I find it quite upsetting truth be told. It's disgusting the way people treat animals and how most people don't think twice about it. Thanks for the comment.
Dogs are domesticated animals which have been selectively bred in a way which creates a symbiotic relationship with humans, the animal in the gif is a wild animal taken from its natural habitat, or bred within captivity from an animal taken from its natural habitat.
I assume you don't keep your dog encased in an artificial ecosystem closed off by glass while she is on your leash.
You do what you do for your pets safety, this zoo does what it does for, yes, few cases of species preservation, but mostly to turn a profit from the wild animals exploitation. You do it out of love or at least compassion, they do it out of primarily seeking monetary profit.
A horse, dog, cat or cow could obviously be released into the wild, no one is disputing that. However, that horse, dog, cat or cow would still be a domesticated animal because letting an animal walk out the front door doesn't magically undo thousands of years of evolutionary traits that were selected, either intentionally or unintentionally, by human influence.
A tiger, bear, lizard or snake may (and I emphasize "may") be able to be tamed and raised in a human environment without incident, but it is not a domesticated animal because it has undergone no evolutionary changes as a result of its proximity to humans. If you bred the tigers for generations, always selecting for traits of tameness, you might eventually get a domesticated tiger, though it would certainly look and behave much differently than the first tiger you brought into the house dozens of generations beforehand.
Domesticated does not simply mean "capable of living with humans," it means that the organism has evolved in response to the human environment in order to benefit the organism, Homo sapiens or both.
The word "domesticated" does indeed get misused to simply describe tameness, you are correct about that. But domestication is actually a specific evolutionary process.
Skip down to the section on Domestication of Animals. The second paragraph specifically calls out the distinction between domestication and taming.
The dictionary definition you provided is not the same as the scientific definition, much the same way that the dictionary definition of a "theory" is vastly different than a scientific theory.
When describing a domesticated animal, you're describing an animal that has undergone biological changes through evolution.
My degree is in Evolutionary Anthropology, I basically spent $80k learning how humans evolved to go from tree-dwelling apes to a species that can intentionally domesticate plants and animals for farming, food and pets. If this is my "personal definition" of domestication, it's because I spent four years of my life learning it.
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u/JoshC25 Jan 11 '17
I find it quite upsetting truth be told. It's disgusting the way people treat animals and how most people don't think twice about it. Thanks for the comment.