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Neotheta In reply to Sapphfyr [2011-08-16 01:40:46 +0000 UTC]

Yay! Long comment! XD

For the elephant part, there's a lot of elephants that live and work with people in asia - sometimes they surprise with how much people and them can communicate. A lot of people havent travelled enough to notice how friendly and familiar behaving most animals are when they have grown up with humans. Of course the point is, they HAVE to grow up with humans to be like it.
Bigger animals need more training to not do their bad things, such as why dogs need more training than cats - since they are cabable of causing bigger issues than cats.

Most felines apart from lions behave almost exactly like cats when they are grown with humans, for playtimes a human is not the best option, but for example a big dog is a good play friend for a tame tiger. Fox's behavour is something you get when merging cat and dog, they're not as crazy social as dogs, but they follow their owner and communicate like a dog - just without barking.

Reasons people usually think unusual pets are bad is: It's not common, they are jealious, they have been told false because of the previous reasons, they think all wild animals have illnesses, or they don't just know enough.

For people, the only animals that communication becomes hard is small animals and non-mammals, small animals havent developed the same kind of social brain as bigger ones, and they are also afride of all bigger creatures, because they are big.

True it would be really really hard to keep an unusual pet, since they need a special vet, special food and all, but creatures like small cats and foxes are so close with cats&dogs with their biological bodies and behaviour that I'm pretty surprised that it's not even uncommon, but rare.

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Sapphfyr In reply to Neotheta [2011-08-16 02:54:01 +0000 UTC]

o-o

Admittedly, I don't know much about elephants. xD It just seemed to me they wouldn't share enough common ground with humans to truly inspire an 'equal' mindset, or hold us to be the same type of companions dogs do (I'm still iffy about cats). But, I am willing to admit I wouldn't know through both lack of experience and exposure. I wouldn't be surprised if elephants could recognize certain humans as trusted friends, but I might draw the line after that and require a notable insight to their mindset to go beyond. xD
Except the strange limbo some animals can live in when reared from a bottle or something, where they look to humans as a replacement they didn't have correct measures to doubt... But then, kinda seems like that's the case with almost every domestication that goes beyond being 'loose friends'. x-x
And yeah, seems like some of the this-is-the-only-one-you-need issues with certain breeds of wild animals, is they can kill you or badly wound you in the heat of the moment. Granted, I think no matter what the training, it comes down to a matter of circumstance.

Same function, similar genetics, so I would assume they'd be similar. xD
Don't want to make it sound like I'm skimming over that paragraph, just don't have much to add without getting offtrack by just throwing out stuff I've learned on cats.

In some cases, I do believe that is true. o-o However, I really think some of the stuff that's said has proper warrent. Though, not to the extent lines are drawn at normal understanding. Pumas being livestock-killers by nature, tigers/big cats being vicous and kill-happy, junk of the like.

I dunno... I really think even large animals/mammals can be very difficult to interpret. Cat's are in some ways still largely unknown, simply because they have a different way of going about it. Some peg them as the height of calm and meditation, others as the height of emotion. It's even been said their facial expressions surpass a nice chunk of animals (I think even having more expressive muscles than humans?), each small change in whiskers and what not helping to convey a clear but often very subtle meaning. There's also the emotional side, value side, and all other types of things. People themselves have dramatically different views and methods of thought depending on the culture, many of which are extremely hard to grasp despite no species barrier to speak of, but animals can extend the gap even farther. We could easily read an emotion that's not there because we think in our own way, and miss the meaning they express that we don't logically equate because of the lack of their mindset.

-shrugs- There are many reasons floating around, sometimes admittedly flimsy, about why not to try to make pets of wild animals. But, suppose generally when someone makes a pet out of a fox or something, a lot of it is just the novelty of it. Some that might truly respect the creature, might simply want it to return to it's natural environment, thereby not submitting it to the process of it and its offspring becoming pets. I dunno. I think most people would take foxes and such as pets for the wrong reasons though, and/or not know enough about them to properly care for them.

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Neotheta In reply to Sapphfyr [2011-08-16 03:25:47 +0000 UTC]

*overloads of too much text*

So I shall reply to the last part XD
A lot of people raise their cats and dogs badly too, it happens no matter what. When kitties have cubs, the cubs are killed because nobody wants them.
In the wild the weakest cubs die quite quickly. But usually for example pet foxes are taken from fur companies, where they would live horrible life anyway and die as soon as they are adults.

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Sapphfyr In reply to Neotheta [2011-08-16 03:39:25 +0000 UTC]

Lol... Would you believe me and some other guy started getting into a conversation where each reply was like ~700(+) words? x-x At some point it just became too much of a hassle. (a particular 1198 word reply still rotting in my log being a testament to that...)

So summed up people are dumb and irresponsible. |3 Suppose it really doesn't matter the species, but what I'm getting at is that more exotic species would likely require greater care, research, and empathy, and individuals who would meet that would be more likely to let them live natural lives away from humans (if possible) out of respect for what they are.

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Neotheta In reply to Sapphfyr [2011-08-16 03:43:05 +0000 UTC]

all animals require a lot care but the current culture makes it harder to keep an exotic pet - the things outside raising up and treating the animal.

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Sapphfyr In reply to Neotheta [2011-08-16 03:48:57 +0000 UTC]

~But how to generally care for cats and dogs is more mainstreamed in terms of knowledge and access to proper junk they need. xD Going beyond the generally-accepted pet species thing would take extra attention and effort.
And I will happily agree to current culture being a poster-child of screwed up views (among other plaques of similar caliber). I have no clue to what extent they are wrong about exotic pets, but I do believe caution should be exercised until a solid understanding about them in terms of individual and genetic potential/behavior can be reached~

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Neotheta In reply to TarodZ [2011-08-15 23:58:08 +0000 UTC]

indeed, they get along.

Also I dont get why people are still raised to think that wild animals belong to wild - if they think like that, they should free their cats and dogs too, any animal that lives with another is still happy, it's not a special thing cat or dogs have, they were once only in wild too, they just become popular as being pets. ó_ó

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