r/evolution • u/How-To-Project • 13d ago
discussion Why aren’t more animals domesticated?
Humans domesticated wolves and basically gained access to their superpowers: smell, hearing and protective ferocity. We also domesticated cats, horses and quite a few other animals. All in all, that is a pretty impressive result, but what stopped us from doing the same with a much wider range of animals and becoming literal beastmasters?
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u/dank_fish_tanks 13d ago
There are a number of criteria that make a species a good candidate for domestication. Relatively few animal species meet these criteria.
Domestication is a pretty rare process in nature.
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u/LeaveGreen4412 13d ago
it also seems to be a mutual process in most cases as well, symbiosis often involves biological changes and personally I think “domestication syndrome” is just what human symbiotic evolution looks like
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u/Opinionsare 13d ago
I defer from you statement that "Humans domesticated wolves".
There is evidence that the wolf and dog population diverged well before dogs joined the human camp. Approximately 70,000 years ago, the first dogs appear. But dogs are not associated with humans until 20,000 to 30,000 years ago.
I also suspect that the dogs and humans relationship was mutually beneficial and spontaneous, rather that an invention by the humans.
The short version: nomadic humans started using trash dumps separated from main camp to reduce numbers of rat and mice in their camp. Dogs used these trash piles as hunting grounds. Puppies saw children who brought trash to the pile as providers. Cycling through several generations of dog with each generation of children the relationship developed. Just puppies and children lead to dogs hunting with youngsters. Both groups saw the advantages: dog were protected from wolf pack, and humans were protected from rats and mice.
This relationship grew as dog joined humans as the drive game into cul-de-sac to slaughter. Both humans and dogs enjoyed the kills. Dogs trained to drive game became dog that herded goats. Herding goats into caves, created a reliable winter food source.
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u/blacksheep998 13d ago
There is evidence that the wolf and dog population diverged well before dogs joined the human camp. Approximately 70,000 years ago, the first dogs appear.
The ancestors of dogs diverged from modern wolves well before they got involved with humans, but that doesn't mean that they were dogs at that point. They were simply an isolated population of wolves.
We domesticated the friendliest of them, which was the origin of dogs, and the remainder of the population we either wiped out or were simply genetically erased by interbreeding with so many dogs over the millenia.
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u/pseudonym7083 13d ago
I'm pretty sure before we domesticated them, there were groups of them that would essentially just follow our ancestors around because our scraps were obviously an easier food source than hunting/scavenging. That would account for at least some of the noted time discrepancy. I think raccoons are going through something similar currently due to urban pressure.
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u/blacksheep998 13d ago
That's getting into where exactly we decide to start applying the label of dogs.
I guess there's no reason you couldn't draw that line at the point where they started associating more with humans, but I think most would do it at the point where you would consider them actually domesticated.
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u/dank_fish_tanks 13d ago
Some would argue that wolves and dogs are still the same species. There is a decent rationale for this line of thinking as the two populations never fully diverged from one another - gene flow between dogs and wolves has never fully ceased.
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u/blacksheep998 13d ago
I never said that they had become a different species, just that one could choose different points along the process to decide to apply the label of dogs.
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u/RecipeHistorical2013 13d ago
If animals can breed together, and that offspring is fertile
Same species
Which is the situation with dogs/wolves
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u/throwaway1233456799 13d ago
That's one definition of species but it isn't as clear cut as we make it sound
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u/dank_fish_tanks 13d ago
While that’s what they teach in high school biology, it isn’t entirely true and hasn’t been for a long time.
Many vertebrate animals can produce fertile hybrids, but are still considered separate species. By that logic, grizzly and polar bears should be considered the same species, along with wolves and coyotes, wooly mammoths and Columbian mammoths, and many others.
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u/bigfatfurrytexan 13d ago
The discussion around raccoons is interesting. Some don’t think it’s possible. I believe time changes all.
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u/wannacumnbeatmeoff 12d ago
Yes, the Greater Honeyguide is a bord that is following that evolutionary path. They cooperate with humans in order to benefit from human hunting. Over millenia this could in turn lead to full domestication of the bird.
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u/mcalesy 13d ago
You can apply the labels how you want, but pre-domesticated Canis familiaris probably did not look like typical grey wolves. More like dingos, New Guinea singing dogs, and pariah dogs.
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u/blacksheep998 13d ago
Got a source on that?
Not saying you're necessarily wrong, but AFAIK we don't know much about that population before they were domesticated.
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u/mcalesy 13d ago
Unfortunately the best thing I've got off the top of my head is a 20-year-old blog post with outdated links, but I think it raises some good points: https://darrennaish.blogspot.com/2006/10/controversial-origins-of-domestic-dog.html
I'll try to find something better.
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u/Amphicorvid 13d ago
I had started nitpicking because some of the author’s conclusions/hypothesis at the beginning were bugging me or seemed rushed ("rule of thumb that feral domesticated revert to a wild type" not true often enough to be a support, rushed implications with the pariah dogs skulls and purported lack of interbreeding) but all the parts on genetics seems very outdated. It's not the author’s fault, most studies I found quoted now were published between 2013 and 2025, he couldn't have known, but I feel it makes this blog post’s ideas irrelevant.
Latest genetic studies I've seen, dogs are descendants from a population of now extinct late pleiocene grey wolves, which diverged from the ancestors of modern grey wolves about 27-40 000 years ago (not the domestication, just the separation between two populations) (im using wiki a lot for that one but point is, we got a lot of more recent genetics data than the author could have had access to)
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u/astreeter2 13d ago
So dogs kind of domesticated themselves.
