jorb wrote:Wash your mouth with soap, young lad. And, no.

Wyrd to your mother.
Sorry i just had to.
Anyway yes people have tamed and kept as pets large cats, bears, chimps, etc, all kinds of stuff. Dunno where you got that from DatOneGuy. Unless you mean they're never fully tamed in which case, I hate to tell you, but neither is your dog

People love to make this huge distinction between wild and domestic animals but there's really not. Sure maybe dogs have gotten a bit more mellow over the years but that doesn't change the fact that you can do everything perfect raising on and still have it flip out and attack you or someone else due to some provocation which you are not capable of understanding because you're a human, not a dog. The reason people thing of dogs as "tame" is more to do with the fact that most of them really aren't a threat to people unless said people are scared of dogs and run away rather than just kicking it upside the head. They simply cannot hurt us, generally. Also it helps that they're pack animals, so they respond well to control as long as you continuously remind them that you're the pack leader and they're the follower (hence all the little rat dogs acting so terribly, their owners rarely discipline them so they think they're boss, whereas people are more conscious of the danger of a larger dog and so do more to correct bad behavior). But yes, large cats can be "tamed" as much as anything can be tamed, the consequences are just much much worse when they decide to test your dominance which they'll do much much more often because they're not built to be dominated over. Of course in the context of this game where you can come to be a veritable superman you could quite easily tame large beasts, all you've gotta do is knock 'em down whenever they rise up to test you.
If large cats and other "wild" beasts were allowed to be tamed then it should be something along the lines of taming other animals, but the tests never stop. That means from time to time your "pet" is going to attack you and its not going to be a pet any longer unless you manage to not only beat it (because you don't want it dead) but make it submit (quell). What this would translate to is you being incapable of owning a large animal that is more powerful than you, unless you've got some buddies to help you control it(or unless the whole idea in the first place was to simply get a bunch of non-despawning animals and releasing them in between your two wall layers for any friendly folks trying to break in

). The likelyhood of them turning on you should of course be greatly increased if you do not feed them properly.
For domestic type cats (which we domesticated from larger cats, probably the african wildcat... seriously how did you think we got domestic cats without taming and controlling wild cats for countless generations?) they could have many uses altho the most obvious one would only be possible if rats were made to have some detrimental effect. Or, quite possibly, they could have no BAD effects from rats but have the presence of a cat stop rat spawns within x tiles and give crops a boost similar to beehives within that same ammount of tiles. They could also add a small buff to healing whilst within this range (to represent the lack of rat-borne disease and parasites). Barring this they could be used to hunt small game such as rabbits and chickens in large number - you could have a "hunt" option on the cat where it will immediately take off at run speed for the nearest such small game and then kill the whole lot of them for you to go around and pickup. As is it is of course extremely easy to grab any rat or flock of chickens but it would be neat nonetheless. Pets of any sort could also of course add a boost to the happiness bar whenever that gets around to doing something. Also if poisons are ever added a small pet could be useful for testing food you find

Now dogs... dogs are where there are some real possibilities

Hopefully there will be no limit on numbers, so that even nobs can buy a pack of trained guard dogs with bricks and give their raiders a little something more to worry about (I'm basically saying they shouldn't be as strong as a person for the same amt of time invested into training them, but they should be quite effective even against higher level people in numbers, both for direct attack and for the strongest of players as a means of slowing them down or stopping them for you to shoot or flee while they deal with the pack of dogs that's encircling them). But thats kind of off topic.