The Geography of Pets

pets are pretty cool but also kind of weird if you think about it no other animal takes into their homes other animals just to sort of hang out with them that's just humans who do that and we've been doing it for quite some time too the earliest evidence of animals living besides humans dates back 33,000 years in the Altai mountains of Siberia here human remains were found alongside those of a carnivorous animal closely related to modern wolves as well as the modern domestic dog species Canis lupus familiaris this means pets have been around since before the invention of rope which came about only twenty eight thousand years ago before the first uses of pottery twenty-four thousand years ago and even predates the domestication of livestock with the earliest record of this being goats from around 12,000 years ago clearly the early relationship between humans and wolves was an important one has early tribes and packs hunted together for their mutual benefit as global temperatures dropped and food became difficult to come by it was likely through this relationship that many people groups managed to stay alive this relationship was evidently so important that domestication events happened several times essentially wherever humans crossed into the range of the Eurasian wolf so it's hard to pin down exactly where humans first did it that being said it took a very long time for this relationship to become regular enough for wolves to evolve into dogs as genetically modern dogs only began to show up around 15,000 years ago a full eighteen thousand years after humans were first known to have started living with Wolves the earliest fossils we have of genetically modern dogs comes from the city of Bonn in Germany suggesting Western Europe was the first place to fully domesticate them however there's evidence for at least one other completely separate domestication event taking place this time in eastern Asia then there's evidence that some of these eastern Asians migrated West and brought their dogs with them these Eastern dogs met with the Western ones and slowly replaced them within Western populations and now most of the dogs were familiar with show hardly any traces of DNA from those Western European dogs there's still some dispute over this however but either way the domestication of dogs was a revolutionary achievement and it was thousands of years before another was domesticated and a couple thousand additional years before the next animal we'd consider a pet joined us the earliest evidence we have of another pet being domesticated comes from the island of Cyprus here the remains of a cat were found close to a human grave dated back to 7,500 BCE however cats weren't native to the island of Cyprus plus they don't like water so it probably didn't swim there so it's believed that this cat must have been brought here by humans likely people from the Middle East this in conjunction with the fact that it was found beside a human grave has made many believe this to be the first example of a domesticated cat however the animal itself came from the wild species known as the African wild cat which inhabited a range centered within you guessed it Africa interestingly there is evidence for another later separate domestication event again coming from eastern Asia from around 5500 BCE this one involved with the leopard cat another wild feline but DNA analysis of modern cats have failed to find any traces of this species DNA suggesting that domesticated leopard cats were entirely replaced by the domesticated version of African Wildcats basically the reverse of what happened with dogs one thing you might notice when looking at an African Wildcat is just how similar they look to what we consider now as a domesticated cat and this is a good way to show there's not actually all that much genetic difference between our house cats and their wild ancestors this near-identical 'ti between wild and domestic species is most often explained by the idea that humans never actually purposefully domesticated cats but rather cats domesticated themselves as early human farms popped up through the Fertile Crescent the growing and storing of grains attracted large populations of mice rats and other pests this sort of created the ideal hunting grounds for cats and they formed a mutualistic relationship with us eating our pests without ever needing to actually interact with us so humans and cats just sort of learned to Co inhabit and tolerate each other instead of working together like with dogs after cats it wasn't until 5000 BCE another two thousand years before another pet joined us in our home though at the time this animal was actually domesticated as livestock to be eaten and that of course was the guinea pig despite its name the guinea pig doesn't actually come from Guinea but instead South America more specifically guinea pigs are the domesticated brethren of the montane guinea pig found throughout Peru and eastern Bolivia all the way to the northern tips of Chile and Argentina it was here that people use them basically as garbage bins feeding their food scraps to the creatures until they were big enough to be eaten as well they didn't really become pets until the Europeans arrived where they were brought back to become exotic household animals it's thought that their perception is foreign is what gave them the name guinea pig as the word was often used to describe general people places and things thought to be far away and very different from Europe after this the next pet we have evidence that we domesticated was the ferret these are the domesticated form of the European polecat which i think is a surprisingly good name for them if the name didn't give it away the wild European polecat came from Europe basically everywhere in Europe and it's believed that it was the Romans who first trained ferrets to sneak into rabbit holes and flush them out where another human would wait and catch them at this time these rabbits were used for their meat and fur but eventually