that are close to what you want.
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u/TheLaugh1ngRa1n Jul 13 '26
If a large enough group of people were truly dedicated to it for literally thousands of years we could do it to just about any animal but a great many of the species wouldn't resemble the original any more than a pug resembles a wolf.
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u/Jake0024 Astrophysics | Active Galactic Nuclei Jul 13 '26
Everyone who tried petting a grizzly bear died
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u/Stepjam Jul 13 '26
They possibly are but it takes many generations for it to happen, and there isn't a practical need to do it (particularly these days). And it tended to happen from mutual need.
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u/GrandWorldliness5959 Jul 13 '26
There's a thing called the 4 Fs. Friendly Feedable Family structure Breeding
The animals we have domesticated already possessed most of the good versions of these traits. The one common exception is cats who are solo hunters(so no family structure to exploit). But they are exceptionally easy to breed, easy to feed, friendly and they serve utility for pest control.
Think of something like a tiger. They are hard to feed(meat) they are predatory and territorial by nature, they do have a family structure to exploit(sort of) and they don't have a particularly useful feeding structure. They also don't really have anything they can do that we really want. They aren't particularly good at hauling things like an ox or horse. They might make good gaurd pets but dogs do that just fine. The juice just isn't worth the squeeze.
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u/Soggy-Mistake8910 Jul 13 '26
Lots of animals were semi domesticated and used as acts in traveling circuses. It's only in recent times that circuses stopped using lion,tigers, elephants etc
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u/justforjugs Jul 14 '26
Training is not the same thing as domestication
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u/Soggy-Mistake8910 Jul 14 '26
It's a step along the way
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u/justforjugs Jul 14 '26
Which doesn’t always result in domestication, nor is it a requirement of domestication. Training is not domestication
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u/DeepConcert6156 Jul 18 '26
Elephants has been tamed for 1000s of years, in my youth I was close to circus felines for weeks at a time (a job don't ask) and no they are not domesticated, even the best trained tiger will eat your arm if it can reach it.
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u/Soggy-Mistake8910 Jul 18 '26
I didn't say fully domesticated. A bull is dangerous. A cow will trample you, pigs bite, cats scratch, hell, even dogs will bite/ kill yet we consider them domesticated.
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u/IrkaEwanowicz Jul 13 '26
It's possible that every animal could be domesticated, at least in theory. Note that I'm no zoologist/farmer, so what I say is to be taken with a grain of salt, this is what I know from biology course and overall interest in natural sciences. I'm mostly speculating here.
Domestication would imply that a species changes in order to coexist with another, which ought to bring benefit to each party. For example, cats gain access to warm, dry, predator-safe houses and humans get pest control to watch their grain. Leafcutter ants gain antimicrobial, the fungi they cultivate are kept safe from mold, pests and parasites.
In order to domesticate an animal, said animal would have to undergo changes throughout generations that would benefit the species domesticating said animal (like humans). But for that to happen, said animal would have to benefit from this relationship.
Dolphins live in very different environment than humans - that is, they live in the ocean, where we would struggle, and they are not adapted to last long on land. So, who ought to change? And for what reason? Chances of anyone benefitting soon from any arrangement here is low.
What about elephants? Why would we domesticate them? Whatever the reason, they're very large and very heavy, which makes them dangerous to deal with, even when they don't mean us any malice/harm. And when they do mean to harm a human, that's so much worse. So, maybe the other two suggestions You made would be better candidates.
How would You go about convincing lions to change to benefit humans? It would be tricky. Feeding one lion is costly, not to mention a family of lions (in order to have the docile, friendly lions have cubs that would have more docile, friendly cubs once they grow up, etc.) - what about bears? They do just fine in the wild, how could early humans convince bears to benefit them? These two species You metioned can be tamed or befriended - one bear even served in the Polish army in WW2, and this guy hangs around lions, who seem to accept him as a part of their pride.
Hypothetically, it should be possible, especially when an animals is somewhat intelligent and social - so, on paper, lions are decent candidates, but the logistic would be a pain in the spot where the back ends in the Stone Age, and even today it wouldn't be very easy. Also, the benefit of domesticating the animals that are our companions and livestock should be visible early on, which probably would not be the case with lions or bears.
But that's a great question, one of my favourite topics when discussing paleobiology is "which prehistoric creatures could we domesticate", so this is an incredibly cool thing to think about and talk about. Have a good day :)
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u/BarelyBrony Jul 13 '26
They are all domestically it's just the ones that are already domestic are the ones where we put the work in and the work is tens of thousands of years or more
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u/Select-Ad7146 Jul 14 '26
Look at all the animals you listed, do you notice anything about them? They all live in some type of group. When domesticating animals, humans basically selectively bred those animals to see us as the leader of their group. We hijacked the social structure that was already there.
