catspook
moonbreaze
catspook
moonbreaze
catspook
Some animals have a temprement that makes it easier to domesticate them; bears do not have that temprement (polar and grizzly bears especially). Plus, with the extreme selective breeding required to make such an extreme trait (especially in a gene pool that has already been limited by low numbers) you are likely going to produce deformed bears a lot faster than pygmy ones. I saw a guy last month with a newfoundland dog that looked almost exatly like a bear and had the sweetest temprement; I'd say stick with one of those if you really want a pet bear.
Couldn't you easily fix that by using genetic engeneering and not selective breeding?
Easily? Genetic engineering is not easy, and as the science currently stands, I don't think they are capable of any such thing at this point. Decades from now, who can say? By why would we want to pour so much effort and money into fundamentally changing an animal just to be able to say that we can keep it as a pet? Bears are not social animals (as opposed to foxes, which are part of the canine family); if you want to change them so much that they become a good pet, why not just stick to a bear-like dog? Considering the number of unwanted pets being killed in shelters, I could never support creating yet another species just to be churned out in pet mills.
Aye, but cats are mostly solitary as well and those work just fine as pets. I agree that actually creating the speacies may be a bad thing as a whole, but I'm more interested in possibility than pratice.
That's true about cats, and the very reason why keeping big cats as pets is a terrible idea; house cats are simply not large enough to kill an adult (unless it has some kind of disease). Also, cats prefer to running over fighting, so they are very unlikely to attack a human (unless the are ill or are trapped). As for bears, don't forget that polar bears are one of the few natural man-eaters; grizzly and polar bears are, quite simply, aggressive animals. As for the possibility, I'm sure it's possible given enough time, but I have to ask; why would you want to do this if in doing so you change the animal so much that it no longer resembles itself?
A house bear would not be large enough to hurt or kill an adult human either, no more or less than a dog anyways, hence the point of making them smaller. Tigers, lions, panters, and any other sort of cat you can name are also agressive animals, and any of those creatures could and would gladly eat a human as well. Who says that the end product would no longer resemble the orignal bear? Dogs of course do look differnt from wolves, but it is also obvious that they are related. the same can be said of wild vs domesticaed cats, horses, bovine, swine... lots of things.
