When I was eight, I got it in my head that I was getting a pet baby tiger that Christmas. I got a wonderful set of toys, but there was no baby tiger. It was a sad moment.
My family explained that tigers were not tame, they had not been domesticated. It would not be safe to have a tiger, even a young tiger, around.
My little zebra: The secrets of domestication reveals that scientists have made progress in learning how to domestic wild animals:
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IN 2003, while geneticist Svante Pääbo was visiting Novosibirsk, Russia's third-largest city, he decided to look in on a famous experiment run by the Institute of Cytology and Genetics, which is based in the city. Fifty years ago, the then head of the IC&G, geneticist Dmitry Belyaev, had begun breeding silver foxes to see how easily they could be tamed. What Pääbo didn't know, though, is that Belyaev had also set up another experiment in the 1970s involving rats. This time, one line of rats was selected for tameness and another selected for aggression.
When Pääbo saw them, he was stunned. After just 30 years of selection, the IC&G researchers had fashioned two populations that could hardly be more different. "I could take the tame ones out of the cage with my bare hands. They would creep under my shirt and seemed to actually seek and enjoy contact," recalls Pääbo. "The aggressive animals were so aggressive I got the feeling that 10 or 20 of them would probably kill me if they got out of the cages."
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Previously scientists thought it would take thousands of years to tame a mammal like the zebra or water buffalo. A group of Russian researchers tried an experiment with silver foxes. They kept breeding the most friendly foxes. Within four generations some of the foxes would wag their tails. In just 20 years they were able to breed a domestic fox. There has also been progress in domesticing the American mink and river otters from Japan.
Just fascinating.
Maybe in a couple decades someone will domestic tigers. And I'll finally get my pet tiger! Of course, I don't think Janine would be very happy about it.
(Hat tip: Digg)
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