Canis lupus hominis

Posted in Marsupials | Tagged quolls | 12 Comments

12 Responses

1. on December 10, 2012 at 3:11 pm kittenz

   The answer to this is a qualified “Yes!”. The animals are small, cute, and relatively easy to keep. That makes for a potentially good pet. I don’t know of any marsupials that have actually been domesticated, but many species are kept as pets, with varying successes. Even thylacines were occasionally kept as pets & from most accounts were good ones. The domesticated (or at least, tamed) quolls could be a point of pride for Australians and possibly could even be a source from which animals could be “re-wilded” at some point. That is, if people don’t go hogwild with breeding for color morphs and extreme mutations.

   
   
2. on December 10, 2012 at 3:31 pm Russell Constable

   I had a few quolls that would come to our back door to drink milk and eat cat food. amazing agile critters capable of great violence for their size. I am often concerned that captive breeding reduces effort put into protecting animals in the wild where they belong and where they can function as an apex predator.

   
   
   • on December 10, 2012 at 3:57 pm retrieverman

     And that’s exactly what’s happening with tigers.

     
     
     • on December 10, 2012 at 4:28 pm massugu

       But if there isn’t an active effort at captive breeding do you think quolls will survive at all? We’ve lost he thylacine and Tasmanian Devils seem to be on their way out. Surely, mankind can be bothered to save just one species of marsupial predator.

       Whenever anyone says captive breeding I immediately think Whooping Cranes and California Condors, but tigers do indeed represent the negative side of this equation. Do you think tigers from captive populations could be reintroduced into their former habitats? Based on books/films such as Born Free, we know that lions can be rehabituated, and there are those folks in RSA who have established semi-wild colonies of tigers. I’m not sure if they’re pure subspecies, but surely in some future, hopefully saner time, cross-breds would be better than no tigers at all.

       
       
   • on December 10, 2012 at 4:02 pm retrieverman

     What species of quoll did you keep?

     
     
3. on December 10, 2012 at 5:37 pm Pai

   Would they make better pets than sugar gliders, then?

   
   
4. on December 11, 2012 at 1:52 pm kittenz

   Tigers could be successfully released into the wild, but not without intensive training and a sort of very large, confined “halfway house” facility where they could practice hunting and social skills without being poached or killed by wild tigers (tigers do socialize, although they live singly). The main reasons that this is not being done more is lack of funding and lack of protected territory into which to introduce the rewilded tigers.

   I don’t believe that captive breeding of tigers impacts funding for conservation, though. If – and it’s a BIG if – poaching could be curtailed and local people could be brought to value tigers the way that lions are valued in national parks in Africa, there are several parks from which tigers have been extirpated, where they could be reintroduced. But the available reserves are so fragmented and surrounded by such a huge human population that unless something positive is done soon, the only tigers will be those living in captivity. What a sad day that will be! Captive tigers would be better than no tigers at all, but still, a tragedy.

   I’ve never personally handled quolls, but most carnivorous animals are intelligent, and most of them also develop behaviors to diffuse aggressiveness in social encounters. Those two traits make it possible to keep many kinds of small carnivores (I’m using the term “carnivores” generically rather than taxonomically) as reasonably good pets. I’d like to see someone give it a go, on a trial basis. If it did not work out the animals could be released, or kept in zoos if release was not an option.

   
   
   • on December 12, 2012 at 5:36 pm massugu

     In at least one of the situations in RSA, the tigers hunt for themselves and live a more-or-less wild existence. (This despite the fact that the owner goes back and visits w/ the female tigers on a regular basis–but at leas they do their own hunting.) There was a reality TV series about it last year but I don’t recall what it was called.

     
     
5. on December 13, 2012 at 10:04 am Peggy Richter

   The main reason captive bred tigers aren’t considered for reintroduction into the wild is the “mixed blood” issue. Purists would rather the animals suffer from inbreeding rather than introduce any animal with “mixed” blood. Never mind that there are areas where tigers are extinct in the wild and where this wouldn’t be an issue. It’s not the “original” so it’s not supported.
   The fact that commercial/private breeding has resulted in more tigers in captivity than exist in the wild is not a “failure” other than it’s a failure to utilize the resource. It’s true that there are some “exotics” such as white tigers and other color morphs in captivity, but the vast majority are plain vanilla tigers that could certainly be reintroduced to the wild every bit as effectively as the CA condor or wolves have been.
   As for quolls, it’s my understanding that Taz devils are pretty much intractably aggressive towards people. Quolls are related, so it would depend on if they have a similar (if smaller scale) temperament. There’s always the odd individual animal owned by someone, but are any of the marsupials widespread as pets?
   Captive breeding isn’t the same thing as domestication. Plenty of animals have been captive bred in zoos and even reintroduced to the wild –http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabian_Oryx_Reintroduction

   
   
6. on December 13, 2012 at 4:04 pm massugu

   Peggy said: “Purists would rather the animals suffer from inbreeding rather than introduce any animal with “mixed” blood. Never mind that there are areas where tigers are extinct in the wild and where this wouldn’t be an issue. It’s not the “original” so it’s not supported.”

   I believe that that is the “cutting off your nose to spite your face” school of thought.

   
   
7. on December 14, 2012 at 10:38 am kittenz

   There are still plenty of “pure” Bengal, Amur, & Sumatran tigers in captivity, though. They are valuable as reservoirs of “pure” subspecies. Some subspecies of tigers are as distantly related to one another as they are to lions, and at some point they will likely be considered “species” rather than “subspecies” (much in the way that Neofelis diardi and Neofelis nebulosa are now considered separate species). So there is validity in maintaining pure lineages of various subspecies. However, there are enough :pure” animals in captivity of some subspecies of tigers that some could be spared for reintroduction into the wild, but to my knowledge, except for the one rather controversial gentleman in South Africa, there are no other “halfway house” training facilities, due to lack of funding and lack of space in most of the tigers’ original habitat in Asia.

   There used to be a captive breeding facility, I think in North Carolina, that deliberately bred different subspecies together as part of their own “species survival program”. I don’t recall the name of that facility offhand. They bred & kept several species of small cats, tigers, & some other carnivores. Their rational was that all the subspecies of a given species originated from a larger, “parent” group, which diverged into subspecies over time due to various isolating situations. They felt that by combining subspecies they were diminishing the inbreeding effects of fragmented habitat. There’s some validity to that approach, too … putting all the ingredients back into the soup, so to speak. To release such animals into the wild is currently considered unwise, but as numbers of “pure” subspecies dwindle, attitudes might change. Possibly the “hybrid” – or perhaps “mixed” is a better word – animals would have a better chance of adapting to various situations than animals of “pure” subspecies, due to their more varied genetic makeup. I don’t think that there have been any controlled studies that might shed light on that question, though.

   
   
8. on December 14, 2012 at 10:46 am kittenz

   As to whether quolls would be tractable enough to keep as pets, some people did successfully keep thylacines, to which quolls are also related, as pets. And small wild cats are notoriously intractable, but people do keep them, usually after taking them from the nest before their eyes open, and they do quite well as pets, more or less. We have even fully domesticated some of them. Then there are ferrets, genets, foxes, skunks, raccoons, not to mention several other small carnivorous species that people keep as pets. So quolls probably would be about the same. They’d have to be raised in captivity, aand maybe hand-raised for the first few generations, but they could probably be selected for tractability and at least semi-domesticated or tamed.

   
   

Comments are closed.