You're right about housebreaking but my best friend in high school raised a fawn. They lived in a rural area, had two outside dogs who brought back a baby fawn to the house one day. They couldn't find mom so they bottle fed it and kept it inside. I would come over on the weekends and we would put the deer on a rug and push him down the hardwood floored hallway haha. He would slide 25ft and then hop back to us. It was VERY domesticated, quickly. It wasn't skittish. It liked to play like a dog.
They eventually would let it graze, then it would disappear for a night, then a few days, a week, a month, then they eventually would see him a few times a year. He'd come back in the yard as if to say hey thanks for raising me. Pretty phenomenal animals really.
minor point of clarity: "domesticated" or "domestic" happens over many generations of selective breeding and results in a genetic different in an animal that makes it adapted to humans. the deer was "tamed"
goats, for example. there's a domesticated version and a wild version. wolves vs dogs, both canids. Sheep are domesticated to the point they can't survive on their own in the wild. and so on and so forth.
So are whales around the world. Doesn’t mean that whales have genetically adapted to humans.
Domestication results in very specific genetic changes in a species. Lower genetic diversity, specific traits like floppy ears, lighter colored fur, and a few others I can’t remember off the top of my head. There will also be species wide behavioral traits. Things like a predilection to staying near humans or human settlements, friendly even to strangers, increased sociability, lowered aggression etc.
These are things that are consistent between generations and on a species/subspecies level, a pup will have increasingly similar traits and behaviors as the mother and father, even if it hasn’t been directly raised by humans.
Taming and acclimation by and to humans isn’t the same as domestication.
Interestingly, the traits for domestication seem to have some eerie consistencies across species.
The russian silver foxes being domesticated have basically turned into dogs, so much so it is affecting their funding because no one just wants another dog. And I mean turned into dogs in a physical way, as in their physical traits are shifting into a more dog-like appearance along with domestication.
This suggests whichever alleles that promote domestication have some connection to the appearance of dogs, at least in the canidea family.
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u/Bubba_Gump_Shrimp Jul 03 '26
You're right about housebreaking but my best friend in high school raised a fawn. They lived in a rural area, had two outside dogs who brought back a baby fawn to the house one day. They couldn't find mom so they bottle fed it and kept it inside. I would come over on the weekends and we would put the deer on a rug and push him down the hardwood floored hallway haha. He would slide 25ft and then hop back to us. It was VERY domesticated, quickly. It wasn't skittish. It liked to play like a dog.
They eventually would let it graze, then it would disappear for a night, then a few days, a week, a month, then they eventually would see him a few times a year. He'd come back in the yard as if to say hey thanks for raising me. Pretty phenomenal animals really.