LogFAQs > #897160007

Zeus posted...

I imagine over an exceptionally long span of time *most* intelligent animals can be domesticated to some degree, particularly in the case of mammals, provided that a culture is sufficiently motivated and possesses enough understanding to do so

Yes, but consider that, in any given culture, it's probably safe to assume that the easiest to domesticate species will be domesticated first, and then, once that species is fully domesticated and filling its given niche, the need to engage in more difficult domestication of similar species fades altogether.

Or to put it another way, once you've managed to domesticate horses as your primary transport species, there really isn't a need to try and start making "riding cheetahs" or "travel rhinos". Deviations (like camels or llamas) really only occur in places where the primary species either isn't suitable (camels), or isn't available (llamas).

So presumably any given niche would be filled by analogous species, especially in a fantasy setting.



Zeus posted...

after all, we've trained countless non-domesticated animals which shows at least *some* capacity for servitude.

To be fair, though, "trained" is not the same as "tamed", and neither is the same as "domesticated". There are actually more complicated mechanisms at play than simply just using operant conditioning to teach a squirrel to water ski or whathaveyou.



Zeus posted...

So you mean if it's like 75% a horse, you'd rather they just call it a horse?

To be fair, I've never had a problem with the human characters in Star Wars being referred to as human or looking human when it's literally impossible for them to actually BE humans either. Nor has it bothered me that every single Time Lord and 90% of the alien races The Doctor meets in his travels are blatantly "human".

I'm fine with the translation convention being applied in a way in which the "dominant" species that is going to serve as the race of the main protagonist is treated as "human" while deviations from that norm can be treated separately (so, for instance, Wookies and Twi'leks are presented as clearly unique races while Luke, Han, and Leia all look and act like a species they literally cannot be - and where the odds of them even having an identical phenotype to humans while not being human are almost infinitesimally small). In the same sense, I'm fine with calling "generic alien riding beast species" a "horse".

So as long as their version of a riding beast is at least mostly horselike (or as Tycho from Penny Arcade tends to refer to this sorts of things, "horse-adjacent"), or otherwise fulfills the purpose of a horse without having dramatic analogous organs that would come up in the narrative (like your "horse" also having scales, wings, and the ability to teleport, or being a giant oversized chicken), then I'd much rather they just refer to it as a horse and not a glerblespoot.

(So yes, I would say this is basically a horse: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-M8DDVuRe6BE/TxCnjDw9xqI/AAAAAAAAJZ4/Zf8JOgXe9r8/s1600/ookla.png )

But again, I also don't mind so much if a writer wants to go the route of having their animals referred to as "riding beasts" and "load beasts" or "herd beasts" to create a bit more of a "alien" feel to the setting, the way Anne McCaffery does in the Pern books (though in those books, those animals actually ARE Earth horses, oxen, and cows, just relocated to a distant planet, thousands of years in the future after the colonizers have forgotten that Earth ever existed).


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