[It’s native to the Middle East, Africa and parts of India/Pakistan. My guess is that it was poached from the wild as a baby; there’s a lot of illegal trade in exotic animals.
Then when it grows and people can’t handle it anymore, they release if.]
Many exotic pet owners don’t realize that domestic pets are different from wild animals in that the former went through many generations of selection. Some were bred and aggressive animals culled. Others persisted in human company because the ones who did not attack humans were fed, while the aggressive ones were either cast out or killed. Either way, this took generations. The century-long effort to domesticate the silver fox is a case in point.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox
[After over 40 generations of breeding, in short, Belyayev produced “a group of friendly, domesticated foxes who ‘displayed behavioral, physiological, and anatomical characteristics that were not found in the wild population, or were found in wild foxes but with much lower frequency….Many of the domesticated foxes had floppy ears, short or curly tails, extended reproductive seasons, changes in fur coloration, and changes in the shape of their skulls, jaws, and teeth. They also lost their ‘musky fox smell’.”[6] It was Belyayev’s view that these new attributes, which were extremely similar to the attributes of other domesticated animals, “was the result of selection for amenability to domestication.” His reasoning was that behavior is “regulated by a fine balance between neurotransmitters and hormones at the level of the whole organism ... . Because mammals from widely different taxonomic groups share similar regulatory mechanisms for hormones and neurochemistry, it is reasonable to believe that selecting them for similar behavior – tameness – should alter those mechanisms, and the developmental pathways they govern, in similar ways.”[2]]
After fluffy’s posts, I wonder if this was bred in the US or taken from the wild. It seems to me that if it was a ‘legal’ animal and simply escaped, the owner would want it back and speak up. If wild and become unmanageable, they may have just released it.