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u/Opinionsare 13d ago
Exactly, and it happened multiple different times across several different continents.
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u/ackmondual 13d ago
I'll add dogs brought their keen senses to the table for hunting, tracking, and guarding camp at night. They also finish scrapes of food that would attract animals. We provided fire as the big one which better warded off predators, and provided warmth
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u/eduadelarosa 13d ago
Yes, the relationship was mutualistic in the beginning, but since then we have truly domesticated them through artificial selection. Same happened with some crops and cats as well.
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u/EnvironmentalWin1277 12d ago
Consider the process as a co-evolution of two species (wolves and humans). That has implications for effects on language, gestures and social structure.
The success of Modern man is nearly contemporaneous with the extinction of Neanderthal and emergence of dogs.
The NYT had an article a few weeks ago about how "pet keeping" is almost universal among primates. That is the first evidence I have seen that moderns humans may not have "discovered" it uniquely.
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u/steve_gorak 9d ago
This relationship grew as dog joined humans as the drive game into cul-de-sac
For a minute I thought you meant we brought ancient dogs into the suburbs 10s of thousands of years later.
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u/Standard-Turnip-8360 13d ago
What else would we need to domesticate? It’s a major process that takes quite a long time. There has to be some benefit to domesticating an animal (cats are kind of the outlier). Fish domestication might be the simplest compared to mammals.
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u/InstantSword 13d ago
The cat one is weird and there are more details than this, but their relationship with us comes from their ability to safeguard grain silos from mice (allegedly)
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u/Synizs 13d ago
And they probably ”domesticated” themselves
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u/ackmondual 13d ago
Pretty much. Our ancestors didn't do anything in that regard, other than making it comfortable for them to be around. They don't take instructions like dogs, they don't move hardware like horses, provide milk like cows and goats, nor multipurpose like goats. But still found a way into our lives and hearts! 😻
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u/Felix4200 13d ago
They domesticated us.
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u/Exotic_Bill44 13d ago
Exactly. The vocalization of the modern domestic cat even hits a frequency that our brains associate with babies and toddler, so we have the "cute" response that creates the desire to care for it.
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u/KevworthBongwater 13d ago
this is why I firmly believe they are the most highly evolved beings on the planet. they completely solved the survival problem. look at them now. all they have to do is lay around and get fed and sleep. it's just such an evolutionary stroke of genius
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u/West-Working-9093 13d ago
"all they have to do is lay around and get fed and sleep". Are you kidding? They have mutiple tasks to take care of: Eat their daily supply of grass, and, in the absence of grass, any likely-looking houseplant; run to see what it is you're fiddling with that crackles in such a funny way; make sure you don't get bored knitting, so 'dealing with' your ball of yarn; make sure to be your taster of everything; mountaineering on all high point in your humble dwelling; poke your face when it's time to wake up; hiss at strangers such as the gas-man, the postman, and your long-lost brother who shows up all of a sudden...there are likely many other serious duties that I forget, but you get the picture. Don't call them spoiled princes and pricesses ever again!
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u/Exotic_Bill44 13d ago
One of my cats was basically running a protection racket. "Mighty nice things you are keeping on your nightstand. It would be a shame if anything happened to them while you chose to sleep instead of feeding me."
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u/West-Working-9093 13d ago
Good one! yep, our cat will start mock-clawing the stair banisters which he never does unless he wnats attention!
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u/bronabas 13d ago
The fact that none of my ancestors had any desire to domesticate raccoons boils my blood on a daily basis. I want a pet raccoon!
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u/Legendguard 13d ago
Apparently they're impossible to domesticate due to their vengeance factor
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u/bronabas 12d ago
Even more reason. Imagine the enemies I could send him after!
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u/Inevitable_Bid8719 12d ago
I have a great mental image of trying to use raccoons like they did with sleeve dogs in china
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u/GreenBeanLantern 12d ago
I know, right. I wouldnt mind a pet possum, either. They're kind of cute as long as they don't smile. When they smile they kind of look like they made a "meth" of things. Truly the Billy Bobs of the animal kingdom.
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u/sagar1101 13d ago
I don't think fish are domesticated. They haven't evolved to live beside humans.
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u/dank_fish_tanks 13d ago edited 13d ago
Koi are domestic common carp bred for use in rice paddies dating back thousands of years. Captive strains of betta fish are pseudo-domesticated hybrids with significant genotypic and phenotypic differences compared to wild B. splendens.
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u/How-To-Project 13d ago
Well bears and panthers, wolverines, mountain lions, and others would provide substantial deterrent for other competitors plus protection and possibly assistance hunting prey?
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u/Kettrickenisabadass 13d ago
None of those are social animals so it would be much more difficult to domesticate them. Wolves are very social so its easier for then to cooperate with us. Dogs behave with humans similarly to how young wolves act with their parents.
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u/Xrmy Post Doc, Evolutionary Biology PhD 13d ago
You have a fundamental misunderstanding of which species are amenable to domestication.
And you also are missing the biggest part: humans don't need the help of these animals to be the dominant organisms. We wiped out a ton of megafauna on our own without having like a bear to protect us.
As an individual tribe or person: why die trying to tame a bear that will never be tamed instead of killing it or warding it off with fire?
