Hoth's ecosystem

[RedImperator]

It could be that it is just a frozen body of water with no snow on it when the picture of the planet was taken.

A girdle of clear ice at least halfway around the equator of an Earth-sized planet? Bluntly, that's completely impossible. This:



is what sea ice looks like. Unless water is largely pure when it freezes, it turns white. No snow required. That blue band might be something besides open water--in another galaxy, you always have to at least acknowledge the possibility of the completely unknown--but it sure as hell isn't ice.

just so you know im taking Hans line in ESB very strongly here "There isnt enough life here to fit in a space cruiser".

A statement proven demonstrably false moments later, when Luke was nearly killed by the wampa. He's also stated it's impossible for the Empire to destroy Alderaan and there's no such thing as the Force, so he's been wrong--badly wrong--in the past. The statements of characters don't override on-screen evidence.

im not disproving you because as you know if its snow and ice that we know of snow and ice that means that Oxygen is very abundent so there has to be a some kinda greenery.

I don't quite follow you here. Are you saying snow and ice indicate the presence of atmospheric oxygen? They don't. There are entire moons in the outer solar system made of water ice with no atmospheres at all. Mars has water ice at the north pole and virtually no oxygen at all in the atmosphere. A high concentration of oxygen in favor of carbon dioxide could tip an Earthlike planet into a global ice age, but you don't need oxygen for snow and ice.

for me thermal heating is the only thing that is oxygen-up Hoth, something tells me Han sees life as TaunTauns and Wampas and not green fungus

Geothermal heat would not add oxygen to the atmosphere. Quite the opposite: vulcanism would release carbon dioxide, methane, hydrogen sulfied, and other poisonous gases. So far as we know, only photosynthesis produces sufficient quantities of atmospheric oxygen to support human life, and the same apparently goes in the Star Wars universe.

[Wyrm]

It doesn't know where the wampa is. If it just runs, there's a chance it'll run right towards the predator because it can't see it. Staying put is a risk, I'll concede - but so is running if the wampa is unaware of the tauntaun's presence and just happens to be passing by, or is trying to spook it into fleeing.

<snip bullshit>

I was not talking about when the tauntaun smelled the wampa, moron. I was talking about when the wampa popped up, roared, and knocked Luke off first, before going on to throttle the tauntaun. Between when the wampa popped up and roared --thus giving an approximate fix on where it was in relation to the tauntaun-- and then taking out the tauntaun, two seconds had passed, during which time he swatted Luke (thus making his predatory intentions quite clear) off the tauntaun.

Two seconds!

The tauntaun could hear the wampa off its side as soon as it attacked, felt its rider getting knocked off, and might have even seen motion in its peripheral vision. That adds up to an immediate threat, and a very good guess where the threat is coming from. Any hard-coded instincts worth its salt would kick in immediately, and with a two-second delay, would be perfectly adequate to take the tauntaun to relative safety.

If the predator pounces too early, the prey has time to react to the sudden movement and gets away. If it risks getting closer for a better shot, they prey might notice it and run away.

That's, uh... pretty much what the wampa did.

No. By all rights, the wampa should not have successfully ambushed the tauntaun. The wampa missed the tauntaun the first shot. It got Luke, but it missed the tauntaun. Read it again and remember it: The wampa's first attack missed the tauntaun! If the tauntaun was really a prey animal, it would at least try to run as soon as the wampa's attack began. That means if the predator misses his attack, the prey gets away! That the tauntaun didn't do this, even with two seconds to respond after the wampa broke cover to ambush, means that it's not equipped with a flight response like a prey animal.

If all prey species were unable to be startled from an immediate flight response, ambush predators would enjoy very little success as a hunting strategy. Luck - and as you noted above, honed stalking behaviours - and the fact that some prey can be panicked into a brief indecision make the difference. Wild animals can be shocked into inaction.

I have never seen this "shocked into inaction" phenomenon on the part of the prey animal. Admittedly, most of my experience of predator/prey interaction has been with blowfish specials, but the prey animal always at least tries to run. (Fuckssake, even flailing around seemingly uselessly is a more helpful adaptation than doing nothing; you might bop the predator on the nose and startle it away... which is a precursor to the "mean prey" strategy.) The operative word here is "try". An animal that tries to get away from a predator might actually succeed in doing so; one that doesn't is certainly doomed. Therefore, there's a clear evolutionary pressure for instincts to evolve in a prey animal to always try to evade capture. Such an instinct will not always succeed, which is why the predator can keep himself fed.

