As I understand it, a significant reason why elephants (and probably others, but this is the one I'm sure about) are becoming fewer in number is because of the ivory-trade. Elephants are huge and I imagine take much more space than cows, but surely the profit would be worth this?
Posted Feb 4, 2013, 7:37 PM UTC
It's also the tameness and the survival chances of the animals. It'd take quite a bit of training to tame hippos like cows, and the transportation of the animals to farms would take quite a bit.
Another problem is the market. I mean, you don't go to your local supermarket or deli to buy some fresh cuts of wolf or snake when people could probably farm them (unless you live in areas where they do in small businesses and family owned stores), but they don't because the demand is so few, there isn't much to profit from.
I also recall the gestation period of some bigger foreign animals very, very long, so the chance of having enough to make business with (while them making some business of their own >;) ) would be a lot less. You see farms with many, many animals on them because they mate as fast as...well...farm animals. Meanwhile, when you go to the zoo, at most they'll have 8 or 9 of an animal and trying to breed them out of conservation efforts.
This also brings me to the fact that the amount of land needed would be very large to have many of them. You can't just put lions in an Alaskan nature reserve. There might be enough space, but the climate is very unacceptable for them and would hunt other animals on the reserve, disrupting their diet and could possibly endanger the preyed animals.
Another thing is safety. Notice how farms often have simple fences while zoos essentially make bunkers around the animals? We can't have herds of escaped elephants run free on the highway or have tigers escape from their farms and have them wander to a nearby public school. It, alongside all the other factors, would be highly controversial.
I hope you learned something, and if it was actually possible to do this, it'd actually be a pretty smart idea. I also hope I didn't include too little detail ;)
Zoos try this, but think of how few and far between zoo births are. Animals that are not domesticated don't do well in captivity, and the malaise slows breeding.
Keeping wild animals in captivity is costly, and a breeding group of them is even worse.
Aren't tigers sort of farmed? I remember you used to hear a lot about how white tigers are produced by tiger breeding operations that try to create the whites by inbreeding regular tigers in huge numbers.
I remember first reading about this in Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel. There are several things that are considered key to successfully domesticating an animal species:
Diet. It's best if they eat a food-source we don't utilize, or food lower on the food chain (such as plants). Food loses energy with each step (we can say 90% is 'lost' for the sake of simplicity). A plant will produce energy using solar energy. An animal that eats plants will harness about 10% of the energy that plant produces. An animal that eats animals will harness only about 1% of that energy from the plant. It isn't beneficial, in most cases, to raise carnivores.
Growth rate. We want a relatively quick turnover. This addresses elephants rather well. From wikipedia: "Gestation in elephants typically lasts around two years with interbirth intervals usually lasting four to five years."
Ability to breed in captivity. You mentioned pandas and rhinos in the title. I know those two, at least, are notoriously difficult to breed in captive conditions.
Attitude. You don't want things which are overly aggressive, or when they are aggressive, can be seriously dangerous. Elephants, tigers, rhinos etc. There are plenty of trained elephants, but they are still known to experience bouts of aggression. Wikipedia also mentions buffalo in regards to this requirement.
Tendency to panic. You don't want something flighty. This is one of the reasons often cited for the inability of people to successfully domesticate Zebra.
Social tendencies. You don't want loners or seriously territorial animals. It takes way too much space. You lose not only that space, but potential food sources (the grass in that space), when you have to seperate them by vast differences (rhinoceros are a good example of this).
Two things should be clear:
There's a difference between domestication and training. Individual animals can be trained to interact well with humans. Domestication happens at the population level.
This list is malleable and subject to a lot of forces. For example, dogs are carnivores, and are domesticated. There is a lot of research that's been going on for a long time concerning domestication of dogs. It's a very complex subject.
In short: Why do we only have a small number of domesticated animals? Because those animals have the traits that make them easier to control, and because the effort we put in yields significant enough reward.