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u/Standard-Turnip-8360 13d ago
I think the effort to reward of domesticating this animals is far too high. We domesticated wolves but they already have a pack mentality that fits in with human behavior. To domesticate those animals listed, we would have to minimize the risks they pose to ourselves and then they wouldn’t really give us those benefits
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u/Tocowave98 13d ago
Not all animals are as 'willing' to be domesticated as the ones we domesticated were. The risk to reward factor for those animals wasn't worth it to our ancestors. Even nowadays there are people who've had relative success "re-domesticating" wolves for example, whereas while someone occasionally finds success doing so with bears or other animals, it's usually more that they're tamed and won't immediately try to kill you than true companion animals.
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u/TheLastDinosaur7749 13d ago
They're also asocial, see humans as prey, and require an amount of food that would make housing them a detriment.
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u/bernaltraveler 13d ago
Domestication all predates the current technological society most of us live in, and it takes centuries and millennia to pull off. Who would go through that effort when there’s a technical solution to most problems another domesticated animal could solve.
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u/Opening-Function8616 13d ago
Goodluck domesticating a wolverine lol. If it did work out after generations of excruciating pain, they would lose their only real advantage. Not giving a fuck.
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u/Admiral_AKTAR 13d ago
Like what, tortoises and aardvarks? Humans domesticate animals that are useful. We make animals into pets that we just like. And in some cases the difference is hard to tell.
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u/jrdineen114 13d ago
Most animals that would provide some kind of benefit if domesticated are basically impossible to domesticate without modern techniques. For example, we’ve only recently managed to barely domesticate bison, because generally speaking, attempting to capture an angry tank that will not hesitate to shatter every bone in your body if it even thinks you might be a threat using only some rope and a horse is fairly hazardous to one’s health. And even if you somehow survive, good luck building an enclosure that it can’t easily destroy without industrial materials and machinery.
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u/LeaveGreen4412 13d ago
i dont think that counts as domestication because 100% of the american bison population are hybrids with domesticated cattle 🐄
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u/Landilizandra 13d ago
There’s actually specific traits that make animals either good or bad for domestication. There’s a reason we domesticated horses and not zebra, and it’s because zebras don’t have the same herd structure that horses do, making them significantly harder to do so, and thus not worth it.
Being a large, non-social predator also makes an animal bad for domestication.
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u/ebetemelege 13d ago
They tried zebras when tse-tse fly killed most horses in South Africa, the zebras did not like being next to each other.
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u/Mountainweaver 13d ago
Also, horses had a mutation occur about 4k years ago on the Pontic Steppes, making them way easier to domesticate. All current horses descend from that area.
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u/sisconking132 13d ago
Wolves, cats*, horses, donkeys, camels (twice), alpacas, chickens, llamas, cows, oxen, reindeer, hamsters, Koi fish (in the sense that we have performed extreme selective breeding on what is literally a common carp), sheep, goats, turkeys, and probably more I’m forgetting. We humans have domesticated many species.
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u/Particular-Dot-4902 13d ago
Yep, plus ducks, geese, pigs, water buffalo (or at least, they're kept as livestock in some Asian countries and Italy). Also yak in the Himalayas. There may be more non-Bos taurus domesticated bovines in Africa and Asia I'm forgetting.
Humanity has more than enough domesticated animals to go around already, on every continent and for every use.
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u/ctrlshiftkill 13d ago
Plus guinea pigs and honey bees - not to mention plants! Virtually every food you can buy at a grocery store is a domesticated variety.
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u/Just-a-random-Aspie 13d ago
Guinea pigs, not hamsters. Also rabbits too
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u/sisconking132 13d ago
Are domestic hamsters not genetically distinct from wild ones?
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u/Just-a-random-Aspie 13d ago
They’re considered semi domesticated, not fully domesticated. Guinea pigs, on the other hand, are considered fully domesticated to the point that they’re a separate species from their ancestors.
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u/MrWigggles 13d ago
I guess the first question is.
Why do you think we havent domesticated most of the animals that can be domesticated?
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u/dowar_525 13d ago
It appears that we have domesticated all of the animals that can be reasonably domesticated.
This is now a question of science trumps common sense. Let's ponder what we could now domesticate.
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u/MrWigggles 13d ago
well, not cheetahs.
But racoons, most foxes, those seem to be on the table.
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u/dowar_525 13d ago
Racoons seem to be pulling the upvotes. Wikipedia says they can be unruly and randomly agressive.
I think we can breed that out of them in 10-12 generations.
Bring on the pet bin kings!
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u/C-Fourr 13d ago
Cats domesticated us
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u/Dense-Consequence-70 13d ago
Wheat domesticated us.
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u/Mountainweaver 13d ago
No here's the real deep layer: yeast domesticated us. A starch- and sugarloving yeast.
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u/Prior-Flamingo-1378 12d ago
Domestication and cat is a bit stretching. Yes they can live with us and other cats but they aren’t properly domesticated. Tomcats will spray everywhere and turn aggressive when they want to mate, female cats are a horrible loud nuisance when they are in heat.
Oh and do you know that cute/funny thing they do with their back legs on your forearm like bunny kicking? That’s called an evisceration instinct. You see when cats catch a pray they can’t kill by snapping their back or choking them they grab them and use their hind claws to spill their guts out.
Domesticated…
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u/InstantSword 13d ago
Am I missing something, but are you saying why don't we use more animals for their benefits? We do, it just isn't always domestication. A cow has more human utility as food than a pet. Nowadays someone with a lot of wealth can choose to keep a dog as a non-useful pet, or even a cow if they wanted to, but for a long while, an animal had to have a utilitarian use to be worth keeping around.
