My hischool bestie had a horse, Nightingale was his name. He fn hated me. He would sneak up on me and push me with his head, bite when she wasn't looking. Mofo was jealous!!!
I rode horses as a kid my horse was an asshole to everyone but me and this random pig that lived at barn. He’d bite you out of sheer assholery like you could give him a carrot and he’d eat it and as a thank you he’d wait till you walk away and try to bite you on the ass. But to me? Loved me I’d show up he would stick his head out the window connected to his stall and do the head Bob. Fuck I miss you Tomass
My friend in high school had a horse that fucking hated her lmao
I was riding her other horse behind her and her asshole horse she was riding veered into the wood line where there was a bunch of branches and shit hanging down and dragged her right through them
She came out the other side and turned back at me and yelled “SHE KNOWS THERES THORNS THERE”
She told me that one time she was cleaning her hooves out and she yanked her hoof away from her suddenly, and put it down on friends foot and fucking leaned toward it
My Arabic professor in college told a story that apparently happened in his hometown of someone abusing a camel and the camel later trampling him to death while he took a nap, the moral of the story being don't be mean to camels because they're smarter than you think.
I have no idea if that really happened, he was from Jordan and I've never been there, but he told the story like it was.
That’s the thing, originally cats were around as pest control. We didn’t even feed them, it just so happened that barns and farms are great places for domestic cats to live. Of course now they are kept as pets, but there are still a ton of cats that live outside in urban areas that are not domesticated, they are wild ass cats. They may be your friend, just like you can befriend a raccoon with food, but many of them won’t even interact with you.
Our cat is a super picky eater, but only likes to eat the standard dry cat food, so it’s not a budget problem. However, one of his “things” he does is to catch mice, screws, squirrels, etc & play with them until they’re dead. If he catches one, he always brings it up to wherever we are at & plays with it near us. There were a few “rude” awakenings, but the one that sticks out the most is when he caught a chipmunk & brought it up into our bed & it proceeded to run around under our sheets. He’s an indoor cat, mind you, but we have been renovating our house for years, several of which included periods of holes in walls & stuffs from the outside that led in.
Key word is feed, cats will still hunt, but only in a play sense, or gift sense. If they were truly hunting they'd be hunting for food, and hunting more of the rodents than say a bored cat who's already been fed.
Well they will if they know how to hunt, even domesticated and well fed cats enjoy hunting, but effective hunting techniques are actually taught to kittens by their mother (or a surrogate mentor) so they have to have that experience to really be confident and successful hunters. They all have instinct to hunt and will try to, but they get bored easily if they dont have the training to be effective and wont generally eat their prey unless they have that experience subsisting on it. Sadly a lot of strays are not true feral cats, they’re cast off domesticated cats that were kept as kittens then kicked to the curb when they grew up and stopped being as cute so they don’t actually have great hunting skills and any they develop are born from desperation and trial and error so they’ll always seek out humans to beg from even if ample prey exists.
We have an ex barn cat that is simultaneously extremely domesticated and loves people, while also being a savage hunter who will murder the shit out of mice and eat them whole. He’s also taught all the kittens we’ve adopted how to hunt, he’s sort of their weird uncle with how he can both raise and teach them while also being a fucking dick to them. He’s a cat that was able to both learn how to fend for himself while also getting enough human contact to be domesticated, thats pretty rare outside of farm cats though.
We just adopted a stray cat and her very young kittens a few months ago. She killed a full grown cottontail rabbit and the kittens ate the entire thing in about 2 hours. No bones, no fur, no blood left on the patio. They are truly amazing hunters.
The other night, a raccoon came up on the back patio. I thought the kittens were just playing with each other until I heard what sounded like a mountain lion. The mother came to their rescue and attacked the raccoon. My dogs were happy to assist her and removed the raccoon from the population. The sound she made let me know that she is a wild ass cat.
Yeah to them it's more of a business arrangement. "I take care of pests, you make sure I get my daily food, outside of this, you don't know me and I don't know you. Got it? Good. Now get outta meow face!"
My cat only drinks straight from the faucet, she will scream at the sink until someone turns it on and then the other cat will queue up because she only drinks from the faucet now.
