Did you even read the article? The tigers were intentionally inbred to spread this mutation. There is no analog of this in humans; inbreeding is unnecessary and does no tiger a favor by continuing it.
They really could have picked a better title. White tigers, being a mutation, will continue to happen naturally even if not selected for. (Much less frequently of course)
According to the Nature of Things, one in every 100,000. Considering how few tigers there are on the planet (less than 50,000) the chances of one naturally occurring are extremely small.
Exactly. One has to realize what is being argued for, not going around the globe murdering white tigers, but to stop contiguously inbreeding them to maintain the strange white fur.
I'm not talking about the methodology; I'm talking about the results. The result of inbreeding is genetic insufficiency for survival - and there are a lot of human traits that have been preserved that are not fit for survival either. Yet, we don't forbid breeding for specific traits.
Generally humans and animals have different rights in terms of what they are allowed to decide wrt their breeding habits.
Additionally, humans FREQUENTLY choose to adopt rather than risk passing on a genetic abnormality to a biological child.
The only difference here is that we would be making the decision for the tigers since, as everyone would agree, they don't have the ability to understand the consequences and make the decision themselves.
As long as frequently is considerably less than 1% of all births in the US (and significantly less in other parts of the world).
1.5-2% of children are adopted in the US. About 50% of those children's parents adopted due to infertility, of which an even smaller fraction is voluntary infertility.
I wouldn't say that is something that humans due frequently, and is probably limited to a small set of cultures, and an even smaller subset of parents with both the knowledge and fortitude to make that decision.
I'm an adoptive parent and know several dozen other adoptive families. I have never personally met someone who chose to adopt to avoid the risk of passing on genetic abnormalities.
As an adoptive parent myself, I know several couples who chose to not pursue biological children because of genetic conditions.
Unfortunately, I also know some who chose to ignore the advice of their genetic counselor and now have 3 lovely, but severely mentally disabled children (Fragile X run amuck) who will never be able to live independently.
Hmm, some purebred dogs yes. They can have quite awful lives because of genetic diseases. But domestication, besides the fact it was done by our pre-human ancestors, is not the same. Modern thinking sees the domestication of dogs more as a co-evolution of humans and dogs.
Dogs can function quite well in their natural environment (in close proximity to humans); white Bengal tigers will die very, very quickly in the wild. The mutation is non-adaptive.
You mean like cats? (That's not a rhetorical question, by the way. When you domesticate tigers, would they be very different from what we now consider a cat?)
That's sort of the process we had to get the bengal (hybrid asian leopard cat and housecat), which is considered a domestic cat after 4 generations.
Same thing has been done with servals ("savannah cat"); I can only imagine how awesome/terrifying it would be with other lesser wild cats, although I think there are enough differences between the great cats and domestic cats to make it difficult/impossible to do naturally (tiger/cat or leopard/cat cross).
Didn't Siegfried and Roy hack the maternal instinct of female cats to achieve some semblance of domestication? I mean, it didn't work out very well of course, because a cat mauled Roy and nearly killed him by grabbing him by the neck (to drag him to safety, according to them) like she would a cub.
So, I think there is a hook. It's just a really shitty one. Note that the hook for dogs can backfire as well, if they try to assert pack dominance vs. their owner. So we breed really submissive dogs.
Tigers and especially lions are somewhat easy, not to domesticate per se but to befriend. I wouldn't really call this a hack the way domesticating dogs was a hack--they just seem willing to occasionally befriend humans the same way ordinary cats do.
Tigers and lions are very confident apex predators, so they don't really have the vicious instinct or the intense fear response that some animals have. So they don't deliberately attack humans. By contrast, leopards and jaguars will kill you out of sheer viciousness, bears will attack you if they feel threatened, and polar bears will attack you because they are hungry and you are made of meat.
The main danger with tigers and lions is that they don't really understand how fragile humans are, so they might accidentally kill or maim you, which happened to Roy.
