In my lifetime, I’ve seen African pygmy hedgehogs for sale as exotic pets.
I now see them bred in fancy color varieties.
We’ve bred so many interesting and often strange forms of domestic animals, but now we’re breeding hedgehogs like we do rats or sheep.
As a North American, hedgehogs are as exotic to me as kangaroos.
But people keep them as pets.
I don’t mind it at all.
Domestication goes on. Maybe we’ll have new varieties of fennec foxes.
Or kinkajous.
Our fascination with nature pushes us into these directions. Our love for novelty and oddity takes us down many rabbit holes.
But domestication requires refining the oddity, distilling it into a strain.
And that’s where this all ends up.
A Week Alone With Big Cats
-or-
How I Learned to Brave the Lazy Lion
and Live to Tell About It!: http://www.rexano.org//ResponsibleOwnership/Husbandry/Tim_Frame.htm
This article says that pumas may be the second cat species to end up domesticated, seeing as Near Eastern wildcats are the first to end up that way. The Puma clade of feline cats (cougars, jaguarundis, and cheetahs) has a reputation for being rather friendly rather than fierce.
Do kinkajous make good pets?
I’ve heard they make terrible pets, because as arboreal animals, they just let the urine and feces fly where ever they are. They also have been known to attack people at night, and they also can get the dangerous raccoon roundworm.