How different is a domesticated animal from a non domesticated animal of the same species?

Question

say a domesticated hamster and a non domesticated hamster whats the difference

Answer 1

Like was mentioned domestication is a process, where we take an animal for a specific characteristic and breed it for a purpose. For instance some breeds of chickens are bred because they are good egg layers other produce better meat.

Domestication takes several generations, and eventually the animal breed or species becomes dependant upon us for its way of life. Keep in mind that a domestic animals is different than a tame animal. Some one may claim to tame a lion, but it is far from being a domestic cat.

Answer 2

I don't know about hamsters, but I know about rats and mice.
The pet store mouse is mus musculus, the house mouse. If you catch a house mouse you can mate it with a pet store mouse and produce babies. But they are different in a lot of ways. First, the pet mouse is larger. Freed from the struggle to survive, its size is less critical, and people like their mice a little bigger. Second, the wild mouse has survival instincts that have practically disappeared in pet mice. Wild mice startle easily, run from the approach of a larger animal, and will bite if captured. They have to be like this to survive. They can also be aggressive and territorial with each other, though they are also sociable and share nests. Pet mice have almost no instinctive fear. Only if they learn by experience that something can hurt them, are they afraid. This makes them much easier to handle.
Similarly, the pet store rat is rattus norvegicus, the same as the common brown rat. They, too, are often a little bigger than the wild rat, lack instinctive fear, and are very docile.
Of course the domesticated animals are bred in a variety of colors.
Once I bought a mouse that was being bullied by her cage mates, and had a lot of bite marks. I put her in a cage full of harvest mice (even smaller than house mice, and kind of aggressive with each other). Although she was a docile mouse, these wild rodents never thought of attacking her because she was so much bigger. She was like the friendly giant, she would groom them and wash their faces. She seemed very content with them.

Answer 3

Nearly all animals know the difference between right and wrong, and have a sense of fairness to one degree or another. Dolphins can communicate with a language and even have names for one another. Any animal that experiments with using a tool for opening something is effectively a scientist, albeit a very basic one compared to the 100's of thousands of years of refinement that humans have done on how to perform an experiment. As for whether other animals worship any form of gods. We don't know enough about them to really know the answer there. Dolphins can understand us but we can't really understand them. We've learned that they talk, we've learned that they have unique vocal arrangements for each other (names) and we've learned that they have syntax. We still have no real clue what they're saying. Which makes them understanding us rather ironic considering their speech sounds a little like laughter to us.

Answer 4

It's hard to generalise but the domestication process usually involves making them more docile and adaptable to different climates and daylengths, and of course making them more productive.
Example: the wild cow, or Auroch, if it hadn't been made extinct would be much more aggressive and much harder to breed in different climates. The quality of the beef would differ, and they would take longer to fatten. They would also make a lot less milk. The adult bull was also a lot larger, with bigger, more dangerous horns.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs