How Long Would Your Pet Survive in the Wild?

Your pet walks out the front door and doesn't come back. How long would it actually last out there? We ranked 8 of the most popular pets, from the budgie to the goldfish, against the same checkpoints: one hour, one day, one week, one year. Every verdict comes from real research: Florida's lost wild budgies, the 1930 hamster dig in Syria, a 5-year study of 364 street-dog puppies in India, road surveys in the Everglades, and the goldfish that survives winter by making alcohol. The rule that decides everything: the more we changed an animal, the faster the wild takes it back. Please never release a pet into the wild. If you can't keep it, find it a new home. Chapters: 0:00 The rule that decides everything 0:56 #8 Budgie 2:00 #7 Guinea pig 2:52 #6 Hamster 3:59 #5 Rabbit 4:50 #4 Dog 6:02 #3 Burmese python 6:51 #2 Cat 7:56 #1 Goldfish 9:08 The final ranking Sources: - Budgerigar, Florida Breeding Bird Atlas (University of South Florida): https://lib.usf.edu/breeding-bird-atlas/species-accounts/budgerigar/ - Pranty, B. Extirpation of the Budgerigar from Florida. - Domestication of the Syrian hamster (Aharoni, 1930): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication_of_the_Syrian_hamster - Gattermann, R. et al. (2008). Golden hamsters are nocturnal in captivity but diurnal in nature. Biology Letters. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2008.0066 - Lowe, S. et al. (2000). 100 of the World's Worst Invasive Alien Species. IUCN/SSC Invasive Species Specialist Group. - Gompper, M. E. (ed.) (2013). Free-Ranging Dogs and Wildlife Conservation. Oxford University Press. - Paul, M. et al. (2016). High early life mortality in free-ranging dogs is largely influenced by humans. Scientific Reports 6, 19641. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep19641 - Dorcas, M. E. et al. (2012). Severe mammal declines coincide with proliferation of invasive Burmese pythons in Everglades National Park. PNAS 109(7), 2418-2422. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1115226109 - Loss, S. R., Will, T. & Marra, P. P. (2013). The impact of free-ranging domestic cats on wildlife of the United States. Nature Communications 4, 1396. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms2380 - Doherty, T. S. et al. (2016). Invasive predators and global biodiversity loss. PNAS 113(40), 11261-11265. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1602480113 - Driscoll, C. A. et al. (2007). The Near Eastern origin of cat domestication. Science 317, 519-523. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1139518 - Montague, M. J. et al. (2014). Comparative analysis of the domestic cat genome reveals genetic signatures underlying feline biology and domestication. PNAS 111(48), 17230-17235. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1410083111 - Fagernes, C. E. et al. (2017). Extreme anoxia tolerance in crucian carp and goldfish through neofunctionalization of duplicated genes creating a new ethanol-producing pyruvate decarboxylase pathway. Scientific Reports 7, 7884. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-07385-3 #animals #pets #science