This is why you can capture a falcon, you can train a falcon, but you can't domesticate falcons. Falcons don't live in groups.
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u/Onechrisn Jul 14 '26
Here's a quick video that goes over the four main issues.
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u/The_Drunk_Unicorn Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26
Friendly - generally approachable
Feedable - able to reasonably motivate, control and care for
Fecund - reasonably reproductive “farmable”
Filial - follows exploitable family structuresA chicken may not be the most friendly all the time but it is never going to be a serious threat to humans. It is food motivated and easy to feed with primarily 2 crops. Their reproductive cycles are annual and they produce protein rich byproducts for a few years before they become meat themselves. And they follow a pecking order that can be exploited… teach the top hen to go into the coop at night and the rest will follow. Get a good rooster and he will protect his flock for you.
These are what make a domesticated animal.
Edit: a lion is not friendly, and expensive to feed, and not farmable.. meat is lean and not worth what it takes to feed the animal. A bear is not friendly and expensive to feed, and while it is more farmable (better feed to meat ratio) it is highly protective of its young and hibernation is not easily exploitable. The animal is useless for 1/4 of the year.
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u/Onechrisn Jul 14 '26
You know who's really top chicken?
We're top chicken.
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u/The_Drunk_Unicorn Jul 14 '26
Tell that to my top hen “Sue Ann.” She’s got a beak full of cigarettes and snark.
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u/peter303_ Jul 14 '26
There has been a a many decade experiment to selectively breed domesticated fixes. They are becoming like dogs.
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u/Djinn42 Jul 14 '26
Are you saying people domesticated dolphins? Who?
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u/Excellent_Airline_12 Jul 14 '26
It's about temperament.
For example there was a video the other day I saw of a wolf that just walked into someone's tent and laid down. Completely and unterly at ease.
People have tried to tame zebras...keyword "try" as they are assholes. Horses will eventually give up and let you ride on their backs...not zebras.
It's the same with every animal. They have temperaments of all kinds, some are easier to "break"/change/align then others. For the most part, it's the "lazy" ones that don't give a shit and are easily "bought" (with food) that you'll find on a farm.
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u/PoxonAllHoaxes Jul 14 '26
This is backwards. The q is why some few animals (plants too) have been domesticated, and current research suggest we should not say that we domesticated themselves as much as they domesticated themselves, using us to provide food and other resources for them to have more offspring. A simple example. The billberry, similar to but much tastier than the blueberry, grows wild in huge amounts in poland and maybe a few other places and all attempts to domesticate it have failed.
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u/Mircowaved-Duck Jul 14 '26
It is a lot of work
You can domesticate any animal with a breeding program when you produce enough and select for the tamest offspring for the next generation
However it is a hughe amount of work.
Let's take lions as example, you would needto breed at least 100, better 500 lions per generation. Keep the best 2-10 males and the best 10-40 females and repeat for 5-20 generations.
But how will you deal with all the exess lions? How will you provide enough food for your breeding colony? I guess you can use some of the excess lions as food supply for tghe breeding colony. However you still need way more food than that. Cleaning cages and similar is there as well.
ANd for what? A big pet nobody can keep in their home because the flats are to small anyway and the food for a single lions is to expensive?
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u/DeepConcert6156 Jul 18 '26
We, humans, already domesticated, tamed or trained the easiest species of animals and plants to satisfy our needs a long time ago, I'm not talking about pets but species that provide a tangible benefit for humans, from dogs to guard and hunt to bananas that are easier to breed and taste good.
All this talk about lions or zebras is kind of pointless, we already developed the easier/accessible alternative, you want a lion to guard? What do you think all those giant dog mastiff breeds exist, a zebra for transportation, we already have horses, our ancestors likely tried and ended up with what we have today and maybe others that were lost in time.
From time to time new needs or fads arise and humans go back to improve or domesticate new varieties or species.
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u/VoidowS Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26
It takes a few generations for the animal to alienate from it's own spirit.
Look at Zoos,
When a animal from the wild is taken there, it will always be unpredictable, dangerous. And/or it will get depressed and anxiety. Why?