became pets in their own right which means the rapids we keep as pets today also come from Europe out of the wild European rabbit big surprise there these are known to have had a smaller original range however having specifically come from the Iberian Peninsula throughout both Spain and Portugal spilling over a little into southern France another animal we first domesticated to do work for us was the pony now while the name Pony actually does come from the French word Pola net which is just an adolescent horse today the name Pony is attributed to an entirely different equestrian species one that does in fact stay smaller for their entire lifespan but honestly to me they look exactly the same and they even came from the same place as horses across the Pontic steppe throughout what is mostly today Russia and Ukraine okay so I haven't been going alphabetically and I stopped going chronologically and I can't think of a good transition to any other pets so let's just go with the next one on my list goldfish were another pet that actually started out as lives they originated as the Asian carp a freshwater fish found throughout the river systems of East Asia and it was here specifically in ancient China the people first began farming these carp to be eaten at this time the carp were just a silvery gray color and nothing really special to look at but after a while the fish farmers began to notice some of the carp would have a slightly yellowish orange coloration first recorded during the Jin dynasty by the time of the tang dynasty people were keeping these carp in ornamental ponds and water gardens and began to select for this goldish coloration by the Song Dynasty these colors had become perfected while the cheddar and pretzel colorations didn't arise until much later another pet fish that came out of East Asian fish farming were koi fish which are probably the fanciest fish to have where your standard koi can cost around $100 while show-quality koi which yes to exist and have price tags upwards of $10,000 but yeah koi actually got their start as a regular carp too and through the process of artificial selection became what we think of now and even their name koi which comes from Japanese is actually a translation of a Chinese word which translates back into English simply as carp another fish kept for its spectacular coloration is the betta fish but looking at their more common name Siamese fighting fish we can get a hint at where they're from Siam today called a Thailand specifically within the Chou Phraya River okay and there you go done with the fish portion of the video I'm sure there are plenty more fish that people own as pets but I'm really only trying to cover the big ones here and since I just did a bunch of fish let's do the opposite birds the most useful pet birds helped us again with hunting in a practice known as falconry which is 10,000 times cooler than owning any fish today the most common birds for falconry are ironically mostly Hawks like the red-tailed hawk and Harris's hawk the red-tailed Hawks native range covers a huge area spanning nearly all of North America except for the far north where it becomes too cold and the south is the Harris's hawk which starts in Mexico and moves throughout South America the most popular fountain for falconry is the peregrine falcon the coolest bird to ever exist and also the fastest animal on earth having been clocked in dive-bombing prey while going over 320 km/h this incredible means it's natural range spreads over well just about the whole world wherever there's enough prey to sustain a population however this map includes both where they live and where they'll fly to breed during different seasons and you might not find them in some of these places all year round after birds used for falconry the most common pet birds are parrots which have a massive range that looks like this parrots however include 393 different species so I'm only going to mention a few perhaps the most recognizable species of parrot is the blue and yellow macaw which have arranged throughout the Amazon rainforest in South America but when I was a kid my family owned a parakeet that we called budgie but upon doing research I found the most common species of parakeet are the Australian budgerigars which are also just called budgies for short so we basically named our bird after itself these are actually the third most popular pets in the world behind dogs and cats and if the name wasn't enough of a hint they originated across nearly all of Australia a very similar bird in the parrot family is the cockatiel which are about the same size but have far less impressive coloration unsurprisingly cockatiels grow over a very similar range over Australia lastly for birds we have the domestic pigeon which if you're unfamiliar can just be called sky rats for most of us these would probably be considered more of a pest than a pet but that's honestly going to be a lot of the animals from here on out plus in the past before phones and such pigeons were used as important methods of communication especially during times of war with some even becoming decorated with military medals the domestic pigeon is actually the oldest domesticated bird - with the pigeon getting mentions in Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets dating back 5000 years as well as Egyptian hieroglyphs of nearly the same age the domestic pigeon we all know love and try our best to avoid derived from the wild rock dove which looks admittedly cleaner and less like a rat than your standard pigeon being a cosmopolitan species capable of living nearly anywhere their original range was also pretty large reaching throughout the Mediterranean all the way to Central Asia and India but if since expanded onto every continent except Antarctica very similar to birds but not a bird our flying squirrels the most popular type of flying squirrels kept as pets are known as sugar gliders because they presumably tastes exactly like sugar and definitely not because they prefer eating sugary