Take Down Rampaging Elephants with Automatic Entangling Leg-Cords, Star Wars Style

Hurry up and genetically engineer a miniature elephant that we can keep as pets already!!! It's the only chance they have to survive. If we are going to come even close to 50,000,000,000 by the end of the century then no land animals over 55 lbs are going to be wild. All will be in sanctuaries or extinct (zoo and house habitat only is technically extinct)
Long story short... Genetically engineer all the animals so then can live with us and not eat or step on us and at least they won't be completely gone :/

@A_Rock Really? Why do we get to play god (and by god I mean the intricate web of reactions that is responsible for life). The more we mess with nature the more we screw things up. Leave genetically engineered species out of the equation. There's no telling where things may end up.

i thank popsci for such good informations about innovative ideas.
i am going to write a blog about this on my 2 websites
www.areacellphone.com and www.gizbuy.com

thanks.

I want to know why we think it is a good idea to keep wild animals as pets.

because it's fun... and we can.

Yep, and that is exactly why things like this happen.

At one point dogs were wild animals. Take a good long look at cats, for the most part they still are wild. Wild animals are only 'wild animals' till we as a society decide to go and change our view of them. i don't hear people up in arms about how we have to let all the Pomeranians roam free when they go bite someone. Besides, take a look at the history of the elephant. they start rutting and become almost as violent as any predator.

A point about domestication:

Not all animals can be domesticated. As Jared Diamond elaborated in "Guns, Germs, and Steel" there seem to be a set of characteristics that an animal needs to have in order to be domesticated. I seem to recall that the natural social structure of the organism seemed to make a big impact. However, since elephants already have a complex social structure, they may be domesticated... in fact, aren't they considered to be semi-domesticated in some way, considering how they are used in some places for moving large objects?

Also, the Aurochs, despite their intimidating size and aggressive behaviors, were successfully domesticated to become the calm, complacent dairy cow that we all know and love. We can only guess what non-g.m. elephants have the potential to become if domesticated (We could try to plan for their development if we genetically modified them... but I think that artificial selection without genetic modification is a time-honored tradition)

Jared Diamond goes on to say domesticated animals require short life spans and pregnancy periods. Two things elephants dont have.

Also, the social structure of elephants may be to complicated for us to domesticate. Based on the fact that we cant control them all by simply controling the alpha male

nope! engineering is better ^.^

Remember here. The end result is everything dies. EVERYTHING EVER! Even if by some chance we find a way to extend our lives far beyond normal. Our sun will explode and the universe will run out of energy. Stop acting like we are supposed to keep everything all pristine. It won't matter in the end anyways. Lets just have fun with it. I want to make Momo from Avatar ^.^