Prey animals are not humans, you know.

I don't know why you keep saying this; I have never said or intimated they are and have referred to other prey animals' behaviours rather than humans'. The only thing I can think of is that I maintain that it is possible for a wild animal to be shocked into a temporary inaction. This is not a trait endemic solely to humanity, nor domestic animals.

For a prey animal, to be shocked into inaction for this kind of stimulus is extremely maladaptive, and would be quickly bred out of a prey species and replaced by a simple, robust flight instict that responds to any sudden, close movement by running the other way and not asking questions.

And it's not like an roaring animal twice its size right on top of it, batting its mount off it might cause a brief What do I do! or similar effect (i.e. the force of the blow knocking Luke might have unbalanced it).

For real prey animals, no it doesn't. The flight response has only one purpose, to get the animal away from things that might eat it, and it has clear priority over all other behaviors. See, confusion about what to do is only a problem if your priorities aren't clear. A flight response activating has absolute priority in a prey animal, and so there's no confusion on the part of the prey animal of what action to take.

The point about Africa is that zebra, hippos, ect. have large predators after them. What is the wampa? A large predator! How do prey creatures evolve in response to large predators? By becomming skittish, or mean. If the tauntaun is really the prey creature of the wampa, then it will evolve to become skittish like the zebra, or mean like the rhino. What they will not be is easily trained.

I'm sorry - I was joking. Next time I'll remember to put an insipid smiley face in.

It's still a large leap from "Luke's tauntaun didn't act right" to "therefore every single Lucasfilm-approved source is wrong" - we're both discussing the behaviours of an individual animal's behaviour that doesn't even exist and applying it as a generality, then using that same generality as proof.

Fleeing from predators is something I expect prey animals to behave with reasonable consistency. That is, I expect a prey animal with a longtime history of predation to at least try to run from a pouncing predator. Therefore, I can say with confidence that wild tauntaun have no large natural predators, or they've been domesticated so long that their skittishness has been completely suppressed. If the EU claimed that wampas regularly prey on tauntauns, then Lucasfilm-approved or not, it is dead wrong.

The problem is not merely that Luke's tauntaun didn't "act right", it's that Luke's tauntaun acted totally wrong for an undomesticated, yet tamed animal. Also, I didn't say that the entire body supplementary sources can be dismissed if it gets one thing wrong, only that (in this case only) the supplementary material is contradicts what we see in a higher canon (the films) and can be dismissed on this matter... because that's canon policy.

(Besides, I don't know where you get this notion that "Lucasfilm-approved" means "correct". The WEG sourcebooks are "approved" if I recall, but they're low down on the canon totem pole. Lucasfilm-approved sources have been claiming an Executor length that was demonstratably inconsistent with the movies for YEARS. Approval by Lucasfilm, I think, is to protect the franchise, not say what is "correct". A Lucasfilm-approved source is only correct on a matter if it doesn't contradict a higher canon on that matter.)

And how would the Rebels know what kind of drugs to use to produce these specific effects in a few short months if Hoth has never seen human habitation before, idiot?

I don't know and can't say.

That part right there just flew right on by, didn't it?

No. But your unfunny and quite frankly braindead speculations were getting on my nerves.

Based on two animals, which, given that they were assigned to the officers held in high regard were likely to be the most well-trained of the bunch. Yes, that's a whiz-bang way to make an assessment for an entire species that we never see again.

You say that, because we only see two tauntauns, that the sample is too small for us to tell anything of consequence. Bullshit. This restricted sample actually does tell us a lot about tauntauns because we have a framework for understanding animal behavior in general, and setting that knowledge against what we know about the Rebels stay on Hoth. Our picture is far from perfect, but there are always a few things we can say.

The Rebels had only just set up a sensor net for detecting movement outside the base, the base commander comments on the meteorite activity as if it's a recent revelation, Han Solo is taking about bounties on his head as if he only dallied long enough to get the place set up, so the Rebels can't have been there more than a few months. Setting up the sensor net would be one of the top priorities in establishing a base.

If Hoth really has no permenant human settlement (as Piett's report seems to suggest), then the very notion that tuantuans are native to Hoth, a planet devoid of human forms, and yet are able to be easily tamed and used as mounts by humans, skullfucks everything we know about animal behavior. If tuantauns are wild animals, then they have to be raised from childhood to tollerate humans (it also requires tauntuans to have no natural predators), like elephants. Now, Hoth is not a place where food is abundant, especially for obvious endotherms like tauntauns, so at best a tauntaun takes a few years to grow to the size of Luke's, so the Rebels cannot have done this taming themselves. The conclusion is that Hoth has been inhabited long-term by some human society, a society that has stayed on Hoth long enough to learn how to tame tauntauns for use as mounts.

Furthermore, being a desert farmboy, I wouldn't place any money on Luke knowing anything more than the basics of tauntaun riding. If horseback riding is any indicator of how difficult it is to ride a tauntaun, then one of Luke or his mount has to know what he/she's doing. That implies that it is Luke's mount that knows what she's doing. Therefore, Luke's tauntaun was roughtly five to ten years old and has been ridden for most of her life. This, again, implies long-term habitation of Hoth by humans somewhere. If there's no such human habitation, then any animal native to Hoth the Rebels capture would be essentially untamable and useless as mounts, and therefore the tauntaun (being tame and useable as a mount) cannot be a Hoth native. (Of course, once you have human habitation on Hoth, why not go for the whole hog and do a proper domestication job on the tuantuan?)

You must either give up the notion that Hoth has no long-term human habitation, or that tauntauns are native to Hoth. You cannot have it both ways. I choose to give up the notion that tauntauns are native to Hoth, because at least the notion that Hoth has no long-term habitation is supported by Piett's statement.

[Bladed_Crescent]

The tauntaun could hear the wampa off its side as soon as it attacked, felt its rider getting knocked off, and might have even seen motion in its peripheral vision. That adds up to an immediate threat, and a very good guess where the threat is coming from. Any hard-coded instincts worth its salt would kick in immediately, and with a two-second delay, would be perfectly adequate to take the tauntaun to relative safety.

As you yourself said repeatedly, stupid animals get eaten. Well, this was apparently one of those stupid ones. See? Parsimony at work.

I have never seen this "shocked into inaction" phenomenon on the part of the prey animal. Admittedly, most of my experience of predator/prey interaction has been with blowfish specials, but the prey animal always at least tries to run.

Mammals are generally what I was referring to, I should have made clear from the get-go. Lower orders of species - such as your blowfish - are more likely to react as you predict, because their brains are more wired for automative instinctive behaviour than cognition/data processing, even to the extent that herd animals like deer, caribou, etc are.

This is not to say that higher animals can't or won't react instinctively, just that you will not always see the instant stimulus-response behaviour that you do in an animal with a simple brain.

So, sometimes they do freeze (again, we come back to the deer example). Even when it would mean that they'll end up dead, some animals will hesitate a moment, a second, an instant longer than they should. I've not claimed it's a consistent trait and I've agreed that it can be a (lethal) problem for the animal, but freezing up - or, as above, simple stupidity - is not proof positive of a "not born here" theory.

You say that, because we only see two tauntauns, that the sample is too small for us to tell anything of consequence. Bullshit. This restricted sample actually does tell us a lot about tauntauns because we have a framework for understanding animal behavior in general, and setting that knowledge against what we know about the Rebels stay on Hoth.

Two animals, out of a possible population of thousands is not a small sample? Huh.

Hypothetical: A colonial British expedition comes across an Indian maharajah who has just moved into a new territory along with his entourage, including two elephants. Oops, I guess elephants aren't a native population to India because they can't be domesticated that quickly. Never mind the fact that they could have been brought in from somewhere else, never mind that it's only two of them; making a species-wide generalization based on two trained animals is is A-OK, because we know how they should be acting!

But, anyways.

The Rebels had only just set up a sensor net for detecting movement outside the base, the base commander comments on the meteorite activity as if it's a recent revelation, Han Solo is taking about bounties on his head as if he only dallied long enough to get the place set up, so the Rebels can't have been there more than a few months. Setting up the sensor net would be one of the top priorities in establishing a base.

Here's a wild and wacky thought: the base had been set up earlier, but not to that scale. (Tales of the Empire features a short story wherein Rebels steal a power generator for the Hoth base and one of them mentions ongoing equpiment problems, so there was a Rebel presence on Hoth for a while).

