flockdynamics:

lookatthisbabybird:

turings:

turings:

tameness and domestication are not synonymous. a feral cat is not a wild animal just as a tamed bear is not domesticated.

for the record:

• domesticated: an animal that has been bred from its wild species to a more domestic counterpart, generally for a specific purpose. greater production output (plants, sheep), work (horses, dogs), and showing/sport (chickens, canaries) are popular reasons for domestication, and animals are often domesticated for more than one purpose. 

• feral: an animal from a domesticated species, now living in the wild. cats (F. catus), horses (E. f. caballus), and pigeons (C. l. domestica) are some well known species that have established feral populations.

• wild: an animal that is not domesticated, and thus has not adapted to living a life in captivity or alongside humans like a domesticated animal has.

a wild animal can be tame (which is to say, they can be adjusted to human presence and interaction to various degrees) just as a domesticated animal can be feral, but the presence or absence of tameness does not imply anything other than that presence or absence of tameness.

For the people looking at this blog who think budgies are domesticated. They are tamed, at very best.

To be fair, budgies are definitely the closest to domestication of the species of parrots in captivity. They’re NOT yet, and I’m not saying they are, but we HAVE bred many of them to be different than their wild counterparts. Not all of them, of course–there are plenty that are still the wild type greens and yellows (but to be fair, there are also plenty of domestic pigeons that still look like wild rock pigeons). But there are TONS of different color and pattern mutations in budgies, English budgies are significantly bigger and stouter, with bigger foreheads (and in my experience are calmer than the smaller wild-types). They were bred for showing, which you’ll notice is one of the purposes of domestication listed above.

They also breed much more quickly and readily, and are easier to care for than other parrots, so they are more common and are bred more. And I believe the first breeding of budgies in captivity started in like the early 1800s. So while a lot of larger parrots are only a couple of generations removed from the wild, a lot of budgies (and to a slightly lesser extent, cockatiels, who are just behind budgies on this domestication train, having also changed in some significant ways from their wild counterparts), are literally a couple hundred years removed from the wild (and given that budgies reach sexual maturity at 6 months or so, there could easily have been multiple budgie generations within a year, making many of them potentially several hundred generations removed from the wild).

Just some fun domestication discourse for your Thursday night!