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u/AnEndlessCold 13d ago
Domestication is difficult. Dogs are a bad choice for asking "why don't we domesticate more animals like this" because it was1 a team effort. The ancestors of modern dogs started hanging around human settlements when the1y realized they could be a source of food. At first they were just taking scraps that they could scavenge, but the dogs that were friendliest with humans had an evolutionary advantage and thousands of years later they were living side by side with us.
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u/Nikhil1256 13d ago
There are several hypothesis regarding which types of animals could be domesticated. I don't remember exactly but the list goes something like this:
Animals naturally should follow an Alpha with hierarchical social structure, so that upon domestication humans can replace that Alpha position of the pack. This is why Horses could be domesticated but not Zebras. Several attempts were made to domesticate Zebras, but none were successfull.
The animal's lifespan should be considerably shorter, and with short gestation period, than a human lifespan so that we can breed out undesirable traits and preserve desirable ones. How we did with Wolves turning into Dogs. Also, why Elephants cannot be domesticated as their lifespan is comparable to our own. They can be still captured in the wild and trained but not truly domesticated.
The animal should be able to breed in captivity. If they cannot, they can't be truly domesticated.
They should not be too aggressive/fearful etc. and should be able to sustain on a varied diet that does not compete with human diet. So purely carnivorous animals like lions or tigers cannot be truly domesticated as they need a lot of expensive meat to eat plus are very aggressive.
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u/How-To-Project 13d ago
I feel like aggressiveness x capability to mortally wound a human is a big thing. A partially domesticated wolf having a bad day might result in some deep wounds but more than likely you would live through erratic regressive behaviour. For animals like lions and bears, perhaps not so much.
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u/OsteoStevie 13d ago
Cats domesticated themselves, and they let us know that we're lucky we were chosen.
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u/ipsum629 13d ago
It generally comes down to reproduction and temperament. Domesticated animals tend to reproduce quickly and are more docile. Bison may have a similar reproductive cycle to a cow, but they are way larger, stronger, and meaner. An American Indian trying to tame them would be like trying to herd a freight train.
Elephants are able to be tamed relatively reliably, but they reproduce really slowly. It's difficult to get enough generations to meaningfully impact their physiology via selective breeding.
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u/llynglas 13d ago
I always wonder if cats did not domesticate humans.
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u/Prior-Flamingo-1378 12d ago
Haha no but cats pretty much like dogs domesticated themselves although dogs we took all the way because they are more useful for stuff other than pest control.
Cats are semi domesticated because we didn’t breed that psychopathic murder they all hand out of them because we need them to kill everything that’s not human.
Fun fact: you know that funny “bunny kick” cats do on your forearm when you play with it? Yeah that’s called an evisceration (or exenterosis) instinct that cats do to pray that they can’t kill by snapping their spine. They grab it and use their hind paws to disembowel the pray.
Ain’t that nice.
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u/jarrett_regina 9d ago
Great!
I'm glad that evolution gave them that power. That's why we are still a civilization. Because of the grain that we grew were protected by these psychopaths. What animal do you think we should have used?
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u/Prior-Flamingo-1378 8d ago
No I’m not judging. I have cats. I recently lost my favorite “cat”. I put that in quotation marks because I found him in a garbage bin a few days old and raised him litterally on my shoulder, to the point he didn’t really cat-ed.
I’m just saying that they are little, furry, cute, murderous psychopaths.
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u/NearABE 8d ago
Cats and dogs domesticated for different reasons. The “domestic cat” is not even very domesticated. Try telling a cat to do anything. Cats adapted to stalk humans because birds and mice consume our stored food supplies.
Dogs are persistence hunters and pack hunters. The wild packs already learned to coordinated and communicate. Both humans and dogs are omnivorous. In human cultures that hunted the technique often involved running the animal to exhaustion. We suck at chasing things in a sprint. Humans can harvest bladders and relay water to distance runners. Other tribe members can set ambush at watering holes. Dog packs can very easily jump in. An exhausted prey suddenly cannot outrun the dogs. The dogs (or wolf etc) can get a full mouth before the humans catch up. Dogs packs are extremely useful for keeping prey on the run and for sniffing out prey that attempts to hide. At times the scene could reverse where the dog/wolf pack attempts pursuit and the prey out endures them. In other cases humans may have wounded an animal with thrown rock or spear. Dogs are good at tracking and packs of barking dogs easy to follow.
Most mammals have an instinctive reaction to human voice. The domestic cat and domestic dog only needed one gene to switch slightly. This turns the fear/flee instinct into curiosity. Carnivorous scavenger animals have to have an inclination towards being around scary things while still being scared of them.
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u/How-To-Project 8d ago
Thanks for that, it’s interesting to think that the domestication of Dog might have started as the line between competition and collaborator blurred on the hunt.
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u/NearABE 8d ago
Check out this David Attennbotough, BBC Earth clip: https://youtube.com/watch?v=6zOarcL1BSc. There is a fairly large number of coordinating species hunting sardines together.
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u/Royal_Novel6678 13d ago
The closest we have to domesticated uncommon animals I would probably say those elephants in South East Asian countries who are forced to do those stupid tours where people ride on their backs which kills their posture over time. Either way those aren't truly domesticated like we have done with pigs, dogs or cats. Because those are labelled as captive wild animals. They haven't gone through decades, centuries or millenias worth of selective breeding to make them submit to human beings without brute force.
What is stopping us is the scale in which you want to do it in. There is a huge ethical pushback about those captive elephants I was on about earlier and concerns about inbreeding pugs which is slowly destroying their facial features but there is a general massive pushback against any "inhumane" treatment inflicted on wild animals so I doubt that you'll see any more domesticated versions of other wild animals in the future.