The Rebellion has multiple bolt-holes across the galaxy; given this it's likely there was a small presence on Hoth before that cell/command structure moved in, even if only to keep out the smuggler and pirates that Ozzel referred to.

Here's some more facts for you: the Rebels had extensive fortifications and an elaborate underground base, including barracks, medical facilties and docking bays - all of which would have had to be carved out, supplied with power, etc etc. It would have taken a while to erect those, especially the installation of such large aboveground facilties as the Ion Cannon, the power generator, etc when their machines are having trouble working in the first place.

They'd been there for a while; maybe not in that number, but Echo Base wasn't something they whipped up on the fly and just moved into. If the base had been on the backburner for who-knows-how-long, it's not inconceivable that personnel there managed to acquire and train tauntauns. A base that they might one day use isn't going to have a lot of urgency in getting their equpiment up to spec, so that leaves them with finding other means of patrolling.

Also, I didn't say that the entire body supplementary sources can be dismissed if it gets one thing wrong, only that (in this case only) the supplementary material is contradicts what we see in a higher canon (the films) and can be dismissed on this matter... because that's canon policy.

What we see is what we get?

And the Empire only had a handful of Star Destroyers at its disposal because we never see more than that on-screen - supplementary sources that say otherwise are wrong, of course. We only see that many, so that many is what they have. Of course that's wrong - they had thousands, but we never see more in the films, just referred to in the supplementary material, so hey - guess the sources that say they do are wrong, right? I mean, the films are higher canon and the OT has only got a few dozen SDs in there.

Just like seeing two tauntauns and extrapolating their actions to an entire unseen species is equally as dubious.

And I never said Lucasfilm-approved always meant correct. I even provided an example of where it had been clearly wrong. I said, that it wasn't as definitive a boundary as such other things and that in light of evidence more overwhelming than two animals' behaviour, it was simpler to err on the side of the background material than saying "Nope - ain't right. Didn't run." and trying to contort a new theory that goes against everything but less than 30 seconds of screen time.

For example, the whole "Karen Traviss" debacle; it can be (and has) clearly stated that 3 million clones for the GAR is an incorrect number, by simple logisitcs. Saying that tauntauns can't be from Hoth because one of them should have run is more of a grey area.

Furthermore, being a desert farmboy, I wouldn't place any money on Luke knowing anything more than the basics of tauntaun riding.

As a child, Luke had a dewback mount. Granted, it's not the same, but he had some experience with riding animals.

I choose to give up the notion that tauntauns are native to Hoth, because at least the notion that Hoth has no long-term habitation is supported by Piett's statement.

That's your perogative, of course. I'm not trying to convert you, merely defending my own interpretation as you are doing with yours.

[Elfdart]

I was not talking about when the tauntaun smelled the wampa, moron. I was talking about when the wampa popped up, roared, and knocked Luke off first, before going on to throttle the tauntaun. Between when the wampa popped up and roared --thus giving an approximate fix on where it was in relation to the tauntaun-- and then taking out the tauntaun, two seconds had passed, during which time he swatted Luke (thus making his predatory intentions quite clear) off the tauntaun.

Two seconds!

Many animals freeze when a predator is nearby. Many don't bother to run when a predator has made a kill nearby and they just stand there. This is why you'll hear about a wolf or some other predator killing every sheep or cow in a corral. Weasels and Foxes do the same in chicken coups. Even fairly smart animals like wild pigs just freeze when they are themselves attacked. I've seen footage of a wild boar that could have easily run away as a crocodile approached, but just stood there and got eaten.

[LaCroix]

There is one mistake in the evaluation of the wampa incidence.

The tauntaun already knew where the wampa was.

If there is a scent in the air, the animal knows fairly exact where the attacker is. Its called wind direction. Thats hardwired into ANY prey animal.

And yes, two seconds would be more then enough for even a large mammal like a horse (trust me, calling a horse domesticated is a blatant lie, I work with them.. they are (same stands for rendeers, who were tamed a few thousand years earlier) merely tamed.

If you let horses loose, they will be quite able to survive on their own.
Not one of their instincts has been eradicated by now, they are still the frightened meatbags they KNOW the are. Ask a rider about what happens if a rabbit jumps up next to you...

That "freezing" occurs, but it is merely a thing with small (e.g hideable) animals. a rabbit can duck to the ground and hope he will not be seen, but a horse?

