Domesticated wild cats.?

Question

Can a SERVAL cat be domesticated? Just curious. I'm quite happy with the cat that I have now.

Answer 1

Do you mean a feral cat (wild)?

I wouldn't want to try it...

Answer 2

yes they can, and they make great pets :)

Answer 3

I'd say after a couple generations you could have tame ones. It only takes one generation to produce wild cats out of our pets, so it shouldn't take too many generations to get tame servals.

Answer 4

Here's the info that I got from the Honolulu Zoo:

Servals have shown up in the pet trade which is a bad idea. While cute, cuddly and still a novelty to the owner when they are young kittens, they become destructive, difficult to handle and potentially dangerous before they are full grown.  This leads to neglect, abandonment and sometimes death of the cat.  Keeping any wild animal as a pet is bad idea.

Answer 5

Hi there... in order for an exotic cat such as servals to become domesticated it would take thousands of years of selective breeding such as it did to have our domesticated house cats of today  You can read more about this under the heading "Domestication": http://www.baa.duke.edu/companat/BAA_289...

Excerpt taken from this article: The actual process of the domestication is not fully clear. Nor is it known exactly when cats were first domesticated. However, cats probably became domesticated because wild cats found a new niche created by humans, who attracted rodents to agricultural areas. The first evidence that we have of domestic cats is generally believed to be in the artwork from ancient Egypt, where it appears that cats were religiously revered. The oldest skeletal evidence that could be a domestic cat is a mandible from Cyprus, where wildcats are not known to have existed, dated to 8 thousand year ago (kya). This has been interpreted as evidence that humans transported them there.