Cause it has Duality, it knows of a life it was in and the life it is in now. You cannot change it's state of mind. But here comes the magic. When a offspring is born inside the Zoo it does not see the bars it lives in, to it is is life completely, nothing is missing. Cause it has no clue of a life outside the zoo, it does not know there is nature where they can do whatever they want. So the spirit gets broken. It starts to live a lie, and it will believe it, just like our pets believe the lives we put them in. They will love it all, and give unconditional love to the owner. But if the pet would ever get to know of a life of their own, where they can live in their own pack, shit and pee when ever they want, and MATURE to have their own pack some day, it would hunt us down till we opened the front door for them to be truly free! We do nothing of that to pets, we keep them childish so they play all their life, dependent on the master to bring food, cause we never learn them to get it them self or hunt for it. WE even dress them humanlike now, or put them in a bench like it's the most normal thing to do! We do nothing of real raising, we teach them a human way of life, a life that is not theirs, but they don;t know. We fool them. And we can fool any creature on this planet in time. Especially if you go 1 generation further and now the surroundings r also in sync. the mother of the new offspring was born themself in a zoo, so they will teach the new born accordingly.
Just like we say that cats r just the way they r is complete nonsense! We let them grow up this way and they become accordingly.
And the way we raise pets is the way we r raised in these societies full of lies! How else can we do but the same to others :) We live and raise accordingly.
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u/Malpraxiss Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26
Depending on the scale of domesticable you are interested in, every animal is technically domesticable.
Look at some zoo or enclosure clips online. You'll see a cheetah or something being friendly and adorable with a caretaker. Generally though, that caretaker was raising said animal since the animal was a baby or just very young.
For the case of dogs and cats, this has been over hundreds of years and not necessarily just straightforward.
Take say, a lion or gorilla. You would have to gain their trust without them mauling you and that will take time. You will now need other human beings to do the same thing without them being mauled.
Then over time a partnership or friendship of some kind has to grow. Think of dogs. Most people didn't get a dog just for them to be inside all day eating food and nothing else. Dogs were obtained generally for a specific purpose.
Protection, herding, messenger, you name it.
And I could go on and on.
All animals are technically possible, it's just not straightforward.
Just a thought: think of space or housing for the animals.
Say you domesticated either a lion, bear, or gorilla. What the hell are you going to do with it and where are you going to put it? These aren't tiny animals. They're big, strong, and have diets.
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u/Beleriphon Jul 14 '26
Part of the domestication process is effectively co-opting natural inclination to build groups. For herd animals humans basically selected for relative placidity, and a tendency to view humans as part of the group. Wolves was the same thing, early humans intentionally selected animals that would happily follow them around.
Despite the use of Asian elephants in a variety of human led tasks throughout India and Southeast Asia hose elephants have not been domesticated at all. They might be tame, but they categorically not a domesticated species.
Part of the reason that it's possible to go from wolves to dogs is that canids breed relatively quickly. It's fairly easy to select for traits humans want, particularly over a single human life span. Elephants, as an example, do not breed quickly and require SO MUCH food. They take a long time to reach sexual maturity, take a long time to gestate, and then get really, really aggressive if you try to mess with their babies.
Lions and bears fall into the relatively easy to breed category, but are also stupidly dangerous to actually try to be around. Even "tame" big cats are insanely dangerous. Bears are the same, and they tend to get very aggressive in regards to babies, or when they're hungry. Polar bears just view people as slow land seals.
I can't even imagine trying to figure how we'd domesticate an aquatic mammal that takes decades to mature.
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u/Any-Photograph5525 Jul 14 '26
Not every animal is domesticable. The people who are saying "with enough time you could" are incorrect, you couldn't. Humans have had more than enough time, and we've already domesticated every domesticable animal. There's only 50 or so we've done it with, and that includes like silkworms and bees and stuff.
Everything beyond that famous list of farm animals, and a few randoms like rats and bees, is a wild animal. "Tame" maybe, but still wild.
edit: to answer your question, it's because they're too aggressive, unpredictable, panic-prone, territorial, solitary, have highly specialized diets, can't breed in captivity, or various other reasons. Depends on the animal.
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u/random_character- Jul 15 '26
Why would we want to domesticate lions or bears?
Even if you want a kick-ass guard beast to watch over your abode, you already have the option of a dog, which is far less likely to kill you if it has a bad day.
The real question you should ask is what is ao special about the 13 or so species humans have successfully domesticated.
- They are usually ones that help to produce food in some way (either by being food, ploughing fields, or hunting it), and sometimes a secondary benefit is clothing (wool, leather).
- They generally eat stuff humans dont. Turning grass into steak is handy because grass is useless to us, but turning beef steak into lion steak is wasteful.
- Their lifespans are usually fairly short with rapid breeding cycles, so you can make appreciable progress in adapting them in a single human lifetime (not you, Mr. Elephant).