Sheep and cows are domesticated (truely) for a long time, they lost most of their instincts. also , they are very accustomed to dogs, since they see them often. Especially sheep are frightened by dogs, but not scared to death anymore, thats why you use herddogs. They would make no sense if the sheep would flee in panic at the pure sight of one.

The chickens problem is, it cant get away (fence) and they have rather shitty chances against the proverbial fox in the chicken stable. If there were no fence, you ould have only a few dead chicken, but the rest would be scattered into the proverbial woods.

[Elfdart]

If there is a scent in the air, the animal knows fairly exact where the attacker is. Its called wind direction. Thats hardwired into ANY prey animal.

Most intelligent predators know to be downwind when they stalk and attack.

That "freezing" occurs, but it is merely a thing with small (e.g hideable) animals. a rabbit can duck to the ground and hope he will not be seen, but a horse?

Wild boar are not small animals. Red deer have also been known to freeze, and numerous types of large and small antelope make little or no effort to run away when one of their number has been killed. You can see it in wildlife documentaries all the time. They just move a few steps away, probably because a carnivore usually starts to eat immediately after a kill, so they don't consider themselves in any danger. But sometimes predators will keep killing if there are animals nearby. The fence just makes it easier.

The chickens problem is, it cant get away (fence) and they have rather shitty chances against the proverbial fox in the chicken stable. If there were no fence, you ould have only a few dead chicken, but the rest would be scattered into the proverbial woods.

No, chickens are unbelievably stupid. They don't run away even after you've chopped the head off one in front of the others. Same goes for turkeys.

[LaCroix]

Most intelligent predators know to be downwind when they stalk and attack.

Actually, the tauntaun was aware of the wampas presence.

That means either

It saw him, that means it knew perfectly where he was.

It heard him, which would give also a very exact position. Most animals have exellent directional hearing, especially prey.

OR it smelled him, which would give at least a rough position, too - upwind.

Either way, the tauntaun was already aware of the rough position of the wampa, therefore, there would have been no question of where to flee, as it was mentioned before.

On the freezing, I stand corrected. We do not have that much larger game here, I only knew from rabbits and pheasants and something.
We don't have that many red deer, only (?)roe deer(? smaller deer, very common in europe), and they are running like mad everytime something happens.


On the chicken, I can't agree completely.

We have dozens of chicken on the stable, and every now and then, we have a dog in it, and have to rescue the chicken from the roofs around, so they do run. But once they are up there, they forget that the can fly enough to get up there and have to be rescued. So they are really stupid.
Maybe your usual chickenrace over there are even stupider or those on the stable are a somewhat brighter clan (not that a chickens brightness can be anything worth mentioning).[/quote]

[Elfdart]

I think prey animals freeze for several reasons:

1) They're stupid.

2) They are scared shitless and paralyzed by fear. It happens to humans, so why not other animals? That's the only explanation for why that wild pig didn't run from the crocodile.

3) They try to hide by holding pefectly still and trying to blend in.

4) When another animal nearby has been killed, they don't want to waste calories running away since the predator will be too busy eating to bother with them.

5) All of the above.

Luke's tauntaun had another problem: It was tame enough to let Luke calm her down when she sensed trouble. Maybe a wild, feral or unbroken tauntaun would have made a run for it. The animal also might not have wanted to abandon its master. Horses and mules often refused to leave their wounded or killed riders during battle.

[Wyrm]

As you yourself said repeatedly, stupid animals get eaten. Well, this was apparently one of those stupid ones. See? Parsimony at work.

Two seconds stupid. Of course I expect some variation in the species, but not that much -- not if they're regularly preyed on. Standards are high in the wild; a fraction of a second stupid is something I would believe in a creature that has any significant history of predation. The two seconds stupid creatures would've been eaten a long time ago. Being two seconds stupid here would suggest tauntauns do not regularly roam in wampa territory, or indeed, have had little evolutionarily recent predation. This has been my point all along.

I have never seen this "shocked into inaction" phenomenon on the part of the prey animal. Admittedly, most of my experience of predator/prey interaction has been with blowfish specials, but the prey animal always at least tries to run.

Mammals are generally what I was referring to, I should have made clear from the get-go. Lower orders of species - such as your blowfish - are more likely to react as you predict, because their brains are more wired for automative instinctive behaviour than cognition/data processing, even to the extent that herd animals like deer, caribou, etc are.

