[QUOTE=Ssthisto;983372]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.

I have no idea what your point is. I don't care what the animal looks like. Can't say it any other way. You are hammering one point to death and poorly at that. If an animal is altered from the wild type significantly than that fact could be used along with others as a case for being classified domestic. Ball pythons have not been signifigantly altered from the wild type and therefore I don't understand why you insist on making all of the irrelevant points above.


[QUOTE=Ssthisto;983372]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!

I personally do not believe that cats are truly domesticated for the above reasons. I really don't understand what point you are trying to make. If you could make a statement and then we could discuss that it would be great. My point has from the beginning been that snakes do not have a flexible diet. You claimed the fact that bp eat common mice and rats as an example they do, I disagreed, you brought up snake sausages, I disagreed with the whole idea that could refute my initial statement and now you are going on about what cats eat. Snakes do not have a flexible diet.

[QUOTE=Ssthisto;983372]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.

Snakes do not normally take artificial processed food. You can not use rare examples to make a point about the classification of a species. The fact that Ball Pythons are finicky eaters is alone proof they are not domestic. The whole point of the flexible diet is that in order to domesticate an animal its must be easy to feed. BPs are not easy to feed when compared to domestic animals.

[QUOTE=Ssthisto;983372]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.

Well I guess we will have to just disagree. In fact I disagree with your above comparison. BP eat rodents in the wild. Feeding them rodents in captivity is not an artificial diet. It is strictly biologically appropriate. I can not believe you are now comparing the differences between common rodents and african rodents to the differences between rodents and geckos. What makes your point so much more rediculious is that BP do not readily eat anything. They are notorious for not eating at the drop of a hat.


[QUOTE=Ssthisto;983372]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.

Again I do not concede cats to be domesticated and dogs will eat what humans eat. What they eat does not alone make them domestic. I never said it did. It is one trait among many.

[QUOTE=Ssthisto;983372]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?

All of this is irrelevant. What is best for the animal has virtually never been considered when it comes to domestication. Non of the above points have anything to do with BPs.

[QUOTE=Ssthisto;983372]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.

We disagree on the definition of "resemble" as well. Wow you are very serious about using the appropriet terms. Does it bother you that I call my snake a ball python and not a royal python.


[QUOTE=Ssthisto;983372]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.

Not sure what point you are advancing here. I love the point about humans and chimps because I bet we disagree here as well. Humans are basically chimpanzees. We are genetically very very similiar. I would argue that an animal that ate sole humans in the wild would not be considered domestic just because it could be coaxed into eating chimpanzees. All of the stuff you said above also great reasons why BPs are not domestic.

Quote Originally Posted by Ssthisto View Post
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.
Well you say a few I say hundreds, I am going to go ahead and say we agree on this point.