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>It would be even easier now with the advent of marker-assisted selection as GWASes increasingly turn up the genetic signatures of selection for domestication in cats/dogs/rabbit/foxes/etc.

Do you know if these changes are mammal-generic, or species specific? If the former, it raises a fascinating possibility of making a virus that would domesticate the offspring of an infected mammal.

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.)

Agreed. The very title conflates taming with domestication, two totally different things.

> even friendlier than most cats.

Given that "cats are assholes" is a common aphorism, this doesn't say much. (I get that you mean that they're friendlier than cats at their best, but few cats friendly a majority of the time.)

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

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

Yes, but this is true of many wild animals as well. The whole meaning of "domestication" is to change an animal's instincts to be more intuitive and easy to manipulate using human socio-tribal instincts, without knowing anything about how the animal thinks per se.

Or: you don't need to do this with dogs—at least the breeds people actually keep as pets—because [those breeds of] dogs have been bred for friendliness.

My wife is a veterinarian, and gets bit by dogs more often than cats.

Most popular breeds for pets bite.

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.

Agree, cats are often misunderstood.

> 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.

For cats, consider that anyone who stores grain may be very happy to have a few "barn" cats -- not pets, nearly feral -- to hunt small rodents who would otherwise be eating grain, or spoiling it with excreta.

I can recommend "Veterinary Aspects of Feline Behavior" by Bonnie Beaver, DVM, to people who keep cats.

Right, but I'm not sure there would be a motivation to breed barn cats. They're already pretty good at what you need them to do. Feral dogs, on the other hand, can't herd or protect livestock, nor are they useful for hunting.

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

Your last question was touched upon in "Guns, Germs, and Steel"--though I don't remember the book giving a reason, other than, if it was easy to domesticate [presumably compared to domesticating an alternative species, or just getting other humans to do the work], people would have done so by now.

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

I don't think so. People have also tried to domesticate hippos for meat. Also motivated. Also not successful.

A more interesting question to discuss might be why Africans were never able to accidentally domesticate zebras as useful insect-resistant beasts of burden when Europeans/Asians/Americans were accidentally domesticating all sorts of species left and right, such as horses.

What hypothesizes might you suggest?

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.

gwern rejects Diamond's hypothesis later down the thread, so I'm interested in hearing about any alternate hypothesizes he may have.

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?

> what kept the mesopotamians away from farming from 20000-10000 years ago?

Actually, this is one that we do have a good answer for: The most recent Ice Age was still well in effect during that time period.

Ah right, I forgot about that! Not that Iraq was anywhere near an ice sheet, but it was a whole lot drier.

Still, is the argument that there were no climatically suitable zones in 20k.BC? That they were smaller, too small for some critical mass of proto-farmers?

I always thought the reason why many African creatures seem undomesticable is because humans have always been in Africa and co-evolved, so anything native became fierce and untrusting gradually as hunters improved. Seems obvious, but I am not a scientist, so maybe it is more complex.

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.

Perhaps when you're not such a good hunter, you tend more to use whatever you can catch for food. When you're an expert hunter, you start to think about other possibilities.

I believe Jared Diamond answers this question in Guns, Germs and Steel. Africans didn't have iron tools and were not as effective hunters, so the animals had a much longer time to adapt against their predators.

That issue is addressed by the co-evolution clause, which posits that the ancestors of modern Zebras underwent selective pressure for hostility and avoidance towards the ancestors of modern humans as the latter became more dangerous. (Note that the use of 'ancestor' here does not assume any position on whether these ancestors were a different species than their current descendants.)

I get that. It explains why the dodo was fearless, and all the american animals.

We ate all of them when we showed up, in the american case c. 10000BC, long before iron weapons.

My point is that if the wild horses we first met were similarly tame, then surely we would have eaten them too. We didn’t. So probably they weren’t.

So that can’t be what stopped us domesticating african animals.

Maybe what made Asian horses somewhat wary of Homo Sapiens when they showed up was their experience with previous migrations of hominids (Homo Erectus, Denisovans, Neanderthals). This would assume that these predecessors were less dangerous to horses than were the early humans in America, possibly because they were less widely or more thinly spread, or dispersed more slowly.

Or we ate them to massive multiplication and huge success (chicken, cows, pigs, goats, ducks, turkeys, sheeps...)

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.

and now they're sold as pets and reportedly are even friendlier than most cats.

Is the Wiki article just out of date? It says:

As of August 2016, there are 270 tame vixens and 70 tame males on the farm.

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.