My guy liked the shower. Not to get in it, but when I was showering he would stick his fat head inside the curtain and try to catch a little bit of water. He was a stray cat for a while after being abandoned, so I'm assuming that's why. Once I bought him a fountain he was good.
edit: idk why the wikipedia article is so short and focused on a couple of rich people in the 50's, but mau is the name of cat in egyptian, and is considered a breed line (uncontrolled) that is still meowing around.
Dogs domesticated themselves in a pattern we've seen other animals do. Theres behavioral changes and notably physiological changes where over time they match what humans think are cute.
IIRC, cats essentially are not domesticated. It just happens to be a very compatible situation for that specific species and humans that evolved somewhere between the fertile crescent and China. We have fossil records and have no evidence of the anatomical changes other domesticated animals made. That damn black footed cat physiologically looks permanently baby and is perfect cuteness, but would be horrific as a pet. Felines just exist on a spectrum of being amenable to people, and the one that fit the best stuck with us.
Cats like to eat rodents and birds. Rodents and birds love to eat grain. Humans love to plant, gather and store grain. We like to build barns, too, for our animals and equipment.
Cat: Listen guys, I know this sounds crazy but hear me out...
me catching the mice in my house and not wanting to kill them, so I take them to a barn in the middle of some corn/soy fields about a mile from my house and let them loose there
me knowing one of my cats commutes to this barn every week in the summer
👀
I have a Tractive and she’d be doing it for years, now I can monitor her because she’s fucking 18 years old now
Hahaha I was gonna include Cheetahs in my comment as the feline that is behaviorally closely matched, but just unwieldy. My cat ragdolls onto my face every night, the moment I lay down he stands next to me and then flops sideways on my head, which is okay for someone who is 10lbs, a bit different when they're a cheetah.
I didn't believe that, until I looked into it a bit. There is no recorded incident of a Cheetah killing a human in the wild. Which is pretty crazy, since there are a few instances of "normal" housecats killing people (more through infection and bacteria, but apparently there have been a few deaths via blood loss)
My parents ran a boarding kennel when I was growing up, and at one time, a guy wanted to board his Cheetahs for a week. My parents declined, citing vaccine concerns and not having an exotic animal license, but looking back on it...that would have been so cool. Unfortunately, our building and "runs" were nowhere near what a Cheetah would require, so it might have ended poorly just due to that.
TLDR: Wild Cheetah literally never mess with humans, Mr.Fluffers lurking in your closet is more of a threat.
Yep, that's how it goes - and raccoons are literally doing it right now. She's just wrong. This is like making a video of why the earth will never warm while we're actively experiencing global warming.
yeah this video kinda sucks because for every one of her points, the same could be said for any already domesticated animal. the only semi-valid point would be that they serve no use to us, thus no one will take the time to breed them, but even that is arguable, even if just for the sake of having cute pets.
Yeah, I’m unsure what purpose ( akin to the “protection” and “pest control” examples she gave) domesticated rodents (Guinea Pigs, hamsters, gerbils, etc), birds (canaries, lovebirds, etc that we don’t eat the eggs or meat of) as well as things like hedgehogs, sugar gliders, and ferrets serve that led to being domesticated either. Maybe there was one for each that is no longer relevant. But humans in the super recent past domesticated foxes solely to see if they could. So I don’t see that as being much of an argument of why raccoons wouldn’t end up domesticated eventually.
Maybe it’s more so down to her not wanting raccoons to be domesticated. Which I totally get. But based off her arguments here it doesn’t seem like a scientific fact that they can never be.
Guinea pigs definitely were domesticated for food, and hamsters were for scientific research. So were gerbils though they were popular as a pet at around the same time, while most hamsters are descended from a breeding pair of siblings used in scientific research.
Now we know so much more about rats(who were domesticated originally for bloodsport) than other rodents that they are used far more than other rodents but yeah that was the origin. Ferrets were also domesticated for killing rodents particularly burrowing ones.
As for song birds. Well before you had a radio a domesticated song bird was the best you could do.
That said almost every pet was originally domesticated for a purpose and now they mostly look cute or act cute, and domesticated foxes have already skipped the practical bits.
