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submitted 11 months ago by ooli@lemmy.world to c/worldnews@lemmy.ml
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[-] Froyn@kbin.social 16 points 11 months ago

Himalayas makes me think cold. So maybe they freeze to death if you release them naked like that? If you keep them around until it regrows, well that's domestication.

[-] Decoy321@lemmy.world 5 points 11 months ago

The solution here would be to just domesticate them.

[-] FauxPseudo@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months ago

Shouldn't take more than a few thousand years

[-] Decoy321@lemmy.world 6 points 11 months ago

You can actually do it on a much shorter time scale, depending on the species in question. A Soviet scientist in the 50s started it with foxes and had noticeable results by the 4th generation, less than 2 decades later.

The real catch here is in the semantics, defining your terms and expectations. How much genetic drift you're aiming for, and what traits you select, what results are functionally "good enough", etc...

In this example, we probably don't need fully domesticated animals, some tamed generations should be good enough.

[-] FauxPseudo@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago

But foxes are canines and have a great record, thanks to those fox experiments, of being rapidly domesticated. But canines have lots of pups quickly. Sheep are so much slower on that front which dramatically increases the length between generations. Even "domestic" rams with thousands of years of breeding are still barely "tame".

this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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