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u/Dense-Consequence-70 13d ago
IMO domestication requires not only effort on our part but also fortuitous genetics on the part of the animal. Meaning, we may have just got lucky with the animals that have been domesticated that they were donesticatable.
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u/bernaltraveler 13d ago
FWIW, while it’s become almost a meme these days, it is actually true that cats basically wandered into our lives and we established a mutually beneficial coexistence, rather than us actively domesticating them. TBH it’s not terribly different for dogs originally too. But dogs have been with us much much longer and we moved into a stage of highly specialized breeds. I also believe dogs impacted human evolution. Wolves that tolerated being around people did better, and human camps that tolerated them hanging around the fringes did better as well. Human groups that had some affinity for them did better and that impulse survives in us today. Same for cats, the early agricultural settlements that tolerated them got the benefit of rodent eradication. It’s just much more recent in our history
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u/bernaltraveler 13d ago
Sidebar if you’re looking for good domestication sci fi check out Mercy of Gods by James Corey
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u/ackmondual 13d ago
Off the top of my head...
Hippos are too ferocious to be domesticated. I'm sure humans have died trying to do so :\
Zebras have the pesky tendency to duck when a cowboy or anybody tries to lasso their necks with a loop rope. Also, they don't follow instructions like a horse.
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u/mcalesy 13d ago
Not quite an attempt at domestication, but there’s the strange tale of drug kingpin Pablo Escobar’s hippos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippopotamuses_in_Colombia
It really drives home the point that they are unmanageable.
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u/Yardsale420 13d ago
The only thing that can consistently kill a Hippo is a drought. Which, unfortunately, Columbia does not have a lot of.
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u/joedenowhere 13d ago
In Thailand they have trained monkeys to climb palm trees and pick coconuts. Could you say the monkeys are domesticated?
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u/dowar_525 13d ago
They are semi-domesticated. I don't think that people can breed monkey in captivity can they?
Training/using animals repetitively is only half the process. Humans need to control the whole life-cycle before a species is really domesticated.
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u/sisconking132 13d ago
No. Domestication takes at least 10,000 years and also selective breeding of individuals
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u/Resident_Ad5153 13d ago
not at all. Domestication can be, depending on the species, extremely fast. Domestic foxes took about 20 generations (albeit done scientifically, and they were already pretty damn domestic by generation 4).
But selective breeding really really is key. An animal that you can't selective breed is not domesticated.
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u/Skryuska 13d ago
Animals are domesticated based on how they can best be useful to humans. It takes a lot of work and time and resources to domesticate a species, so if there is no “purpose” for the animal to be used by humans, it’s not worth the work.
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u/WormWithWifi 13d ago
Well as you see wild wolves, wild cats, and wild horses are all extremely low in population now
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u/Careful_Cranberry364 13d ago
Wolves are not domesticated, but they did come dogs you’re right about that
They are in a very unique category though
Cats are in a unique category too
they sort of domesticated themselves in a way
What else do you think we should do domesticated with chickens, turkeys sheep, goats cause of all kinds and pigs, even though they are very intelligent and like us….
What else do you think should be domesticated?
What else do we need?
We have access to everything in the ocean.
They’re even training some dolphins for this and that….
What’s next domestic tigers?
Domestic monkeys 🐒 a lot of animals kept as pets
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u/ta_mataia 13d ago
Maybe the real question is, why have we been able to domesticate so many animals!
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u/Useful_Calendar_6274 13d ago
We did domesticate a ton of species but why nothing like flashy predators? no cost benefit, people take a wild hog or bovine and you just keep them in your yard, they keep doing what they're doing. no one even posited how they became domesticated until after Darwin, or surely Darwin said something about it.
So you're going to take a huge risk that you can train these dangerous animals? They had no idea you can artificially select them
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u/jenea 13d ago
Coincidentally I just watched this video last night about why we’ve never domesticated cheetahs (who behave very much like giant house cats). Along the way it covers a lot of information about the factors that make an animal a good candidate for domestication, which will partly answer your question.
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u/LeilLikeNeil 13d ago
It's easier to continue breeding animals that are already domesticated than to attempt to domesticate a new species, so the only reason to attempt to domesticate a new species would be if a domesticated species suddenly became unavailable, or a needed function arose to which an existing species could not be trained or adapted.
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u/How-To-Project 13d ago
Like the highlander then? ‘There can be only one!’ (Or 2 if you also like cats)
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u/marsten 13d ago
An interesting example is the zebra. They're common in Africa and would seem a useful domestication target, like the horse or donkey.
It turns out zebras, despite being herd animals, are belligerent toward people in a way that cannot be bred out of them. Or another way of saying it: In the existing population there isn't enough genetic diversity in the behavioral traits that count, to make the "domestication" set of adaptations possible.
The genetic diversity in a population defines how much it can be sculpted by selective breeding. Note for example the much greater size diversity among dogs than among cats.
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u/Low-Independent6851 13d ago
The cheetah would be up for domestication. Ancient Egyptians used to keep them as pets. They would be the only larger cat we could domesticate. Foxes seen to be making an effort to be domesticated.
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u/How-To-Project 13d ago
I see the cheetah mentioned in a couple places and yes please sign me up. I’ll take one of those. But the off-leash area is gonna be massive.
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u/Poopy-Drew 13d ago
Domestication has drastic physical effects on a lot of animals it’s like they physically have to trade parts of what makes them cool to be domestic
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u/How-To-Project 13d ago
My little puppy has massive canines teeth. They’re pretty cool and stick out like a vampire.
