MexicanRedKnee
Arachnopeon
- Joined
- Jan 8, 2010
- Messages
- 11
Why would you need to kill the ferocious T's? Why not just give them away or sell them and breed your tamer ones? I would never want such T's though, I want my spiders to be as wild as possible and if someone were to produce an essentially domesticated T, I wouldn't want any. I'm sure many others would agree.No you're right. "training" would be the wrong word for the effects of selective breeding. "taming" would be a better word, and i don't think it really would even count for the sake of this thread. I was throwing that in there to re-emphasize the capacity a tarantula has for "getting used to us."
although, I must say.... if i had the money and the resources (and the ability to kill all of the ferocious Ts), selective breeding to see if you could actually alter the demeanor of a particular breed would be uber interesting!
ability to kill meaning.... i would feel guilty and cry myself to sleep every night.
Thanks for all the facts and opinions. Despite the efforts of some to turn this thread into another handling thread. Now for my opinions on what was said:
1. Basically I learned that T's have a very limited capacity to learn, and don't remember for long, makes sense.
2. Some people argued that a population of T's can be tamed, or essentially domesticated. That may or may not be true, I read of an experiment in Russia years ago where they took some wild foxes and in only a matter of 30 years or so basically domesticated them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox . I think that if you were to attempt the same experiment with T's, it would take much much longer if it was even possible. Not only because T's take longer to mature, but also because behavior in T's seems to be all hardwired in them. It's all instinct, unlike dogs where much of their behavior is learned. It would be like trying to breed the foxes so that the newborn pups wouldn't immediately suckle when they were born, which is instinct. That would take much longer or probably be impossible.
3. I don't believe that preparing and maintaining a burrow or altering their environment before molting is good proof of intelligence either, it seems like it's all predictable hardwired instinct to me. The spider is just acting upon its instinct.