This is not to say that higher animals can't or won't react instinctively, just that you will not always see the instant stimulus-response behaviour that you do in an animal with a simple brain.

Er... By "blowfish special", I meant nature shows in general, not ones restricted to blowfish. Mea culpa.

Actually, I did have mammals firmly in mind when I wrote this, not just blowfish. You pretend that there do not exist mechanisms inside complicated brains for turning off behaviors that would conflict with other activating behaviors that are more important. There are.

So, sometimes they do freeze (again, we come back to the deer example).

Again, the blowfish specials... sorry, the nature documentaries I've seen and the horses I've ridden don't support that conclusion. And no, we don't come back to the deer example, because that's a different situation requiring a different response from both the predator and prey.

Even when it would mean that they'll end up dead, some animals will hesitate a moment, a second, an instant longer than they should. I've not claimed it's a consistent trait and I've agreed that it can be a (lethal) problem for the animal, but freezing up - or, as above, simple stupidity - is not proof positive of a "not born here" theory.

The only thing that the delay in the tauntaun's "two seconds stupid" shows directly is that they have no regular predators, which given wampas are native to the region Echo base was, indicates that tauntauns are either (a) domesticated, or (b) not native to this area of Hoth, somewhere lacking large predators like the wampa. (The (a) conclusion was surpressed in some of my more recent messages, because the argument was focused on whether the tauntaun actually does have the flight reaction.)

You say that, because we only see two tauntauns, that the sample is too small for us to tell anything of consequence. Bullshit. This restricted sample actually does tell us a lot about tauntauns because we have a framework for understanding animal behavior in general, and setting that knowledge against what we know about the Rebels stay on Hoth.

Two animals, out of a possible population of thousands is not a small sample? Huh.

Don't strawman me, fucktard. Of course two animals is a small sample. But even two specimens can tell you a lot.

Hypothetical: A colonial British expedition comes across an Indian maharajah who has just moved into a new territory along with his entourage, including two elephants. Oops, I guess elephants aren't a native population to India because they can't be domesticated that quickly.

Stop strawmanning, asshat. The hypothetical is not even remotely comparable. We know that Indians come from India, but the Rebels do not come from Hoth. Elephants used as war-mounts (or whatever) have to have been raised from childhood, which was not recent, therefore tame elephants imply elephant tamers that have been doing their thing to these elephants since childhood. Tame elephants do not specifically mean that elephants aren't native to anywhere.

Secondly, if you read carefully, that's not the conclusion I reached. The entire conclusion is either the tauntaun is not native to Hoth, or there is a human population on Hoth that tames tauntauns, and that's because tamed tauntauns imply tauntaun tamers existing somewhere.

Closer hypothetical: An American expedition comes across a Brittish expedition that, from all evidence, has only been here two weeks. These Brittish persons are riding elephants. The Americans come to the conclusion that either the elephant isn't native to India, or there is a native population of humans in India who tamed these elephants as mounts before the Brittish arrived.

Note that although the "elephant isn't native to India" part of the conclusion is wrong, the entire conclusion is right, because it is in logical disjoint with the part of the conclusion that is right.

The Rebels had only just set up a sensor net for detecting movement outside the base, the base commander comments on the meteorite activity as if it's a recent revelation, Han Solo is taking about bounties on his head as if he only dallied long enough to get the place set up, so the Rebels can't have been there more than a few months. Setting up the sensor net would be one of the top priorities in establishing a base.

Here's a wild and wacky thought: the base had been set up earlier, but not to that scale. (Tales of the Empire features a short story wherein Rebels steal a power generator for the Hoth base and one of them mentions ongoing equpiment problems, so there was a Rebel presence on Hoth for a while).

How long is "a while"? Months? Years? These tauntauns have to be somewhere on the order of a decade old (perhaps five, maybe seven, likely ten, ect.). That means if they were starting from baby tauntauns, already knowing how to tame a tauntaun, they would need at least that much lead time to tame a set of tauntauns as mounts. Of course, if Hoth has no prior human habitation, the Rebels would have to figure out how to tame these tauntauns from scratch. That means a couple of tauntaun generations of handling them and figuring out how to use them as mounts. Though they might get lucky and get it right first try, realistically it would take several tauntaun generations at least to get usable mounts. How long do you think that'll take? Twenty years? Thirty? The Rebellion plain isn't that old.

This isn't even touching on the can of worms opened if the tauntaun isn't merely tamed, but domesticated to some degree.

