Quote:
Originally Posted by Swarly
I didnt mean to jump down DFF's throat, I just wanted to know where he stood. I'm not trying to be a jerk here or anything just wondering but I may have come off harsher than I meant too, it was 5.30am and I was just heading to bed.
He said it makes him ill that people are buying bobcats for pets now. Correct me if I am wrong, anybody on here who knows more about the history of pet species than me. But, breding these bobcats to be housepets would create a new species down the line, much like was done in the past to create the current dog and cat species that we now own as housepets.
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I'm not sure you'd get a different species as such, but selectively breeding them as pets will, over many generations, produce animals that are more acclimatized to domesticated life. In the meantime, you've got many generations of potentially unhappy animals. The website originally quoted says that it's okay because bobcats and lynx 'sleep 17 hours a day', but to me that's not sufficient to say it would be happy living in a domestic environment.
Go down to the zoo and have a look at the bobcat and lynx exhibits; the habitats they put these animals in are not simply for the benefit of the viewers; in a lot of cases, the best zoos have put a lot of study into what it takes for an animal to be content in captivity. They know the minimum amount of range that an animal needs. If you can't provide this same sort of experience, you shouldn't be looking at owning one of these pets.
My own personal take on it would be that there's a bit of human arrogance in trying to domesticate all of these wild species of animals. There's no denying that there are a lot of animals out there that would hypothetically make really cool pets (my own choice would be to have sea otters, and not just because I watched Danger Bay a lot growing up), but is any animal really better off living in a domesticated environment, unless it's an injured creature that can no longer survive in the wild?