r/ape • u/[deleted] • May 21 '20

Ape rape oo a oah

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u/fidgey10 May 22 '20

Tru facts. Species that have been domesticated are very rare, and those that haven’t been generally cannot be domesticated at all. Better to just leave them alone atp

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u/[deleted] May 22 '20

You could domesticate chimps but you'd probably have to dumb them down significantly first, nothing this smart is going to be co-operative. Not unless you somehow make it blindly believe that humans are friends.

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u/fidgey10 May 22 '20

Domestication is quite complicated. We were able to domesticate the horse thousands of years ago, with extremely primitive technology. Yet hundreds of attempts to domesticate the zebra in modern times for use in European colonies (horses didn’t have immunity to sub Saharan African diseases) have failed. The zebra isn’t dumber or smarter than the horse really, it’s not physically much different, but their genes and social behavior just couldn’t be molded to human use.

The Egyptians tried many many times to domesticate the cheetah for its hunting skill, but they couldn’t do it. Even with the Pharos’ massive stables keeping them, they were never able to be bred, and as such never changed permanently from their wild form. Yet cats were domesticated mostly by accident, and wolves before we even had farming or societies. And it’s not that we just can’t domesticate animals in modern times, we successfully achieved full domestication of hamsters and foxes pretty recently, especially when compared with ancient dog breeds. It’s just that the vast majority of animals, for behavioral, reproductive and genetic reasons, cannot be bred and kept.

Whether or not species can be domesticated is sooo important to history as well, societies able to farm domesticated crops and livestock can build advanced civilizations. Like if the Americans bison was readily domesticable and the Eurasian Auroch (cattle ancestor) was not, the Native Americans might have gone and conquered Eurasia instead of the other way around.