Here's some more facts for you: the Rebels had extensive fortifications and an elaborate underground base, including barracks, medical facilties and docking bays - all of which would have had to be carved out,

From ice. Remember the princess's chambers?

supplied with power,

From exposed cables running along the walls.

etc etc. It would have taken a while to erect those, especially the installation of such large aboveground facilties as the Ion Cannon, the power generator, etc when their machines are having trouble working in the first place.

The base itself is a really huge ice-cave with bells. We have exposed cables hanging off of ice-walls, VIP chambers that melt when you turn up the heat, and the only place in the base where people don't regularly wear winter coats is in the medical unit. Echo Base was built by a faction whose power is still impressive compared to ours, yet it was definitely a rush job.

Figuring out how to tame an animal that has never been tamed before is not easy, or quick.

They'd been there for a while; maybe not in that number, but Echo Base wasn't something they whipped up on the fly and just moved into. If the base had been on the backburner for who-knows-how-long, it's not inconceivable that personnel there managed to acquire and train tauntauns. A base that they might one day use isn't going to have a lot of urgency in getting their equpiment up to spec, so that leaves them with finding other means of patrolling.

Um, setting up sensors so that you can figure out if the enemy is about to appear on your doorstep and curbstomp your ass, I think, would be rather high up on the To-Do list when setting up a base. And like it or not, the base was still a rush job, no matter how you look at it.

And the Empire only had a handful of Star Destroyers at its disposal because we never see more than that on-screen - supplementary sources that say otherwise are wrong, of course.

Nice strawman, fuckstick. The supplementary sources can make the assertion that the Empire has a shitload of Star Destroyers and make it stick, because nothing in the movies contradicts that assertion. Yet, the same supplementary sources which make the assertion that the Executor is five miles long does NOT stick, because the movies consistently depict it to be nineteen miles long, thus directly contradicting that assertion.

Tauntauns, as depicted, are likely domesticated to some degree -- fully tamed, at the very least. This imposes some restrictions on their history on Hoth. Either there's a long-term, recent, and still existing human population on Hoth, or tauntauns were domesticated (tamed) elsewhere on a similar planet and imported. If the supplementary sources claim both that Hoth has had no recent human habitation and the tauntaun is native to Hoth, then at least one is wrong because the both of them together leads to a conclusion that contradicts a higher canon. Choose one to drop.

We only see that many, so that many is what they have. Of course that's wrong - they had thousands, but we never see more in the films, just referred to in the supplementary material, so hey - guess the sources that say they do are wrong, right? I mean, the films are higher canon and the OT has only got a few dozen SDs in there.

Need more straw, scarecrow? Of course there can be thousands of tauntauns in the Rebel's herd on Hoth, because the movies don't contradict such a notion even though only a few are shown.

Just like seeing two tauntauns and extrapolating their actions to an entire unseen species is equally as dubious.

Certain states of nature demand certain consistencies in the tauntaun. A long evolutionary history of predation is one of them, which (if they're not domesticated) demands them consistently having quick responses to predators jumping on them. A single tauntaun standing two seconds stupid does NOT support the supposition that they have a recent history of predation, and can only undermine it, even if it's the only example you see. I've explained this above.

I said, that it wasn't as definitive a boundary as such other things and that in light of evidence more overwhelming than two animals' behaviour, it was simpler to err on the side of the background material than saying "Nope - ain't right. Didn't run." and trying to contort a new theory that goes against everything but less than 30 seconds of screen time.

You can whine all you want. It doesn't counter the fact that what we do see on screen, the stronger canon, only undermines what the supplemental sources say about the wampas' supposed predation on tauntauns.

Saying that tauntauns can't be from Hoth because one of them should have run is more of a grey area.

That you've only left out just about my entire fucking argument behind me thinking that tauntauns aren't native to Hoth doesn't enter into it, does it, fucktard?

Here it is again, for the peanut gallery: The fact that Luke's tauntaun stands two seconds stupid when the wampa pops up and breaks cover cannot support the conclusion that the tauntaun is native to this area of Hoth, unless they are also domesticated. Indeed, that particular piece of evidence can only undermine the hypothesis that tauntauns are wild animals native to that region of Hoth, and given the close tollerances that animals with long histories of predation can be expected to have in this regard, this is strong evidence indeed. This means that they are either (a) domesticated, or (b) not from around these parts of Hoth, and possibly both.

