Compared to sheep, cattle and dogs, they seem more on the wild side of spectrum than other domestic animals.
By contrast cats are not really domesticated and cannot be, no matter how you treat them. This is why you'll still have things like a cat just randomly attack you in weird circumstances and ways, but because they're tiny and relatively harmless it just makes them hilarious and weird. But it's also why people who miss out on this final nuance, and pick up lynx and similar animals as pets, often end up in the hospital.
A wolf pup raised by humans won’t be anything like a tame dog.
People whose animal experiences are limited to pets and zoos have many wrong ideas about how real wild animals are.
So definitely dangerous, but not in a Wolf way.
One of the main issues with feral/wild dogs (or wolf hybrids) is that they are much less afraid of humans and therefore are more likely to attack livestock, pets or even actual people when given the opportunity. Under normal circumstances actual wolf attacks are (and probably were historically) and feral/hybrid dogs are just attributed to them.
There used to be a huge population of stray dogs in Balkan cities after 1990. (Contraception and culling reduced the numbers quite a bit since then.)
Most of the time, they just went out of people's way, individually or in loose packs. Attacks on humans did happen, but weren't a daily occurrence.
That said, a stray dog in a big city will always find food, so they weren't hungry.
How are they? Really shy and prefer cermonial fights?
I would guess a stray dog is a bigger threat than a wild wolf that have not got its instincts breed away to have the fur in a special way.
(Note, I don't mean I'd rather be in room with a wolf than a stray dog. But that the wolf would bail 1 mile away from me.)
When I read the title, I was thinking I like a horse that's been domesticated the whole time :)
Former or latter, I don't want to actually participate in the full rodeo experience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_dog_attacks_in_the_Unite...
No need to blame the victims.
(So this whole discussion just went round in a circle.)
A dog killed an infant as it slept in bed with its parents. The baby's father awoke during the attack, saw the injuries to the child, and immediately killed the dog.
The family dog killed two-month-old Julius who was in her infant bouncer while her father was sleeping. Julius was taken to the hospital where she was declared dead
An eight-month-old girl in a bouncy chair was attacked by the family pet while in the care of her grandmother. Fire and rescue declared her dead at the scene.
Of course unnecessarily risking the life of your child is still a horrible idea (especially considering that a dog might still hurt it entirely unintentionally).
I had believed that I understood when a dog was unhappy. The dog that bit me gave zero indication that I could see. I walked past it and it attacked. I have no doubt that someone very perceptive might have seen it coming but my policy now is to treat all dogs as if they're unhappy until I get super clear sense that that's not the case.
Of course you can. A small tiger won't sleep on your couch and remembers not to make a mess in the house. And when a small tiger attacks you, it can still be dangerous. There are still wild cats around here (in europe) - and they would not get that tame so easily.
(Also you can teach cats some commands, it is just way more work and the commands won't work all the time)
Humans don't die so easily.
Cats can in general play without (seriously) hurting one another or a human.
On the other hand, even a small cat could kill a human by going to the throat, which they could. But they don't. The house cat evolved to manipulate us instead to get what they want, instead of eating and killing us. Those cats that tried that, like tigers, got allmost extinct. And from what I know, there are bigger limits to what a tiger will do, instead of a house cat. And yes, they are bigger and any bad mood of them allways very dangerous.
For instance we were introducing one of our cats to a new stray kitten we found. We've done this plenty of times before and are used to the process including having them play footsie under the door for weeks, reading positive body language (tail posture, etc) and so on. It was all positive. So we let them see each other. Everything was going really well until the kitten decided to boldly just march up to the cat.
Something just clicked in her at that point. The cat, the most docile and friendly cat imaginable, just pounced and decided she was going to wreck the kitten. After separating her we assumed it was her way of trying to roughly assert dominance, reminding the kitten she was being a bit too familiar. That was until we were treating the kitten and saw the bite marks were in the throat area - she would have 100% killed the kitten if we had acted half a second more slowly.
After that she was all back to being nice and friendly outside the door, but we decided to find the kitten a new home instead of risking being a bit too slow the second time.
However, she has her limits, and will often give me a hefty bite if I do something she considers unacceptable, such as stop scratching her ears and instead try to pet her fur or clear it of nestles, which she seems to love collecting.
It is me, being domesticated. I wait for my ears to flop.
also attacking in play is different than attacking, so that should be considered.
