Alternate Domestic Animals

It isn't really ridable, as you can't put a saddle on it the way you can on a horse.

I admit that I personally know nothing on the subject but what I've read on the internet. But from what I read, they are ridden the same way as a horse, with a special saddle and reins. You can't use the same saddle on it as a horse, obviously.

The more I read about it, the more it seems that the Ostrich was a "missed domestication" by the ancients. It seems more broadly useful, faster and tougher. I am unsure of how well it could do as a draft animal, but lacking the breeding the horse had, there is no way to know.

I'm not so sure. Although its not a plant, mussel mollusks have some similar features. But in the region where I grew up, no one considered it edible until tourists from another region came around.

Given sufficient time, most edibles in an environment may be discovered. But that's not necessarily the case, particularly if there are cultural issues, environmental shifts, or even a sustained lack of need.

In my own area, people have fished with roughly the same methods for thousands of years. But the deep-sea fish that occasionally is caught are still considered "unfish" and not eaten despite being perfectly edible. If you can get past them looking like something from the depths of nightmare.

Which is peculiar. This is a people who made the most hideous concoctions in February, snowed in with all the appetizing bits already eaten off the animal. Lutefisk for example. What twisted and perverse imagination first thought of letting fish rot and jellify in lye, and then eat it!?

Lutefisk has been fisting our stomachs for a thousand years.

And if you will eat lutefisk, you should be up to snarfing down all sorts of boneless horrors of the abyss.

Perhaps the issue is that no-one would be fishing when those dishes were concoted out of a dizzying mix of starvation and perversity? You'd only catch unfish when you were flush with resources anyway?
 
I think that apart from limitations in diet, the real problems for Tapirs in Asia is that there were other big herbivores - water buffalo, horses, elephants, cattle who all delivered far more horsepower and had more catholic diets. Slow reproduction, slow maturation and other factors may have also been involved. I wouldn't say that the Tapir couldn't be domesticated. I think its more likely that the particular combination of factors that would have lead to a domesticated Tapir didn't fully come together.

Although the Asian tapirs were unlikely to have been domesticated at that time, the South American tapirs would have had a much better chance of domestication as in history, there was a major food shortage in Central America and South America, so if South American tapirs during that time were viewed as the next possible domestic candidate, then these tapirs would have had a chance of being domesticated and over time, could have been bred over time to breed faster than their wild counterparts, become more diurnal than wild tapirs, more tame, grass being more important to domestic tapir's diet, have slightly longer lifespan, slightly smaller (around pig/dog-sized), and other beneficial traits, to be kept as farm animals and possibly as pets. So yes, South America's domestication of tapirs could have domesticated.


Note: I know this thread is more than 8 years old, but I want this thread to continue.
 
Although the Asian tapirs were unlikely to have been domesticated at that time, the South American tapirs would have had a much better chance of domestication as in history, there was a major food shortage in Central America and South America, so if South American tapirs during that time were viewed as the next possible domestic candidate, then these tapirs would have had a chance of being domesticated and over time, could have been bred over time to breed faster than their wild counterparts, become more diurnal than wild tapirs, more tame, grass being more important to domestic tapir's diet, have slightly longer lifespan, slightly smaller (around pig/dog-sized), and other beneficial traits, to be kept as farm animals and possibly as pets. So yes, South America's domestication of tapirs could have domesticated.

Note: I know this thread is more than 8 years old, but I want this thread to continue.

There's no real utility to pets. We hear that a lot because we live in a rich society that can spend a lot of resources on pets and emotional feeding. But most of the animals that are regularly pets were domesticated for other purposes.

As for Tapirs as pets... unlikely. Cats shit and piss in a litterbox. Dogs also understand rules of defecation and urination. Tapirs and other herbivores tend to go where the urge takes them - and they go a lot! That makes them poor candidates as pets.

It's possible that Tapirs, given the right circumstances, might have been integrated into Mayan or Terra Preta or Central American agricultural complexes. It may have simply been a matter of luck or time. They wouldn't have been an easy or obvious domestication.

It doesn't look like Tapirs produce wool. But they might be decent milk animals. Hard to day.

Still, there'd be significant butterflies, assuming that there'd been domestication into meat/milk pack animals.

Looking further, they're not huge animals as far as size goes - 330 to 700 lbs. Say a domesticated version is about 80% that size, you're looking 260 to 550 lbs. Going by Gow, we can assume a reasonable pack/draft capacity would be 15%. Small animals can carry larger proportions of weight, but on the other hand, the Tapir's probably not that robust. Let's assume 15% to 20%. A Tapir's carrying capacity would be between 40 lbs for small specimens, to a maximum of 110 for larger animals. Not great, and I think inferior to Lllama.

But 110 lbs is better than nothing. An average human pack would be 30 to 50 lbs, so having a Tapir would definitely magnify a family's household transport capacity. These weights, of course can be significantly enhanced by travois or sled. Or, if you wanted to get creative, you could hitch the Tapir to a canoe and use it to facilitate water transport.
 
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