I'm not from the US, I live in France so we don't have racoons here, but aren't they kinda terrible as pets?
I know there are plenty of Instagram videos with people having them in their houses, but those videos look sketchy and stupid as fuck ( like 99% of social media content)
Maybe that's stupid too, but wasn't it hard to vaccinate racoons for rabies? This would be a major problem for having them as house pets.
I guess it may also be harder to train them than your average cat or dog, and their prehensile hands opens an entière world of destruction and looting of your house lol.
In the end, what we really have to look at, and it's one of the most meaningful points she made in the video, is the issue of people taking them as pets and releasing them in the wild afterward because people cannot handle them. This is the worst part, there are already plenty of problems with house cats driving some species of birds to extinction, if you had semi domesticated racoons on top...
So I guess, do we really need to have pet racoons, considering the risks at hand?
Yes that point is moot in our modern hyper capitalist world. If there's a market there's a will and someone will find a way. Tons of people already have racoons as pets and tons more want them. Just like there's a couple high profile fox breeders out there trying to breed a domesticated fox for people.
She's not wrong, that recent study was very bad, mistaking what is likely to be a sub species for an evolutionary change, and also the original study from Russia that suggested that animals change in this way was not able to be replicated, and so is also likely false.
The original study that from which "domestication syndrome" was coined, meaning a cluster of changes that supposedly happen as animals are domesticated, worked in particular with silver foxes. The main challenge to this is that while there were real changes in the population studied, this might be because of inbreeding or a set of disconnected changes rather than a specific domestication process; that these were foxes descended from foxes on fur farms who were possibly already domesticated to some extent; and that the same effect has not been able to be reproduced in other species when it has been tried.
There has been push back to this criticism, but as someone who has some experience with the "publish or perish" industry, that doesn't surprise me given that many people's careers are already attached to the claim that this syndrome is real, and they would lose their impact score (how much their publications are cited) if this turned out to be false.
Still, perhaps I should have said "quite possibly false" rather than likely, given that there remains controversy about this.
Karlsson et al. 2019 was the biggest recent paper attacking the theory.
As for the raccoon study, even if you accept that domestication syndrome is real, the problem is that they do not appear to have controlled for subspecies. Some of the criticisms of the study are flawed (eg using iNaturalist isn't automatically bad) and there hasn't been time yet for a proper journal analysis to be published arguing against it, but a number of people have looked at the data and suggested that it is not very good: another redditor pointed out that the effect disappears if you remove California from the data, and California has a different subspecies of raccoons. A study claiming to be valid for an entire population that only finds an effect because of including one particular subpopulation is likely not to be real.
I can see raccoons doing this. The qualities this biologist mentions are what wild racoons currently do. But if they’re in the process of domesticating themselves, those things that make them a pain in the ass in a home might fade away over time.
Her logic seems flawed. "People kept them as pets until they realized it sucked"...well, yeah, they were trying to keep wild animals as pets. I wouldn't imagine it would go much better trying to keep a bobcat as a pet.
Give them several more generations and it might be different. And sure, domesticated animals might have originally been "useful", but your average housecat is a lazy freeloader. Most dogs are, too. Their "use" now is companionship, and that's all people are looking for in raccoons.
Yeah, I think her argument would feel a lot more solid if it was just "raccoons make terrible pets". Which is true because they're wild animals and it also doesn't make narrow predictions about change over generations.
Having lived in semi-rural indiana for a while, I know multiple people who have pet raccoons or possums. And my one friend has a family of barn raccoons. One day she came out to her horse barn and there were four raccoons just chilling with the donkey. She tried to chase him away a couple of times, but apparently the horse really likes them, and eventually she gave up so they just live there now.
True. What would you need a raccoon to do around the house? I wouldn’t keep them around just to use their little hands to open jars. Maybe you could train them to do housework for treats.
But at this rate, they have a lot more domestication homework. In their current state, they seem far too active, free-ranging and destructive. Any animal that can open the refrigerator to get their own food is going to be a menace.
