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Comment by Shenglong | Hacker News Reader

A white tiger that has already been born does not have a vote in the matter and cannot apologize for existing. Humanity has a collective responsibility to care for the two-headed calves and white tigers that we create for our own entertainment, but do we really need to be creating more of the genetic disasters that pull resources away from truly endangered species? There is no good reason to breed another white tiger.

I'm trying to understand the moral implications here. The author paints a very heart-touching and grim picture, and it's tempting to agree. But what happens when you apply this to humans?

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Applying this to humans would mean if we were currently inbreeding slaves with Down syndrome to produce children with the same condition for entertainment purposes, that we should stop doing that. I'd agree.

Edit: Shenglong, just saw your response under this post's sibling. The point is not that the author argues for the human-led removal of unnecessary traits. It's that we should not spread misinformation and continue to go out of our way to create those traits. In the specific case of the white tiger, such behavior results in really harmful genetic defects that could result in the extinction of tigers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_tiger#Genetic_defects).

Did you even read the article? The tigers were intentionally inbred to spread this mutation. There is no analog of this in humans; inbreeding is unnecessary and does no tiger a favor by continuing it.

Exactly. One has to realize what is being argued for, not going around the globe murdering white tigers, but to stop contiguously inbreeding them to maintain the strange white fur.

Oh, you mean the way we did so with wolves to create the thousands of dog species that exist today. By this absurd logic, all dogs should go extinct.

Dogs are bred to live with humans. Tigers are not.

Maybe tigers "should" be? I know quite a few people who would gladly pay for the ability to have a domesticated tiger as a pet...

Thing is they're about 100x more dangerous than dogs.

But are they 100x more dangerous than the wolves from which domesticated dogs are descended?

A tiger on its own, and a wolf on its own? Yeah, probably. Wolves and tigers are both apex predators but wolves are pack animals.

And you can only domesticate a dog by hacking its pack instinct to make it follow you instead of another dog anyway. No such hook with a cat.

Didn't Siegfried and Roy hack the maternal instinct of female cats to achieve some semblance of domestication? I mean, it didn't work out very well of course, because a cat mauled Roy and nearly killed him by grabbing him by the neck (to drag him to safety, according to them) like she would a cub.

So, I think there is a hook. It's just a really shitty one. Note that the hook for dogs can backfire as well, if they try to assert pack dominance vs. their owner. So we breed really submissive dogs.

Tigers and especially lions are somewhat easy, not to domesticate per se but to befriend. I wouldn't really call this a hack the way domesticating dogs was a hack--they just seem willing to occasionally befriend humans the same way ordinary cats do.

Tigers and lions are very confident apex predators, so they don't really have the vicious instinct or the intense fear response that some animals have. So they don't deliberately attack humans. By contrast, leopards and jaguars will kill you out of sheer viciousness, bears will attack you if they feel threatened, and polar bears will attack you because they are hungry and you are made of meat.

The main danger with tigers and lions is that they don't really understand how fragile humans are, so they might accidentally kill or maim you, which happened to Roy.

You mean like cats? (That's not a rhetorical question, by the way. When you domesticate tigers, would they be very different from what we now consider a cat?)

That's sort of the process we had to get the bengal (hybrid asian leopard cat and housecat), which is considered a domestic cat after 4 generations.

Same thing has been done with servals ("savannah cat"); I can only imagine how awesome/terrifying it would be with other lesser wild cats, although I think there are enough differences between the great cats and domestic cats to make it difficult/impossible to do naturally (tiger/cat or leopard/cat cross).

Dogs can function quite well in their natural environment (in close proximity to humans); white Bengal tigers will die very, very quickly in the wild. The mutation is non-adaptive.

Hmm, some purebred dogs yes. They can have quite awful lives because of genetic diseases. But domestication, besides the fact it was done by our pre-human ancestors, is not the same. Modern thinking sees the domestication of dogs more as a co-evolution of humans and dogs.

I'm not talking about the methodology; I'm talking about the results. The result of inbreeding is genetic insufficiency for survival - and there are a lot of human traits that have been preserved that are not fit for survival either. Yet, we don't forbid breeding for specific traits.

Generally humans and animals have different rights in terms of what they are allowed to decide wrt their breeding habits.

Additionally, humans FREQUENTLY choose to adopt rather than risk passing on a genetic abnormality to a biological child.

The only difference here is that we would be making the decision for the tigers since, as everyone would agree, they don't have the ability to understand the consequences and make the decision themselves.

As long as frequently is considerably less than 1% of all births in the US (and significantly less in other parts of the world).

1.5-2% of children are adopted in the US. About 50% of those children's parents adopted due to infertility, of which an even smaller fraction is voluntary infertility.

I wouldn't say that is something that humans due frequently, and is probably limited to a small set of cultures, and an even smaller subset of parents with both the knowledge and fortitude to make that decision.

I'm an adoptive parent and know several dozen other adoptive families. I have never personally met someone who chose to adopt to avoid the risk of passing on genetic abnormalities.

As an adoptive parent myself, I know several couples who chose to not pursue biological children because of genetic conditions.

Unfortunately, I also know some who chose to ignore the advice of their genetic counselor and now have 3 lovely, but severely mentally disabled children (Fragile X run amuck) who will never be able to live independently.

I wasn't trying to imply it doesn't happen, only that it doesn't happen _frequently_.

They really could have picked a better title. White tigers, being a mutation, will continue to happen naturally even if not selected for. (Much less frequently of course)

According to the Nature of Things, one in every 100,000. Considering how few tigers there are on the planet (less than 50,000) the chances of one naturally occurring are extremely small.

Come now, if it is one in every 100,000 and we've got 50,000 of them the odds are we get a white tiger every other generation.

"Go extinct" doesn't mean "be all killed" or "be violently sterilized". It means that we should stop breeding these unnatural and disadvantaged animals. The white tigers that exist would live comfortable lives in captivity (because they can't survive in the wild) and die naturally of age. Everything about their lives is already artificial, but animals don't seem to need or enjoy sex in the general sense in a way that humans do (they have no interest when not in heat) and therefore it's not inhumane to prevent them from breeding.

For a more severe and human example, people who have a high likelihood of carrying the recessive Taysach's gene are often tested. If they both are carriers, they adopt, rather than taking a 1-in-4 chance of having a child who will die horribly. If one is a carrier and the other is not, then it's no problem. No one is being sterilized; it's positive, voluntary eugenics and it's a good thing.

According to the Cincinnati zoo example, white tigers are apparently being bred for profit, and kept in captivity. So I'm unsure how they are disadvantaged anymore so than say pure-bred dogs with physical problems that mongrels don't tend to have.

Tu quoque.

Perhaps Dalmatians should be allowed to go extinct.

Breeds with really severe genetic problems that make them miserable and completely unviable outside human care should be allowed to go extinct. It's not ethical.

It's an impossible battle. Too many people enjoy, for example, like that pugs have a fundamentally non-functional nose.

I don't think it's impossible, this seems like the kind of cultural change that is just an extension of the changes that have happened and are happening.

I've often wondered about examples like this.

To what extent can making yourself attractive or "cute" enough to have your existence furthered by another species be considered a successful form of adaptation?

Cats, I recall reading, "domesticated themselves" a long time ago. As a direct result, they are absurdly successful. Surely that's a valid adaptation.

Well ... if anyone was purposefully inbreeding humans so they had disfigurements that people would pay to look at then I would hope we would do the same thing suggested for the tigers. Stop doing that immediately.

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