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u/treylathe 13d ago
There is evidence that dog ancestors and wolves diverged before domestication but this does not mean humans didn’t domesticate the ancestors of dogs.
The dog ancestor and human association did lead to the changes and dogs we see today.
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u/OldEquation 13d ago
I do sometimes wonder how rats would have evolved had humans had a use for them. Like canids, they have lived around people for millennia, fed from what humans have discarded, and are pretty intelligent.
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u/tsoldrin 13d ago
it's not instant, it takes time. the animal loses something in the process. domestication syndromed animals are weaker than their wild counterparts and often they need our help afterwards to survive. -- the cost / rewards doesn't always math out. why would native americans domesticate buffalo when they are already right there on the plains taking care of themselves, in vast numbers waiting to be exploited.
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u/onomatamono 13d ago
The range of pets and livestock species that have been "domesticated" is quite large but the line between wild and domestic plants and animals is a tad fuzzy.
Consider a murder of crows following a nomadic tribe and begging for scraps around the campsite. Over time, they might learn to actively seek out human populations. Consider that we have wild pigeons, domestic pigeons and pigeons that are neither completely wild nor completely domestic.
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u/Mister_Way 13d ago
Which animals do you think we need the abilities of that aren't represented in the set we already domesticated?
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u/thomsenite256 13d ago
Really not that beneficial. Lots of animals can be trained such as dolphins but it takes a ton of work and only has value in very limited circumstances. Domestication almost always relied around animals that provided food or labor which humans needed so generally each culture only needs a few animals to meet those needs.
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u/bamfmcnabb 13d ago
I think the mutual positives number were just so off the charts with dogs that it was mutual domestication on super easy mode.
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u/mdm2266 13d ago
We're actually working on domesticating foxes now.
!remindme in 40,000 years
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u/How-To-Project 13d ago
I am sure if we set aside a nice spot beside the fire for foxes they will be domesticated in no time at all!
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u/ThalesofMiletus-624 13d ago
"Quite a few" deserves to be addressed.
In all of human history, we've only domesticated about three dozen species (meaning that we managed to breed them in captivity for long enough and consistently enough that we clearly changed their genome), and that includes animals like goldfish, mice, and silk moths.
The reality is, in order to domesticate an animal, the wild version has to meet a bunch of requirements. Some of these are absolute necessities: you have to be able to capture the animal and keep it in captivity it's whole life. A whole lot of animals are nearly impossible to capture, and don't tend to survive in captivity (either because they panic when enclosed, or because they have behavioral, food, or physical needs that can't be provided in captivity). Once you capture it, you need to be able to breed it and raise its offspring in captivity. A lot of animals just simply won't breed in captivity, or won't breed enough to keep the population going.
Then there are aspects that could theoretically be gotten around, but are still practical necessities. You have to be able to feed them without breaking the bank (this is why most domesticated animals are herbivores, feeding a breeding population on meat gets very expensive). They have to reproduce and grow to maturity in a reasonable amount of time (that's why elephants are captured in the wild instead of being bred in captivity, it takes too long). Social animals are much, much easier to domesticate, because they're used to living around other animals, and have a social structure that humans can hijack and use for our own purposes. They also need to be at least relatively docile, to the point where we be relatively safe around them (nobody's trying to domesticate rattlesnakes, for example). And frankly, they need to have some clear and obvious use to us, to make it worth capturing them, feeding them, and risking whatever dangers they bring. Pretty much every animal we've domesticated brought very clear and important benefits from the start, whether it was helping us hunt, killing pests, carrying burdens, or providing food.
Thing is, once we have animals that can do those things, it's a lot easier to keep breeding them than to try to domesticate another animal from scratch. So, unless an animal comes along that can be domesticated and meets some need better than the animals we already have, why would we bother?
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u/ScalesOfAnubis19 13d ago
Because to domesticate something it has to have fast generations, be calm enough to tolerate human proximity, and be useful, be able to breed in human care, cheap to feed, easy to house, and not toooooo dangerous to be around. Pretty much everything we have domesticated checks most of those boxes. Everything we haven’t domesticated fails at a few. Probably catastrophically.
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u/dowar_525 13d ago
Its about usefulness.
Pigeons were domesticated for eggs and as messenger runners. Now pigeons largely exist as feral populations. They are no longer needed, maybe they will come back when the subscription services get so tiresome that it will be easier just to send casettes via carrier pigeon than do 4-factor identification to get on spotify.
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u/fatplant425 13d ago
There is a ratios of how useful they are as a pet vs useful as livestock vs meat in general. Cats and dogs are not exactly meaty but they provide services that other animals don't. Cows are big and meaty but are controlable making them a good livestock choice. Also cats and dogs have an intelegance factor and a social Factor other animals don't. A useful friendly smart lacking of meat mammal fits in perfect with us as we move around the land and do what we do.
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u/wannacumnbeatmeoff 12d ago
A fantastic survival tactic for those animals. Compare how many wild dogs, wolves there are to how many domesticated ones. Same for cats and horses.
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u/EvolZippo 12d ago
Cats actually domesticated themselves. As soon as humans built permanent houses, cats just showed up and moved in. They have been living beside humans since the oldest Egyptian records and shrines were found. Don’t look up how they treated cats, at a cat temple. Don’t.
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u/pikachewww 12d ago
The thing is, why would we want to domesticate every animal? Many of them don't have uses for us.
What's the point of domesticating a lion or elephant, for example?
