Have you ever tried to domesticate a wild animal and converting it into a pet? There are many experiences that have come to my attention. An animal lover rescues a hare entangled in a bush and takes it home for nursing. It turns out that it can hardly eat in the presence of people leave alone in captivity. It could even starve to death. At the first taste of freedom, the hare vanishes. Even birds have been hatched and raised as pets only to fly away never to return. Other animals have even been known to attack. Have you ever had such experiences?
No is my answer to the thread's title. However, I know of several people who have wild animals for pets. One is a governor of a province who has tigers in their house. The giant felines are loose inside the house as if they are mere cats. Another is a friend who owns a small crocodile called "bayawak" in Filipino. It is a reptile that eats raw chicken meat. It is wild and it also bites. There also the friend of my nephew who owns venomous spiders like tarantula and black widow.
I don't think I would have the guts to have those pets. There was one family friend who was offering a boa to my sister. What? A big python? No way.
I've seen videos of squirrels, ferrets, tigers, fennec foxes and other wild animals that have been domesticated. I guess it's about knowing how to handle such animals. Sometimes, animals in reserves are shown human affection the same way families are with exotic domesticated pets and that makes it easier for the keepers to get near them. I don't think anyone should be keeping endangered animals though. I know they are in as much danger from poachers if they're in the wild but there should also be guardians willing to watch out for them from illegal hunting.
05-21-2016, 11:15 PM, (This post was last modified: 05-21-2016, 11:16 PM by kfander.)
When I was a kid, my dad brought a fox pup home. The mom had been caught in someone's trap and killed so he took one of the pups home to raise. For the first few days, it was kept in the porch until it could get acclimated but after that, she was free to go anytime she wanted to. She was raised pretty much like a dog, and she acted like a dog on amphetamines. We had two dogs at the time. The younger one played with the fox sometimes but mostly ignored it. Our older dog hated the fox, I think, but mostly because she would tease poor Wags all the time, wanting him to play with her. Wags was about fifteen years old at the time and not very interested in playtime with a fox. So the fox would run circles around him until he got mad enough to chase. Once she ran into the culvert and while Wags was barking at the culvert after her, she came out the other side, and yipped at her from behind.
When I came home from school, the fox would be waiting for the bus sometimes, and come running, jumping up on me like she couldn't wait for me to get home. Mom never let any of the animals in the house, but the fox would sneak in if someone was too slow getting to the door and run through the house.
She stuck around for around two years. Eventually, she started wandering at night, coming home before morning. Then, some days we wouldn't see her at all. She started becoming less sure of herself around people. She was never mean, but I would have to coax her to come to me, and eventually she wouldn't come to me anymore, and would be gone for days at a time. Gradually, she was acclimating herself to the life she was intended to have, as a fox.
More than a year since we had seen her last, we pulled into the driveway one night to see a fox running from the dog food bowl, so we figured she would come around from time to time for a free meal, and the dogs still viewed her as a rather annoying part of the family. Interestingly, we had chickens at the time, and she never bothered the chickens. We made sure they were penned in, so as not to tempt her but she seemed not to be so interested in them. The cats, by the way, never accepted the fox as part of the family. But then, they weren't so fond of the dogs either.
Also as a kid, I have had a couple of raccoons at different times, and the experience was pretty much the same. They were very tame and fun to have for a year or so but, as they grew into adults, they would gradually transform themselves into what they were intended to be. The raccoons were pretty much like cats only, because they were unable to retract their claws, there would be some accidents. One of my raccoons seemed to want to look me in the face when he talked to me, so he would just climb on up to face level, and it didn't matter to him that I might be wearing short pants. Ouch.
True domestication of an animal takes a couple generations of breeding for the weakest flight or fight responses to get the most docile animal possible. But I've tried to temporary take care of a wild animal during the summer at my grandparents' farm when I was younger. Most of the time, they were frogs. The irrigation runoff from their crops would create pools for frogs to have their eggs and we would catch them and watch them hatch. As they grow up, we would play with the frogs and try to train them to sumo wrestle each other or race. Ultimately though they would just leave or we would have to let them go before the cats ate them.
The only other wild animal I've ever tried to take care of was an injured robin. Its wing was broke and I had put the bird in the garage to ask my mom if we could take it to the veterinarian. My mom came back late that night and when she asked to see the bird, the bird was already dead. So I accidentally killed a bird I tried to save. Ever since then, I've had a hands off policy with wild animals. Unless you can take them to a vet immediately and only plan to temporarily take care of them, you shouldn't handle them.
