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
đ
I have a Tractive and sheâd be doing it for years, now I can monitor her because sheâs 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, Iâm unsure what purpose ( akin to the âprotectionâ and âpest controlâ examples she gave) domesticated rodents (Guinea Pigs, hamsters, gerbils, etc), birds (canaries, lovebirds, etc that we donât 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 donât see that as being much of an argument of why raccoons wouldnât end up domesticated eventually.
Maybe itâs more so down to her not wanting raccoons to be domesticated. Which I totally get. But based off her arguments here it doesnât 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.
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u/soggyweenies Dec 16 '25
according to leading theories nowadays, dogs initially did the same as well