A serval is not domesticatable. They are real wild animals, and just like lions and tigers, while they can be very sociable when they are in the right mood, they can hurt you badly. I suspect there are things in the nature channel at least as inappropriate as this totally wild animal that is failing to hurt anyone this minute as it is in a house (I checked and there are zoo animals, and of all things, pigeons in the nature channel--this cat being on a bed is equivalent to a bear being on that bed). Not that I care about the channels you put this video in, but that it seems you are thinking that Serval is a pet. No matter what that woman thinks, it is not a pet. When I went to college there was a guy who brought his "pet" lion to class. Seriously. Equivalent situation.

Servals can behave well for short periods, and on the african continent, keeping an orphaned kitten serval was easy--for a while. A bit like how easy and cute baby racoons are in the US--until they get a bit older and gut your furniture for you. All of the smaller cats can interbreed with domestic cats, and the resulting hybrids have certain personality traits and instincts, and they vary with how sociable they are. Serval hybrids become "diluted" very quickly and are very sociable and box-trainable even at the earliest generation. Other felid hybrids come from Asian Leopard Cats, Margays Jungle Cats, Indian Desert Cats, Geoffroy's Cats, and European WIld cats. All those cats are wild, wild, wild. They can just breed with domestic cats (producing infertile males and fertile females) the same way wolves can breed with dogs.

I have cats that are part-serval, but they are not servals--not at all. My cats are very gentle and behave like domestic cats that got a bit of a brain transplant from a terrier (dog). If I were to have a serval, I would need a license, a cage, and all the other stuff you need for keeping a wild animal of any kind.

Don't let the cuteness of the serval fool you: it's a wild animal. Period.

Well, it depends on what you call a zoo or a refuge. I have family who lived in Africa for quite a while, in Kenya. In fact, the only Kenyans I have met would have said there are no wild animals in kenya at all--they are all in zoos--so your point holds, but still I think there are room for my points. My cousins knew many, many people who had what we think of as wild animals as ...well, not quite pets, but highly social neighbors. For instance, one friend had a lion who lived in the bush and roamed free, but who expected to come in at night and lie on the couch and watch TV with the old female human who left the door open for him. Africa is not North America, and a lot of things just don't fit our expectations. There are people living lifestyles that are not ancient and are not modern.

I didn't see any claim that would have been something to "fall for" in Tippi's story. Her association with the animals is no less interesting because she was not the first human to associate with them (especially elephants, which can be working animals). If we had some kid here who wandered through a wild animal park, it would be worth noting. People make movies about kids who do all sorts of interesting things: play piano early (yet ultimately no better as adults than people who learned much later), love garbage trucks, repair vacuums, and, of course, lived in odd places. It may not be to her credit, or even her parents' credit that she had an interesting early life, but that doesn't make the story about her disingenuous.

IMO.

Why are you leaving that? Planning a new channel?

Btw, I feel there's a bit of redundancy between pets and cute. I bet EVERY pets video is (can) be also labeled cute, and there are really a few videos that are cute and do not involve pets.