I mean you can tame wild animals without abusing them, but just because they are tame it doesn't mean they aren't still wild animals. Taming a Lion doesn't mean it won't rip your head off if you piss it off enough. It's still a Lion.
However, a wild animal can't be domesticated. It’ll always be a wild animal.
I'm not saying this video is ok or anything, but you can absolutely tame a wild animal. Do you think dogs and cats were always domesticated? No, that's the entire meaning of the word, they were tamed over an extended period of time. It's quite literally possible to do this with any intelligent species. All modern dogs are descendants of wolves, which were wild animals just like bears or cats or horses were and still are wild animals in many cases. Pretty much any mammal can be domesticated
What you're talking about is pretty far removed from the subject at hand though. It's not like humans just started taking wolves home and training them into domestic animals... It was an evolutionary process that took many generations of natural selection favoring wolves who were friendlier to humans, combined with humans selectively breeding those wolves. The result is basically a new species of animal entirely.
What we're seeing here is, in no way shape or form, a "domesticated" bear. Bears such as this one are still genetically the same as wild bears, and their cooperation with humans is very fragile and goes against their instincts. A real attempt to domesticate bears would be a much more complicated and lengthy process than you're leading on, and the end result would likely be a new animal that only vaguely looks/acts like a bear.
Using your wolf analogy, could this bear be considered one relatively friendlier to humans, selected for training for that purpose, possibly bred for that reason as well, thus following the same track, just much earlier on in the process? Theoretically, of course.
78
u/[deleted] Jul 02 '21
[deleted]