SAP and nectar these are also native to Australia as well as the surrounding islands where many different species of sugar gliders can be found besides sugar gliders if we keep looking at the category of small mammals we'll find that a lot of people really enjoy owning caged rodents in their homes the most popular of these besides the previously mentioned - guinea pigs are hamsters and while there are several different types of hamsters the most popular species to keep as pets are known as golden hamsters or also sometimes Syrian hamsters a lot of these animal names keep giving away the surprise but yeah these come from northern Syria and southern Turkey something I learned while researching this is that hamsters are very territorial and once old enough will fight and kill each other it kept together so think about that the next time you're in a pet store and see a bunch of them in a single cage they're all no less than a few weeks away from experiencing the hamster equivalent of the purge another Road and people like to keep in their homes are mice now I'm not going to show a map of where mice live because that really is basically everywhere but the first recorded example of people keeping mice as pets comes from China they're actually mentioned in the area the oldest surviving Chinese dictionary dating back all the way to 1100 BCE an animal many people think are also rodents but aren't are hedgehogs which I very nearly forgot to include on this list the most common type kept as pets originally came from the 4-toed hedgehog also called the African pygmy hedgehog which okay yes surprise surprise came from the narrow area between the Sahara and the tropics known as the Sahel region in Africa very similar to hedgehogs in an obvious way that anyone could see are elephants and while it might be a stretch to call them pets in some places in the world we do use them as pack animals and keep them well not inside our homes but around where we live maybe it would be better to call them livestock instead but then I forgot to put them in that video so I'm doing it here anyway while there are two main types of elephants the African and the Asian ones only the Asian elephant has really been used as a pet / livestock and the way to tell an African elephant apart from an Asian one is that an African elephant will typically speak Swahili while Asian elephants usually speak Hindi this is because while Asian elephants used to have a wide range from the Middle East all the way into Southeast Asia and even far into China it's modern range is much much smaller being found in the wild really only in India Southeast Asia and parts of Indonesia ok the last four pets I have can't really be considered domesticated in any practical sense and they're more like animals we trap and put in cages so that we can look at them occasionally first year will find tarantulas which unfortunately people do keep as pets now there are over 800 different species of these but perhaps the most popular one is called the Chilean rose these names really aren't helping this video be interesting as yeah the Chilean rose tarantula comes from the area shared between Chile Argentina and Bolivia the female tarantulas can actually live up to 20 years which means in most places you can start feeding it alcohol for the last few years of its life people also like to keep snakes inside their house and the most popular pet snake is the ball python which also happens to be the one my brother terrorized my mom with for a couple of years these got their start in tropical Africa spanning from the western coasts far into the interior but some people don't like the fact that snakes don't have any arms or legs and so for pets they usually get iguanas the most popular type for pets are called green iguanas which yes means they're native to Greenland oh but also have a more substantial native population across Central and South America ok but then some people don't like how fast and squishy iguanas are and these people will usually keep turtles as pets the most common types of turtles are red eared sliders which got their start throughout the middle of the United States and northern Mexico ironically because it's become the world's most popular turtle some inevitably get out into the wild where they have become an invasive species in many areas so much so in fact that the International Union for the Conservation of Nature or IUCN ranks these as one of the 100 most invasive animals on the planet which means I really chose a happy way to end this video didn't I hey so before I end though I know I really don't do sponsorships for videos but I just wanted to say if watching this made you feel like getting a pet ID seriously suggest adopting pets from a shelter instead of buying them there are some links to some websites in the description to help you get looking and not only could you find a best friend you could save a life just a suggestion other than that I hope you enjoyed I definitely missed some pets but I to cover at least the most popular from every major category let me know in the comments if you have a pet that I didn't mention though I'm curious if you did in fact enjoy this well it's actually part of a series where I look at the geography of things like fruit and livestock so you might want to check out this playlist next of course I'd like to thank all these patrons scrolling by on-screen for helping make this video possible as well as all the others I couldn't put up here if you want to get your name here check out my patreon and donate I'll be back soon with another video thanks

Channel: Atlas Pro

Views: 1,178,830

Rating: 4.9071412 out of 5

Keywords: education, geography, science, atlaspro, pets, pet, map, maps, dog, wolf, wolves, cat, cats, african, leopard, guinea, pig, ferret, kitten, puppy, goldfish, carp, koi, pony, elephant, falconry, peregrine, china, australia, parrot, snake, turtle, iguana, tarantula

Id: MqElRjVpoSQ

Length: 15min 58sec (958 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 21 2019