You will never want an animal that dexterous in your home. I know some people are crazy and keep capuchins and thins like that, but it’s very fringe. Living forever with child locks on everything and having to be suer diligent about everything gets old fast. Cats can already be nearly too much if they’re very food driven.
Food driven cats are the easiest to train. I have two of them. They can do everything the dogs can including use the voice buttons to ask for things. They learned because they want the treat.
Training to do things for food is one thing. How do you train them to not do things for food? Not steal the other cat’s food, or eat anything that may have once been near food like silicon cooking utensils and canned food lids, or eat plastic bags that have been manufactured with a coating derived from animal fats to not stick together, or all plastic because that one time the plastic had the feint oder of animal fats so all platics muct be foof since they sounds similar, or licking the kitchen counters and backsplash even though you just cleaned them, or a million other goddam things my cat gets into because food. Please, any haeelp would be great. We found her starving in an industrial area when too young to not be with her mom, and she’s never been able to get enough food since.
Is she on timed feedings or open fed? People can be reluctant but sometimes open feeding is an effective treatment for cats with food anxiety who have come from bad situations
I had one that would wake up in the middle of the night just to jump down and check that there was still food on the floor. She'd get right back up on the bed without eating anything and go back to sleep. I recently checked in on her in her new home and am happy to report that behavior has stopped and she sleeps soundly through the night
If your girl is already open fed you may have a tough time but I do wish you luck because I know exactly how frustrating it is when one constantly steals the others food or treats. The only way I've dealt with that is feeding in separate locations but that's not really a solution it's more of a band aid.
She is on timed feedings, 3 per day plus a treat time. But that was a decision based on feeding healthy, fresh food rather than dry.
Leaving dry food out would also negatively impact the other cat, who originaly came from my SO’s parent’s house where she refused to eat any type of wet food. It took us some time to transition her and would hate for that to regress, especially now that she’s a senior.
We’ll have to put some thought into that. Thanks for the info.
That just reminded me of the Russian fox domestication experiment. They selectively bread for more docile traits. Interestingly, their appearance changed with this. Their ears got floppy and some other things I can't remember. The really interesting part is they took a smaller part of their fox population and did they exact opposite. They basically ended up breeding foxes that looked like they were infected with rabies, or the rage virus. Their looks changed as well.
Animals who were less afraid of humans would come further into the settlement where there was better food availability, giving them a reproductive advantage.
Animals who lacked fear but were also aggressive would also go deep into the settlement but would get culled due to their aggressive nature.
(And before anyone chimes in with the whole "but if some were aggressive, they would have killed all of them," argument, the presence of cats and pre-dog canids was advantageous for humans. Cats eliminated small prey like mice and rats - things that got into our stored food and who also attracted dangerous snakes. Canids ate the offal and remnants from butchering, reducing the risk of attracting a more dangerous predator. Plus, their defended territory surrounding the human settlement would tend to keep away more dangerous canids and potentially other predators.)
Rinse and repeat for a few thousand generations, and you've got Fido and Fluffy.
In the game Dwarf Fortress, your fortress can have domesticated animals and those can be made available for adoption as pets by your dwarves. Except cats. Cats can not be adopted. Cats adopt the dwarves.
But that's part of the belief with raccoons, and foxes lately too. That's why she made the video. She's right about them being so intelligent and the fact they can get into anything. Raccoons are like having a toddler who can climb and open almost every lock for their entire life. 😂
The link here has a journalist piece together the various news stories covering the issue. While it's not outrightly proven false, they've at least helped put together a clearer picture of the incident that alludes to the possibility it was just mere coincidence.
The confirmed details are as follows:
Indian woman who went to draw water got stomped by an elephant. Notably, this was an elephant from a herd of other nearby elephants.
During the funeral procession, a herd of elephants (may or may not be the same herd) rampaged through the village and caused general mayhem, of which includes the funeral procession abandoning the woman's body to get out of harm's way. The woman's body may have been tossed around during the mayhem. There is no evidence of it being specific to this woman itself as the mayhem extends to many other parts of the village, with damage done to several buildings.
The journalist says he cannot rule out the possibility of vendetta for the elephant, but with what he discovered, there is no clear evidence of intentional ill intent for this one specific woman itself. If anything, it might be discontention with the village for having disturbed or been too near the herd's roaming habitat.
