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by rymith 4927 days ago
Oh, you mean the way we did so with wolves to create the thousands of dog species that exist today. By this absurd logic, all dogs should go extinct.
3 comments

Hmm, some purebred dogs yes. They can have quite awful lives because of genetic diseases. But domestication, besides the fact it was done by our pre-human ancestors, is not the same. Modern thinking sees the domestication of dogs more as a co-evolution of humans and dogs.
Dogs can function quite well in their natural environment (in close proximity to humans); white Bengal tigers will die very, very quickly in the wild. The mutation is non-adaptive.
Dogs are bred to live with humans. Tigers are not.
Maybe tigers "should" be? I know quite a few people who would gladly pay for the ability to have a domesticated tiger as a pet...
You mean like cats? (That's not a rhetorical question, by the way. When you domesticate tigers, would they be very different from what we now consider a cat?)
That's sort of the process we had to get the bengal (hybrid asian leopard cat and housecat), which is considered a domestic cat after 4 generations.

Same thing has been done with servals ("savannah cat"); I can only imagine how awesome/terrifying it would be with other lesser wild cats, although I think there are enough differences between the great cats and domestic cats to make it difficult/impossible to do naturally (tiger/cat or leopard/cat cross).

Thing is they're about 100x more dangerous than dogs.
But are they 100x more dangerous than the wolves from which domesticated dogs are descended?
A tiger on its own, and a wolf on its own? Yeah, probably. Wolves and tigers are both apex predators but wolves are pack animals.
And you can only domesticate a dog by hacking its pack instinct to make it follow you instead of another dog anyway. No such hook with a cat.