New "Dr K Exotic Vet" show

[sorraia]

This is the one thing I don't understand that well, maybe I shouldn't have skipped taking genetics. I'm not sure how much 'percentage of genetics' it takes for an animal to be considered a sub-species, species, ect. All I know is that any selectively bred animal that is more suitable for the human use and a genetic shift accounts for this change could be considered domesticated. I'm not sure if that should include color variations though. I don't considered ball python morphs domesticated. Thanks for the useful information about your livestock, I know very little about them and just recently learned about the rutting season thing from a story about a camel that killed its owner recently. Also I just learned that cows are de-horned to make them less dangerous on the Dr. Pol TV show. How far does that domestication definition go if animals are mutilated to be better suited for human use? I could de-claw and de-fang a tiger (cruel obviously) and that would make it a lot safer!

I don't think there's a specific percentage of genetic differences that's looked for, but rather a combination of what genetic differences, isolation, etc. Color morphs definitely are NOT a good measure of domestication. Morphs can occur in the wild too. There are always going to be "odd balls" that pop up now and again: leucistic, albino, pied, etc. I've seen some of those variations in birds too (when I was an assistant checking bird traps, I found a leucistic version of a bird that is normally black and brown for males or all brown for females, someone else found a pied version of that same species, and for the endangered bird I study I've seen ones with isolated white patches). Some species have more variations than others, and sometimes those variations are not even genetically determined (some red coloration in birds). Rosy boas are known to have MANY different locality morphs, and those are naturally occurring in the wild without artificial selection.

And mutilating animals to make them more manageable in captivity is definitely a good point. How domesticated is the animal really if it is going to try to kill you?