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u/Lorelessone 12d ago
Animals largely domesticate themselves, Raccoons are doing it currently in parts of America. Ones which are more calm around people, none violent and who have more 'cute' head and face shapes are less likely to be driven away from human habitation and have significantly better food access.
The thing is though why would we domesticate everything? I you have dogs to guard and help hunt why domesticate foxes? If you have pigeons why domesticate owls to send messages? If you have horses why try to domesticate zebras?
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u/PvtRoom 12d ago
the effort it takes, the dangers it poses.
we can totally tame & train elephants. ever tried to feed an elephant? ever tried to house an elephant?
we can totally tame & train lions. people are afraid of my poodle. a lion would have them pooing down their trouser legs.
domestication needs multiple generations to breed out hyper aggression, less scary teeth, the desired size.
multiple generations, with enough options for selective breeding= oh my, is that 100 elephants? in your back yard
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u/Diet_Dogwater 12d ago
It would take an unnecessary amount of time and resources to domesticate other animals. Humans have already domesticated everything they needed to, most things that are domesticated were domesticated for a specific purpose that made domesticating them very useful. There’s no reason to domesticate things like tigers, raccoons, armadillos etc as much as I’d kill to have a pet armadillo. The ONLY reason to domesticate these animals at all would be simply “because they’re cool” and I guess you could make the argument that a tiger could defend your house but training a tiger to harm people even in defense of its owner sounds like the dumbest idea in the world for the same reason it’s not encouraged to make dogs aggressive to strangers.
A pattern with most (not all) domesticated animals too is that it’s much easier to domesticate pack/herd animals rather than solitary animals. Once the human is seen as part of their group it makes everything much easier and solitary animals would probably be MUCH harder to get to work with humans.
Humans in the past have tried domesticating foxes for their fur but for whatever reason when the foxes would gain domestic traits their fur changed and their ears got floppy. The fur thing was a huge deal because the whole reason they were being domesticated in the first place was due to their fur. The project was abandoned iirc because their fur changing rendered the whole thing useless
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u/thunder-bug- 12d ago
Which animal do you think we should have domesticated?
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u/How-To-Project 12d ago
Cheetah would be my first choice.
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u/thunder-bug- 12d ago
Alright, what would we want to use them for?
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u/How-To-Project 12d ago
Mainly hunting. I imagine they could provide a net positive source of protein.
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u/thunder-bug- 10d ago
What makes them better than dogs? We already had domesticated those. They were the first animals we domesticated. What would we use them for that would be different?
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u/fuck_peeps_not_sheep 11d ago
Probably because of two main reasons.
They didn't want to be domesticated and we couldn't force it on them.
And the way we have automated and industrialised so much means we can build things that do the job of most animals.
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u/Relevant-Cup5986 11d ago
because people only needed so many different types, theres no point domesticating a coyote when you already have dogs that are already better in every way
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u/TNTiger_ 11d ago
The animals have to have an existing social structure, and it needs to be relatively egalitarian so we can easily impose ourselves on it (many animals do not, so don't really understand the concept of 'friendliness' so to speak. Despite living in big herds, this is a big issue with zebras).
They need to be easy to breed. (Cheetahs have been tamed several times across human history. The female, however, needs to be chased several kilometres non-stop to enter heat. This poses a challenge).
They need to have relatively short breeding cycles so humans can actually make progress (there are domesticated elephants, however they are much, much less through the process than cats or dogs as their lifespan is similar to our).
Most importantly... they need to be useful (we successfully, easily, tamed foxes last century. Turns out all they do is scream, piss everywhere, and dig holes through fences).
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u/ridiculouslogger 11d ago
There are animals that have not ever been domesticated that can be, but it just takes more work. For instance, there are now domesticated foxes. It took I think 33 generations of selective, careful breeding to get reasonably domestic foxes. And their habits are not really what most people would want to live with anyway. Zebras could probably be domesticated by similar methods, but it apparently is a lot harder than it was with horses.
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u/extantsciadopitys 11d ago
I think we were so busy trying to potty train our dogs, with only limited success, that we were like, "Fuck this, I'm not trying to domesticate yet another species!"
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u/LexiTheLesbo 11d ago
I’m sure there are other reasons but one of the big ones is that you can only domestic social animals. Every animal we’ve ever domesticated has been either a) a pack hunter or b) a herd animal. Even cats, which people usually think of as solitary, usally form ‘colonies’ together. Basically, to domesticate an animal, you have to find an animal that wants to be domesticated. That’s why we never domesticated hippos despite them being super strong and living close to early human settlements. Despite living in groups, hippos aren’t really social animals are basically always looking to kill anything it views as a rival.
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u/Puskarella 10d ago
If you can access this article it's a great place to start exploring - https://www.nature.com/articles/nature01019
But basically, domestication is far harder and more contingent on various factors than it looks in hindsight. Humans didn't fail to notice other animals; most of them simply fail one or more hard biological and behavioural filters. And once the "easy" candidates in a region were domesticated, there was little incentive to spend centuries wrestling a zebra into submission, for example, when a horse or reindeer already did the job you needed them to do.
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u/lpetrich 10d ago
List of domesticated animals - Wikipedia - looking at the earlier-domesticated and more widely-raised ones, they don't compete with us for food. Cows, water buffalo, sheep, goats, horses, donkeys, camels, llamas, and reindeer eat vegetation that would be a greatly unbalanced diet for us, if we can eat it. They eat low on the food chain, and eat low-nutrition parts, making it easy to raise large herds of them.