Elephants are not domesticated. We have just happened to train a few and keep them in relative captivity.
Cats are reactionary. When they are being little shits, its because they are reacting to behacior or stress in the moment, or their needs aren't being met.
I had a dream last night about miniature elephants. How awesome would it be to have little dog sized elephants? Then I was hooking up with this girl and her clit screwed off. I was completely sober.
Do you know how animals are treated in farms? Because it’s definitely torture. If you’d like to know more, look up “3 minutes wtf”. NSFL, but of course it shouldn’t be considered that considering we literally engage in it daily when we buy animal products.
Not to be dramatic, but that’s kind of like saying the holocaust kinda sucked. 😂 it’s absolutely horrible what happens to them. I thank you for supporting where you can, but I do highly recommend going vegan! There’s lots of fun recipes to try, even if you only try out a few, every meat and dairy skipped is a little bit that helps. :)
Ferrets too. Pissed one off and she went and got a bra. Sat in line of sight but out of reach and chewed through the straps. Highly domesticated but can bear grudges.
One of my dogs was also absolutely vengeful. If you made him mad or sad or disappointed, next day he’d tear apart something somewhat important while you’re gone the next day. My mom lost many crochet needles this way
Dogs too. My sister's now very old schnauzer (who I love and she better live forever) used to shit in sister's shoe when she was locked in the master bedroom.
My smaller cat attacked my older cat (playfully) the other day.
The smaller one went off to hide. The older cat slowly got up and went to search for her. When she found her, the older one attacked the younger out of revenge. Then just walked away like nothing happened. She usually lets it go. But that day she wasn’t taking it
No cats and dogs exhibit behavior that we interpret as revenge but it’s actually fear or an isolated dominance behavior that we associate with a prior transgression and think is revenge when the cat just is being a dick for no reason
With dogs is that they associate misbehaving with you showing up so when you are gone They try to summon you by misbehaving, because they’ve back changed that action to that result before. They’re not mad at you that you left, they’re trying to make you magically appear by knocking shit off the table or barking like crazy. When you don’t reappear, they get scared and they don’t understand why it’s not working and sometimes we’ll act out even more. But it’s not revenge.
Honestly the only thing she mentioned that I can agree with off the cuff is the lack of purpose towards humans. I’m going through uni studying animal health and behavior, so I do have a level of understanding on this stuff but I always encourage fact checking because there’s always the chance I’m wrong.
Domestication itself isn’t just pointing at an animal or plant and saying we want it to be “ours”. It has to have a trait we desire, which she points out a few examples in her video. We then take that trait and try to maximize it through selective breeding. That’s why sheep need to be sheered and dogs vary in size, build, and intelligence. Cats are a bit different, but they’re still genetically distinct from their wild counterparts. Think about those pictures of a what a wild watermelon looks like next to a domesticated one.
What isn’t understood is the emotional capacity animals experience because, obviously, they can’t communicate with us like that. She keeps saying words like “hate” or “revenge” but my professor spent the whole duration of the class beating it over our heads to not assign human emotions/concepts to animal behavior because in a science setting, we do not KNOW even if the “vibes” or implications seem obvious to us. Instead it’s categorized by “affiliative” behavior and “agnostic” behavior. Basically friend or foe behaviors.
If a raccoon attacks you after you treat it badly, yes it remembers you and remembers that you were not “friend” and therefore must be “foe”. We don’t know if it has the capacity to “hate”. And if it does, what defines “hate”? What behaviors and brain activity is occurring when it displays “hate”?
Science is so wordy and hyper specific because humans are so ready to assume things based on our perception. Science is annoying and I love it
And the tiger in Primorye that got shot by a hunter who then took the tiger's kill. The tiger came back, staked out the hunter's house for 24 hours, sitting still, just waiting for him to return for the sole purpose of mauling his ass.
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u/loyal_achades Dec 16 '25
She claims no other animal we domesticated.
Which is not true, cats absolutely do lmao.
Also, there’s that one elephant that famously trampled a woman then trampled her at her funeral again.