How do big animals such as Lion, Tiger, Bears, Elephants, etc be “friends” with humans.
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basically the same way pets become your friends. they need to be familiar with you and recognize you are not inherently a threat to them, they may be more comfortable with you approaching them. If they see you as a source that can provide them with food/shelter/needs, they may actively seek you out.
“Friends” is not a good word to use.
What we consider friendship is a very human idea. Even between people you know, they will have very different ideas of what it means to be a friend.
It’s the same thing with animals. We don’t know what’s really going on in their heads. Sure, most of them understand being social with another creature. Playing, grooming, resting and trusting it.
But ultimately that’s part of the animal’s psychology- or behaviour, if you don’t want to go so far and suggest they have a mind- that we shouldn’t be trying to map onto human behaviour.
Maybe they see us as sources of food. Weak creatures that are fun to play with. Members of their social group, whatever that means for their species.
But we can’t really tell what they really “think” of us. All we know is what we can observe. There’s always a chance that we got it wrong. It’s like how sometimes you thought you were friends with someone because of how they were treating you, but they saw it differently. That problem is even harder with animals.
If you’re curious, you should consider studying zoology.
Apex predators don’t pick on each other. Lions and elephants walk right past each other all the time in their shared African range. Animals don’t do stuff at random. Expending energy means they expect a return on their investment. Lions that attack elephants get stepped on and die, so that behavior doesn’t become super-popular.
Under some circumstances, people are seen as fellow predators, and not a cost-effective food source. Elephants like people because elephants love complicated stuff, and we make and carry lots of complicated stuff. Since we’re quite squishable, we’re not dangerous, why not be friends and see if we’ve got any of those oranges on us.
Bears eat berries, we’re not berries, so we’re not food. If we act dangerous, then we’d have to die but just attacking things that aren’t food is a waste of energy.
Wild animals don’t befriend us. They learn to tolerate us. They learn you’re not a threat. They learn you provide them with food, shelter, safety and so on.
That’s why you so often hear about accidents with animals that the owners or trainers had known for years. The thing about tolerance is that it can end real fast when you overstep it’s boundaries.
Normally, because they are raised from being babys by humans. The same way that some animals like chickens adopt other animals when their broody and are treated as real mother by the adopted baby. Or how Dogs and Cats are more likely to tolerate one another if raised together.
By growing up with the human, the animal loses it’s sense of seeing them as a threat. They might even consider the human family.
With wild animals however, this is still dangerous. While there are multiple stories of large animals like this living peacefully with humans, there are multiple more where the animals turned on the humans (although this is generally more common in cases where the animal was befriended in a way other than raising it.)
Furthermore you’ll simply here more about animals that befriend humans than the ones that don’t. If you are working at a zoo or wildlife reserve or something and know what you are doing and notice one of the animals being particularly friendly with you, you’d be more likely to try befriend it. If the animal shows no interest you aren’t going to try befriend it so there’s no news story there.
If you were to breed and raise several generations of an animal like a lion or bear by breeding the ones with friendly traits, you could even begin domesticating wild species to be almost always safe to be around in the same way we did dogs. (although when they did turn on their owners the results would likely be much more catastrophic.)
If its a social animal then what you describes as friend will be something like a packmate to the animal, and depending on the “culture” where it grew up (aka. the circumstances in which its neural network was trained) it will act differently.
If it was raised in a wild pack of wolves, then it will act like that, it will establish hierarchy, and act towards other according to what it was used to.
In such case its on you (as the more intelligent) to recognize this and act accordingly, or bear the consequences.
And of course even asocial animals are not complete idiots.
They are easily able to learn that you can do stuff for them that they like, be it giving them sustenance, nice treat, doing physical activity with them that they enjoy, or just scratch a bad itch in a spot they can’t reach, or that you are nice warm to cuddle up with.
Obviously its not in their interest to attck you – unless you do something that threatens or hurts them, but even then most often they will just mock attack, and signal to you to back off.
Stuff like a cobra biting without injecting any venom, a cat giving a slap without extending its claws – its basically saying “fuck off”.
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