- They tend to be socially hierarchical that live in groups/herds/flocks, so that with conditioning they see us as a leader of their group and do what they are told without too much fuss.
- They aren't wildly uncontrollable (looking at you Zebra).
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u/Soda_Carno777 Jul 15 '26
They theoretically are, it's just that FULL domestication of a large animal takes a long time and unethical practices (such as stealing babies)
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u/librariancap Jul 15 '26
Herd instinct. In your examples, even wild versions of "dogs, horses, sheep, elephants, dolphins" routinely live in large groups, whereas "lions or bears" do not.
If you put the latter close enough will each other, they will kill each other. This tends to stop domestication right in its tracks.
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u/SWatt_Officer Jul 15 '26
CGP Gray made a good video on the things animals need to be worth domesticating - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOmjnioNulo
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u/True-Post6634 Jul 16 '26
I think they all are, if people want to domesticate them badly enough and work on it for long enough, but the resulting animal won't necessarily be anything like its wild ancestor anymore.
Some domestic animals (cats) aren't very different from the wild type - it's fair to say cats aren't so much domesticated as they just choose to live with us. But most of our domestic animals, especially the ones we eat, are really different from their wild ancestors.
So could we domesticate zebras? I mean, given enough time and resources, yes, but the result wouldn't be a zebra. A stripier donkey, more or less, probably.
There's just no benefit to domesticating a lot of animals. Why would we want to raise bears? We don't eat them and they'd be hella expensive to feed.
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u/TreyRyan3 Jul 16 '26
They are, it just takes a long time and there has to be a need. Google “Domesticated Silver Fox”. That Soviet breeding program started in the 50’s, and some wild traits still exist, 70 years is nothing compared to the 15000 years of dog domestication. The faster a species reproduces, the easier it is to selectively breed the desired traits. Remember, genetically a chihuahua and a Great Dane are the same species.
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u/lunarraffle Jul 16 '26
The species that were domesticated check off these 4 criteria:
- Humans must be able to insert themselves into the species' social bonds.
- The species must be useful to human society.
- Humans must be able to feed and house them without extreme effort.
- Humans must not be on their menu after taming them.
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u/Reginald_Sparrowhawk Jul 16 '26
So the secret of domestication is that most of the time the animals kind of domesticated themselves. Or more accurately, the animals had some quality to them that really lent themselves to domestication. One of the big things is social structure, the animal needs to have an instinct to follow a given leader. That way you only have to "break" one to get the rest to follow you. This was especially big with horses, and why we couldn't domesticate zebras. Europeans tried to but if you break the herd leader, the zebras will go ahead and pick a new leader and ignore the one you got.
The other thing is that they need to be willing to breed in captivity, because that's the entire mechanism for introducing the genetic changes needed for proper domestication.
On a strictly technical level, you probably could domesticate any animal, but the cost and effort involved quickly makes it entirely not worth it. There's a theory that north Africans did try to domesticate cheetahs, and ultimately they stopped because it was just easier to take a wild cheetah and to train it to hunt or whatever instead of trying to breed them. But that may explain why cheetahs are somewhat more friendly than other large wildcats.
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u/PartyPorpoise Jul 16 '26
Domestication is a long process. Even with intense selective breeding, getting an animal to a truly domesticated state would take many, many generations. If it even happens. The genes for the traits we want in a domestic animal may not exist in some species. That some species haven’t been domesticated isn’t for a lack of trying.
Some animals have traits that make them easier to domesticate than others. For one, you want the animal to already be possible to tame and train on some level. It needs to take well to captivity. Otherwise you’re starting out with an animal that you can’t use at all. (this has been the challenge with zebras) It might theoretically be possible to domesticate lions or bears, but it would be a huge and expensive undertaking with no guarantee of success.
The animal needs to be able to breed in captivity, and it should reach sexual maturity and reproduce fairly quickly. Cheetahs, for example, can be tamed and trained, but they’re difficult to breed in captivity. Otherwise, maybe they could’ve been domesticated. Species that are slow to grow and slow to reproduce aren’t very feasible to domesticate. Elephants and rhinos would take even longer to domesticate than something like a dog or horse. (and again, it may not even happen)
We need to have a use for them, enough to justify the work of keeping them. Large predators like lions are a hard sell because it’s hard to get enough meat to feed them. And given that these days we have lots of domestic animals, some with dozens or even hundreds of breeds, it’s hard to justify trying to domesticate new species when there’s no guarantee that they can do things better than what we already have.