* Cats absolutely can be obedient with training. I've been clicker training my cat for years and he can do any trick a dog can do. He also understands his name. I tested this many many times by yelling random words, seeing him continue sleeping, then yelling his name, causing him to jump and run towards me.
* Cats can be trained not to attack at hands like dogs. This is called "cat inhibition" and it's standard practice for cat owners, all good cat owners must know and practice inhibition training.
* Cats clearly prefer sitting next to humans and sleep close to them. If you never experienced this you never lived with a cat long term. It's actually fascinating, when a cat is "sleeping" they're actually not sleeping in a human sense, it's a particularly light sleep. They're still ready to hunt. What most cat owners will see is that when your cat is sleeping next to you, and you suddenly change the room to clean dishes or use the bathroom, your cat will get up and sleep somewhere close to you. Although a human interprets this as cat being lazy, they're exhibiting hypersocial behavior for their species.
* Cats are not weak. Have you ever fought a cat? I did. I'm a full sized human male who weight trains regularly and my cat can barely overpower me if he puts all his power. Go watch some feral cat vet videos, you'll see cats require a strongman sized vet to be fully seized (and rarely some still get away). An adult cat will have no problem overpowering a human female. If you think "cats are attacking their owners" you seriously have no idea how incredibly powerful these creatures are. When a cat slaps you or whatever they're merely warning you in a "polite" way (and, as explained before this is a sort of behavior that can usually be curbed with training)
The whole risk and point of undomesticated animals is that you literally cannot know when they will strike. There are countless examples of people having raised all sorts of wild animals for many years with no incident, and then one day the animal simply kills them, or somebody else, for no reason.
It’s a spectrum, some cattle breeds are pretty wild. Dogs are special.
One good measure of domestication would be to compare with zebras which are considered relatively untamable - as in unlike horses they’ll always maintain a violent streak. Ponies tend to be more violent than horses.
They understood the core concept of ‘do not bite the hand that feeds you’ instinctively.
There's this theory that's why there are so few domesticable animals in Africa: that they co-evolved with humans, and the ones who behaved predictably and weren't willing to randomly hurt you for no apparent reason at their own expense, were eaten by our ancestors.
This doesn't make sense to me. Sure, an an animal that is generally a belligerent asshole will discourage humans from trying to tame it, but why would it discourage hunting? If anything, it would encourage hunting the bad animal to extinction, no? Humans successfully hunted Mammoths and other large game even in the stone age, so I don't see how having a bad temper would help.
Africa has some very fertile regions but except for some like the Nile Valley most of them couldn't really compete well with the Yellow River Valley, the Ganges Valley, etc.
Just for comparison, the population of Africa around 1900 was around 100 million, out of which Egypt had 10 million, Ethiopia 10 million, Nigeria 30 million, and 1-2 other population centers around 10 million each. So 70 out 100 million people were bunched up in maybe 5% of the territory.
In the meantime, just India had about 300 million people in 1900 :-) India within from 1500 to 1900 probably had more humans living in it than Africa from the beginning of mankind to 1900.
Just sheer fertility of regions, navigability of rivers, etc, as a Civilization of EU4 player would put it, meant a "better starting position" for some :-p
Half a million years ago, there were large animals pretty much everywhere else on Earth too. They very consistently disappeared right around when humans showed up.
Weird comment.
Sheep and Cows will also act wild if not domesticated; they are just not fast by nature.
Even humans can be on the extreme wild spectrum if not domesticated. There is plenty of evidence even to this day.
What does that mean? Do you mean feral animals? Non-domesticated cows went extinct hundreds of years ago [1]
> Even humans can be on the extreme wild spectrum if not domesticated. There is plenty of evidence even to this day.
What evidence? What is a non-domesticated human?
> A feral child (also called wild child) is a young individual who has lived isolated from human contact from a very young age, with little or no experience of human care, social behavior, or language. Such children lack the basics of primary and secondary socialization. The term is used to refer to children who have suffered severe abuse or trauma before being abandoned or running away.
My impression was that it could be written as, "The term is _also_ used to refer to ...", but I'm not sure.
Here’s a nice article about the biological basis of domestication:
But that doesn't address your point about horses seeming to be happy to live in the wild, which would indicate that horses have seen less change from their pre-domestication state than other domestic animals have.
Maybe their role in human societies, as transportation and draft animals, didn't require them to lose as many of the traits of their wild ancestors, as other domestic animals did?
[1]: https://www.medievalists.net/2016/08/horse-fights-the-brutal...