Wild Horses Can’t be Broken: Zebra Domestication Attempts (2014)

Diamond's argument is circular and falsified by the foxes.

Most of the time if they bite they aren't being malicious, generally you are doing something they don't like so they nip you to tell you to stop or most often they are just scared. If you understand how to handle them few cats are actually a problem, my wife works at an animal hospital (where the cats are generally pretty stressed out) and she's only really been bitten once

Because it is also mostly a prejudice. Well treated cats are very friendly and attached, specially if born and raised in a good environment.

Even stray cats usually responds well to good care if you know what you're doing and have the endurance, skills and resources to do so.

> Tangent: why hasn't there been a breeding program to make domestic cats... more domesticated (i.e. friendlier)?

I've wondered this myself after reading Bradshaw's book on the domestication & psychology of cats, _Cat Sense_, where he points out that not only are cats not nearly as well domesticated as dogs and this seems to be the root of a lot of cat problems (such as the urinary idiopathic cystitis which nearly killed my cat last year, or the cat bites which are extremely dangerous and send countless people to the ER with blood infections, including my grandmother), they also are probably de-domesticating as cat reproduction is increasingly carried out only by feral strays. Cat personality and personableness definitely are genetically influenced, and this has been demonstrated by the usual methods like crossfostering (the offspring of feral fathers are less friendly even when raised by friendly mothers with zero contact with the father).

I'm not sure why, but it seems to be that most people don't regard it as a problem that can be affected, it's "just how cats are", and the scattershot cat breeders are almost all entirely obsessed with coat color/appearance and to a very limited extent, the worst inherited diseases. In addition, there is an incredible lack of cat research compared to dog research, despite being such a popular pet, which has even drawn comment from outsiders: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/26/science/dog-science-cats....

(My favorite example of this: for 60 years, if you asked any reference source like Wikipedia about why some cats respond to catnip and others don't, you'd be told this is because catnip sensitivity is controlled by a single autosomal dominant gene, based on 1 small Boston cat colony pedigree done back in the '60s. Turns out this is entirely wrong, it's highly polygenic, but it took until 2011 for a grad student to demonstrate this, and it took another 6 years until I stumbled across her thesis and added it to Wikipedia.)

> why hasn't there been a breeding program to make domestic cats... more domesticated (i.e. friendlier)?

Not sure, but here are some thoughts: cats and dogs occupy different niches. Feral cats are mostly not a problem because they don’t prey on animals that humans depend on for food. I guess a cat could take down a chicken? It would probably be dangerous, though. Chickens are big. Feral dogs, on the other hand are a problem because they will eat animals that humans are raising for food. After all, there’s a reason wolves have been exterminated throughout most of Europe. So, that difference, combined with the fact that cats just aren’t very useful (they don’t protect or herd livestock and they’re not useful for hunting large game), means that there was never a historical reason to breed them.

Now as to why there hasn’t been a concerted effort to breed them as companion pets. I think the big reason here is that there is already an animal that is the same size as a cat, but extremely domesticated: small dogs! Animals as companions hasn’t been a widespread thing for very long. My guess is that, when that started being a thing, smaller dogs were much closer in evolutionary time than more dog-like cats. And I’m guessing the people who enjoy cats as pets now probably appreciate that they are less emotionally needy than dogs.

Cats still predominately self-select their mates. The fact they even tolerate us is partially natural selection.

The problem with this argument is that we know what happened when humans met trusting animals: we ate them to extinction. So probably the horse’s ancestors were pretty fierce.

Some of the most popular pets and domestic animals came from the african continent in fact: the grey parrot, the domestic hedgehog, the gerbil, the camel, the fennec fox, the gambian giant rat, the ball python, the canary bird and of course the domestic cat

Some groups on the other hand are notoriously difficult to domesticate no matter the continent. Deer and Gazelles for example, too vicious when in heat or too fragile to be trusted in small closed spaces.

I believe Jared Diamond answers this question in Guns, Germs and Steel. Africans didn't have iron tools (or acquired them relatively late) and so were not as effective hunters. The animals therefore had a much longer time to adapt against their predators.

If insect-resistant means tsetse fly (which was why the idea if taming zebras was briefly fasionable) then it’s worth noting that this wasn’t a problem until 1896, when the rinderpest killed all the cattle, whose grazing had kept the land grass not bush.

For the owners of said cattle, one answer is like the maize: they already had cows!

These farming and cow-herding people were busy replacing other african peoples. Why the others didn’t domesticate zebra... comes back to why weren’t they farming too? I don’t know if we have a great theory for why farming started when it did, anywhere: what kept the mesopotamians away from farming from 20000-10000 years ago?

There is some evidence that it's generic. Darwin, as I mentioned, pointed out the close commonality of domesticated animals: the floppy ears, neoteny, year-round breeding, piebalding or spotty colors etc. There's no reason to expect all the human domesticators to be selecting for stuff like floppy ears, so the repetition suggests that there's some universal domestication syndrome where those all come as a package. I think the existing GWASes tend to support this but aren't definitive? Not really an expert on the details there. (One interesting claim is that humans appear to have undergone a light form of domestication syndrome too.)

Not seeing the contradiction there. They certainly are sold as pets, you can look up fox videos on Youtube etc. Damn expensive though, a Redditor I was talking to about it said that his fox was going to cost like $10k all told after all the fees and importation paperwork. I'd never pay that much for a cat or a dog (although it'd make a great gift for the billionaire or oligarch in your life).

Friendlier with humans, but foxes tend to be destructive with furniture. Is in its nature to recolocate things, tear apart carpets and dig lairs in the sofa.

Evidence is that horses were domesticated (on the Eurasian Steppe) for meat and milk before they were ever ridden.

So you're probably right that the behaviours that made them docile enough to ride emerged over quite a long time.

The catch is that friendly foxes don't look that foxy anymore; friendly zebras might lose their stripes at which point they kinda look like donkeys

We say wheat is domesticated. I just think it means weaved into the fabric of society. Brains are not necessary, but mutual benefits is.

I think this is a pretty fair point. Cars are incredibly dangerous to others and many drivers completely disregard that. A 5-star safety rating doesn't mean anything to the pedestrian or cyclist in front of you, but people tend to act like it's no big deal since they themselves are unlikely to be seriously injured.

Risk homeostasis or risk compensation explains this behavior quite well, and I believe it's a very damaging affliction on our car-centric society: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation

I think he meant the phrase "hairless ape" to be parsed together, to indicate human. Not a ((weak, hairless, ape) body) but a ((weak, hairless-ape) body)