• samus12345@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Possibly not. Unlike the housecat, lions aren’t domesticated. If you took a housecat who already knew and liked you and made it lion-sized, you might be okay…depending on the cat and whether you kept them well-fed.

    If your cat likes roughhousing with you, though, yeah, you might be in trouble.

    • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Case in point:

      https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oEEY_c9KunA

      They do hurt him, but it’s more of a case of being too enthusiastic about greeting and playing with him than wanting to cause him harm because they are wild animals.

      The wild animal part means they are unpredictable, not automatically homicidal. All of our domesticated animals descend from wild animals, so at one point they would have been relationships between humans and wild animals. There might have been different levels of bonding as they were bred for sociability, but given the guy in the video’s bond with lions and knowing that he is far from unique in that with big cats, I’d say there were probably some humans early on that befriended wolves or wild cats with strong bonds.

      And there were also likely many that were killed by wild animals they had bonded with or were trying to. And that might still be the future fate of that guy in the video and it might even be over before he realizes it’s any different.