Quote Originally Posted by Egapal View Post
You can not have it both ways. I don't know anything about canaries but you have to pick one. If the domestic canary is different than the wild ones then sure its domestic. How can they be a subspecies and be indistinguishable from a wild canary. Again how they look is not really the issue.
A hairless silver fawn dumbo rat is very easily distinguishable from a wild rat and nobody would ever assume that they are anything other than domesticated. An agouti show-bred rat, at first glimpse, looks indistinguishable from a wild rat - the bucket test, unless you're a rat fancier, wouldn't let you pick the wild one from the domestic one. The agouti rat can quite easily be the OFFSPRING of that hairless silver fawn dumbo (breed to a top-eared blue, mink, chocolate, black or agouti normal-coat)... both are still domesticated rats.

A green singer canary doesn't LOOK different to a wild canary - but the song is significantly different. Green singers are a variety of the domesticated subspecies that just happens to resemble the original wildtype in certain aspects (it hasn't been bred for colour or posture traits, ONLY for song.) I personally couldn't pick out a green singer domesticated bird from an aviary containing singers and wild Serins... but I bet someone who's a canary fancier could.

A Violet Pied English show budgie doesn't look that much like a wild Australian Undulated Grasskeet... but they're both Melopsittacus undulatus, and a captive-bred domesticated budgie that has come from an outcrossed line will be visually similar to the wild type.

This is one of the worst points I have seen made yet. I am pretty sure I would fail at getting hard numbers but generally speaking here is why snake steak sausages is complete irrelevent to the conversation. Almost everyone who keeps snakes feeds rodents with a hand full of fringe people trying to feed snake steak sausages. Almost everyone who keeps cats feeds kibble with only a small fringe group feeding live, f/t or pre-killed prey.
Actually, most people worldwide who keep cats probably have cats that live off of the mice and birds they kill... because the vast majority of "kept" cats are not cats confined to houses, they're barn and working cats or just plain cats that have access to the outdoors. My cats catch, kill and eat wild rats and mice (and my occasional escapees!), but they are also provided with kibble. Just because they always have a bowl of kibble available to them doesn't mean they don't want the biologically appropriate diet!

But the fact that some snakes DO take the artificial processed foods indicates that it's possible to feed them that way. Heck, I've got a baby albino royal who wouldn't eat on her own until I provided her with a strip of raw chicken thigh. After that she was quite happy to eat the mice and rats I WANTED her eating.

Are you seriously trying to say that feeding common mice or rats vs african rodents to BP's is analogous to feeding kibble vs prey to cats?
Yes, I am. It's an artificial diet based on its convenience to humans; if they required a strictly biologically appropriate diet they would be much harder to convert to domesticated easily obtainable defrosted rodent prey. Compare to something like a mock viper, which does NOT convert to readily available prey items, not even when several generations captive bred. They demand the species of geckos they eat in the wild.

The point is that you do not need to simulate a domestic animals natural diet. They are domestic. They eat what we have domesticated them to eat.
So feeding an obligate carnivore a diet based on grain makes it domesticated?

Just because a cat or dog can survive on a kibble made out of corn (and please keep in mind kibbled foods have only been around for the last century or so - the animals in question were domesticated thousands of years prior eating their own NATURAL diet... mice and birds for cats, carrion and scavenged table scraps as well as hunted prey for dogs) doesn't mean that they are adapted to eat it nor that it's good for them to eat it.

If a domesticated animal didn't need to be fed its natural diet, why can't people keep cats alive on a vegan diet, or feed dogs on, say, mashed potatoes? For that matter, why do rabbit keepers suggest you let your rabbit graze for its health, why are free-range chickens that eat seeds, bugs and plants healthier and tastier than battery farmed ones and why do dogs that get a raw-bones diet have fewer dental problems and less obesity than kibble-fed ones?

Conversely, my "wild" royal pythons will eat rodents that don't resemble anything they'd ever see in the wild (and the next time I see someone say "they eat gerbils" I am going to scream at my computer... no, they aren't making the thousands-of-miles trek to Mongolia to eat pet-trade gerbils!) that are fed on diets composed in part of *surprise surprise* kibbled pet food.

Convincing a snake to eat a rodent around 1% genetically different from the rodents it gets in nature does not constitute a breakthrough in domestication of snakes. A wild ball python would eat a common rat if one wondered by. In fact they do.
My captive-farmed adult male didn't recognise domesticated rats as prey. He was quite clearly hungry, but unless you offered him a Multimammate rat (which are genetically much further from domestic rats and mice than one percent - chimpanzees are as close to being humans as multis are to being rats) he would not take the prey. It took quite a bit of doing to convert him to the readily-available prey.

On the other hand, my captive-bred babies from Bob Clark were not interested in the multimammates at all - they wanted the rats they'd been raised on.

Wild ball pythons are reutinely fed common rats. Are you saying there is no wild ball python species? All ball pythons are domestic?
Nope, no more than I am saying that tigers are domesticated - just because it'll eat "artificial" food doesn't mean it IS domesticated (wild fox in my garden quite happily eats cat food; wild birds eat imported milletseed, and so on) any more than eating a biologically appropriate (if not geographically appropriate) diet makes them NOT domesticated. But I am saying that royal pythons have the POTENTIAL to be domesticated, they meet many of the criteria already, and with a few generations of captive breeding under their belts WITHOUT input from wild populations, we'll be well on our way to having domesticated Python regius familiaris.