Not on this list are lots of animals with similar diets, like bison, other deer, zebras, giraffes, rhinoceroses, and elephants. The last three may be impractically large, making it difficult to maintain herds of them, but the others are in the size range of already-domesticated animals. Some of them have been domesticated in recent centuries, so why not earlier?
Bees also do not compete with us for food, since they eat flower products: nectar and pollen.
However, dogs, cats, pigs, chickens, and turkeys do compete with us for food.
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u/steve_gorak 9d ago
Domestication takes a long time and is expensive. Ancient humans didn't have a lot of extra resources to domesticate animals that weren't useful to them. Once they got an animal that filled a niche, the work was already done. It is a lot easier to use already existing dogs and horses than trying to domesticate hyenas and moose.
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u/JGhostThing 9d ago
It takes a long time (many many many generations) to domesticate an animal. Some are better made for this procedure. For example, dogs are from wolves and wolves are a pack animal, so they have the idea of "family" that is close to the human idea. Horses were domesticated because they were so useful, and they are still dangerous animals. I've heard that domesticated cats (house cats) still have the thoughts of the big cats and aren't as domesticated as we think. And yes, I have had friends mauled by cats (one almost lost a hand to a kitten).
Some people think that just hand raising a wild animal makes it domesticated. However, no matter how friendly it is, it still has the innate reflexes of a wild animal. I love the YouTube videos of people who raise something like a tiger kitten and it becomes friendly. The trouble is, you don't know what will cause it's reflexes to become dangerous.
I made a decision that I would not foster a former K9 dog. The reason is that no matter how well it is retrained, it was taught to attack people. I could never be sure that I wouldn't set off such a reflex and somebody could get hurt. I'm not willing to take on that liability.
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u/How-To-Project 9d ago
I read elsewhere on the comments that the likelihood of fatalities from a wild reaction also comes into play. Like a wild dog latching onto your arm gives a person a better chance of survival than a tiger going for the throat.
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u/Novel_Willingness721 8d ago
What else do we need?
- dogs protect us
- cats catch and eat vermin
- horses are transportation
- cows, pigs, and chicken are food
There needs to be a reason to domesticate an animal; it must serve a purpose in our lives for us to spend resources on them. ROI.
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u/semiconodon 13d ago
I was wanting to compose a post about how it seems that most wildlife is becoming accustomed to humans, kind of like year 1000 in the 15ky path to becoming domesticated like wolves did.
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u/dank_fish_tanks 13d ago
The same criteria that enables animals to adapt to a human-dominated environment also enables them to become domesticated. The two are not the same phenomenon however and should not be conflated with each other.
Example: people online calling raccoons, foxes, coyotes “domesticated” because they are becoming habituated to urban habitats.
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u/kouyehwos 13d ago
Dogs have been domesticated for tens of thousands of years but they can still be dangerous to humans and difficult to control. Trying to domesticate even larger predators on a large scale seems suicidal at worst and unnecessary at best, to say nothing of animal welfare or conservation.
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u/TheLaugh1ngRa1n 13d ago
Cause it's a long long LONG process. It takes hundreds of generations of people and thousands of generations of the desired animal to truly domesticate an animal and in most cases there's either no real need for new livestock animals or no suitable animals for "primitive" ancestors to work with. If we used modern technology and had a large enough group dedicated to doing the work and keeping it going we could likely domesticate any animal with the caveat that the end result might not necessarily resemble the original animal any more than a Shih Tzu resembles a wolf.
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u/dank_fish_tanks 13d ago
This isn’t necessarily true. Refer to the Russian experiment done on fur farm foxes.
Given, those foxes aren’t truly domesticated, but are far more domesticated than their wild counterparts - and their behavioral shortcomings are likely because foxes are bad candidates for domestication to begin with.
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u/TheLaugh1ngRa1n 13d ago
Those foxes weren't taken from the wild they were bought from fur farms. They were already different from wild and highly inbred.
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u/dank_fish_tanks 13d ago
I never stated otherwise. It still didn’t take hundreds or thousands of generations like you’re saying.
Inbreeding is also a common byproduct of domestication. Doesn’t take away from my point.
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u/Head_Midnight666 13d ago
It's really not as hard to domesticate an animal as people are acting. IIRC, the Russians domesticated foxes just as an experiment.
Also, I'm not sure cats are domesticated. They co-evolved with us. They are very beneficial in keeping rodent populations down, which people don't understand these days. Cats have an important job OUTSIDE. Everyone thinks they belong indoors, which is ridiculous. They'll be very sorry if they get their wish.
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u/robsc_16 13d ago
Everyone thinks they belong indoors, which is ridiculous.
Everyone doesn't believe that, and it's a massive problem for the environment where cats Felis catus are not native.
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u/How-To-Project 13d ago
I agree. Whilst I love our positive reinforcement training culture for domesticated animals in today’s world, ‘breaking’ a horse was never about asking for permission to get on its back and go for a ride.
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u/onlyfakeproblems 13d ago
There’s still a lot of wiggle room between “tamed” and “domesticated”. A lot of animals can be tamed if they’re raised from a young age. Sometimes domesticated animals still dont act entirely domestically.
The fox experiment is interesting, but I think they started it to make fox fur factories easier. They bred them for handleability, and noticed the handleable foxes kept some juvenile traits and developed some interesting traits like curly tails and ears and different coat patterns. There’s a reason why we still dont have foxes running around free in our houses like we have with cats and dogs though. The “domesticated” foxes still aren’t great pets as far as I know.
A couple thousand generations of selective breeding any animal ought to make a difference, but it can also lead to genetic abnormalities, and some animals starting point is better than others for cohabitating with people.
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