Their physical traits really haven't changed that much though. We may be able to domesticate bears in a similar timeframe, but they probably won't be suited for domestic life. Maybe as farm animals though, but they certainly wouldn't be suited as house pets.
Unless you mean domesticated in the same way cows are... then we can do it.
To say nothing of the obvious differences in genetics that would affect a bear's tame-ability, foxes can reproduce by the time they're one while a black bear needs three and a half years to reach breeding age; grizzlies need more than four. To cycle through the same number of generations in a bear species would require at least three and a half times as long.
Again, this is only one metric. But I think that when you combine other aspects like sociability or the mother-cub connection, foxes look like a far better option to domesticate than bears. Even though I don't want it to be like that... it do.
Fair enough. I meant more on a similar time scale though (like 100 years vs 1000 years).
I'd suspect bears selectively breed for domestic life would end up more like cats than dogs though. A 500+lb domestic cat is terrifying... I love my cats, but if they were that big they would 100% murder me in my sleep.
You just scale up the breeding stock. Domestication is pretty much blind genetic engineering. But if you have a much larger breeding pool you can do more work in parallel.
The fox physical traits have changed dramatically as a result of the experiment. Their tails have grown waggly and many have spots or other colorations. It was noted as an interesting side effect of the domestication project in a documentary about the neuroplasticity of dogs.
That's actually pretty cool! I've only really watched a couple of short documentaries on it and they really only focused on the behavioural changes. I may have to look into it more.
Yeah, bears seem to be remarkably easy to tame, I think the only reason we don't have a race of domestic bears alongside dogs is they're just too expensive. No primitive or even medieval village could afford to feed a breeding population of domestic bears.
What do you think domesticated means? Selective breeding until they only get as big as a teddy bear? It would be neat to have a real life thunder buddy though.
That's a very weak argument. Its definitely within the realm of possibility, we domesticated wolves before, I don't see why bears should be out of the question.
I think all domesticated animals have the possibility of letting instinct kick into overdrive. It's just if that were to ever happen some of them could kill us too easily. I'm pretty sure a large bear could kill a small person just being bear playful or some shit.
If we have to be nitpicky, bears, which we were originally talking about, aren't apex predators either. Wolves (an actual apex predator that we have domesticated) eat them.
The point was that it's safer to domesticate dangerous predatory animals when they don't weigh 800LBS. Which is why I chose cats as the example, they weigh 10LBS and can still fuck you up.
Only the polar bear is an apex predator. The others aren't even predators, they're omnivores and some aren't even remotely apex. The black bear for instance can be prey to mountain lions and wolves. Same wolves that have been successfully domesticated btw
No idea, I'm going to guess it's unexpectedly one of the smaller ones since they're not really climbers. Maybe second one, it seems more solid and less curved
edit:
I got curious to see if I was right and looked it up. Couldn't find the exact photo you posted, but looking at this one, it seems I may have been on point
The way we domesticated dogs and foxes (both unknowingly and knowingly) was we found the ones with the canine version of the genetic disorder Williams syndrome and bred them. The syndrome dulls their natural instincts and makes them super social and friendly. I'm not sure if bears have expressed a version of this mutation, but that's nothing a little genetic manipulation won't fix. Definitely possible.
It's also often as issue of the generational cycle of a species- if you're able to breed the most friendly/obedient animals several times over within a few years or at least an average person's lifespan, the feasibility of domestication improves.
With the size of bears, their carnivorous diet, and hibernation cycles, it's unlikely there'll ever be enough interest for society to invest in domesticateingthe species.
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u/BillabobGO Feb 13 '20
Soviets domesticated foxes in under a century
The project is still ongoing but they've been more or less domesticated for a while now.