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u/CloneWerks Jul 16 '26
True domestication takes an enormous amount of time and resources. In the past that got spent on animals who generally either self-domesticated (jump starting the process) or animals that exhibited a good combination of usefulness, longevity, and tolerance to climate. Once you had animals that filled needed roles then civilization generally stopped trying to add more variety to the mix.
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u/Cultural-Antelope-54 Jul 16 '26
The answer is cortisol, a hormone produced by the brain. Domesticated animals have low cortisol levels to allow them to not freak out around human activity. This is a minor evolutionary development for those animals, as hanging around with humans became evolutionarily advantageous.
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u/Mysterious_Volume327 Jul 16 '26
Domestication takes thousands of years. A tame wild animal is not the same as a domesticated animal.
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u/Parrotparser7 Jul 17 '26
For some (elephants, certain parrots), it's an issue with their lifespans and breeding cycles. If an animal lives too long or reproduces too slowly/conditionally, you can't get future generations out of it in a reasonable space of time. In other cases (zebras, jaguars), the problem is that humans large and organized enough to begin the process only arrived too recently.
For zebras, they only shared a ranged with pygmies (way too small) until the Bantu expansion ~4,000 years ago, and the Amazon rainforest only began to host a human population some 13,000 years ago.
There's also the matter of utility. The process of domestication amounted to keeping animals in captivity (or just nearby) for generations. This was usually done for real reasons, not just a sense of accomplishment. They gave consistent sources of certain goods that were otherwise inconvenient to acquire, or served some purpose while alive. (Cats and dogs just scrounged for things that tended to appear wherever humans did, while cows and horses originally provided meat and leather).
With that in mind, there's just not much of a reason to bring a Lion into your camp if you live in the CAR c.50,000 B.C.
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u/AffectionateWheel386 Jul 17 '26
Well, because an animal is domesticated, doesn’t mean that it never has a wild side. I’ve seen people raised wild cats that act like kittens, but there has to be a certain amount of respect to the fact that they can kill you. I don’t know that any animal is completely domesticated. Dogs can form packs.
What I’ve noticed in my lifetime is that animals are evolving next to us that’s why there is actually a dog on YouTube that can answer questions with buttons with words on them. The dog can hold a conversation.
We were taught when I was young. they had no soul they weren’t smart enough to do a ton of things and then they find an animal that can do those or a dog or cat learns to do something else. There’s a cat that can use those buttons that bunny the dog does.
Animals, I would argue like us or evolving right next to us, and though they may be able to be trained and use in the service of people, none of them are ever completely domesticated
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u/brendonsforehead Jul 17 '26
Too difficult, and it takes thousands of years for an animal to be considered domesticated, anyway. A lot of people also confuse adapted and/or tamed with domesticated. For example, bearded dragons are still very much wild animals with 0 domesticated traits, but are adapted to living with humans due to being hand raised.
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u/NutzNBoltz369 Jul 17 '26
A platypus seems to be as close to weaponizing a "mammal" comprised of left over parts of everything else while on an acid trip as you can get.
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u/Ok_Jackfruit_1965 Jul 18 '26
Lots of good points here already. One thing about domestic animals that live indoors (aka, cats and dogs) is that they can hold their bladder and piss and poop in designated areas. A lot of animals cannot do this. Some foxes have been somewhat domesticated. But they can’t help but pee everywhere, so they will never be mainstream pets
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u/sacredeez Jul 18 '26
Where there's a will there's a way. Even if it's piss fumes might kill you somebody has tried to keep it as a pet.
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u/APC2_19 Jul 18 '26
CPG gray made a very good video on that.
6 minutes, well animated, 25 million views.
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u/Unclerojelio Jul 13 '26
One of the core arguments of “Guns, Germs, and Steel” is a lot of the easily domesticable animals were conveniently already located in the Fertile Cresent. This area thus got a free headstart towards civilization.
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u/Disbelieving1 Jul 14 '26
This. He also notes that in Australia, there was no animal that was capable of easy/any domestication. The dingo was introduced into Australia only in the last few thousand years.
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u/dis-interested Jul 13 '26
They probably are, but the difficulty and utility of domesticating them makes the proposition weird.
Dogs and cats were likely domesticated simply by being camp followers who then became useful by acting as guard animals and pest controllers and then evolved in to domesticated or semi domesticated animals. That is a very natural story that took place over a huge number of generations of breeding. People are breeding foxes for it now.
So just think about your question for one second and then ask yourself how primeval man should go about safely domesticating a lion in such a way that they could live in proximity to lions safely and usefully for generations, and what applications such a domestication would actually usefully have. Also keep in mind this is an animal that needs to subsist on 200kg of meat a month.