The fact that the Rebels are using them as mounts indicates that the tauntauns are at least tamed. This implies tauntaun tamers. Did the Rebels themselves do the taming? Did they even have time to do the taming? Echo Base is only barely established at best, so a few months is likely, perhaps five years tops if we believe Tales of the Empire. Is this long enough to tame tauntauns completely from scratch? Realistically, no. They might get lucky first time, but realistically, we should expect three decades to learn how to tame tauntauns well enough to accept a mount, assuming a tauntaun maturation of five to ten years. If the tauntauns are native to Hoth, then someone other than the Rebels must have tamed them, or taught the Rebels to tame them assuming they had the time to tame one batch themselves. Therefore, tauntauns being native to Hoth implies there are native Hothian tauntaun tamers roaming the ice planet of Hoth, perhaps in the warmer climes.

Luke was able to an abort an attempt of his tauntaun to buck him off. The control of ingrained behaviors is a hallmark of domesticated animals. This implies a tauntaun domesticator, and proper domestication happens over an even longer period of time than figuring out how to tame animals. Again, this implies tauntaun tamers.

(Although horses are not completely domesticated, we know that domestic horses (Equus caballus) we ride nowadays are different from the wild horses in the past. The last remaining wild species, the Przewalski's Horse (Equus ferus przewalskii), is genetically distinct from the modern domestic horse and has never been trained the way modern horses are. Modern domestic horses have controlable instincts.)

The evidence so far points to tauntaun tamers, either on Hoth itself, or a planet similar to Hoth that is the tauntaun's actual planet of origin. If we believe Piett's report that the Hoth system is devoid of human life (especially if supplemental materials agree with that assessment), then that excludes the possibility that tauntaun tamers are Hothian. That leaves only the possiblity that tauntauns are not native to Hoth.

Furthermore, being a desert farmboy, I wouldn't place any money on Luke knowing anything more than the basics of tauntaun riding.

As a child, Luke had a dewback mount. Granted, it's not the same, but he had some experience with riding animals.

While some horse riding skills are transferable to camels, I don't pretend that I would be much of a camel rider without a fair amount of practice.

I choose to give up the notion that tauntauns are native to Hoth, because at least the notion that Hoth has no long-term habitation is supported by Piett's statement.

That's your perogative, of course. I'm not trying to convert you, merely defending my own interpretation as you are doing with yours.

Of course you are.

I think prey animals freeze for several reasons:

1) They're stupid.

Flies flee from sudden movement. I don't think stupidity is an obsticle here.

3) They try to hide by holding pefectly still and trying to blend in.

4) When another animal nearby has been killed, they don't want to waste calories running away since the predator will be too busy eating to bother with them.

Adaptations. We're not considering actual adaptive traits here. We're considering whether we've seen this reaction when it is maladaptive.

2) They are scared shitless and paralyzed by fear. It happens to humans, so why not other animals? That's the only explanation for why that wild pig didn't run from the crocodile.

Humans have such a wide rage of responses to fear, most of which would be maladaptive in the face of an actual predator, that our fear response has been unhooked from our flight behavior. Fortunately, our response to fear is trainable, so that a warrior can pick up a rock and throw it at predators.

Note that being paralyzed with fear, if it's to effect your items #3 or #4 below, is an adaptation.

As for the pig/croc case, your details are lacking.

Luke's tauntaun had another problem: It was tame enough to let Luke calm her down when she sensed trouble. Maybe a wild, feral or unbroken tauntaun would have made a run for it. The animal also might not have wanted to abandon its master. Horses and mules often refused to leave their wounded or killed riders during battle.

It does indicate that there has been some domestication on the part of the horse or mule.

[Elfdart]

I can't find the film of the crocodile killing the wild pig, but I remember the pig was standing next to a pond or stream where the croc was hiding. The crocodile lunged and missed. The pig didn't run away or fight. It just stood there, apparently in shock for a good 30 seconds. The narrator was just as puzzled as anyone watching. After the crocodile gathered itself for another lunge it attacked again, only this time it didn't miss.

I thought Han Solo rode his tauntaun to death, just as Rooster Cogburn rode the pony Little Blackie to death in True Grit. If the animal froze to death while Solo didn't, I'd say it wasn't adapted for the cold and is an import from elsewhere on Hoth or further abroad.

My theory:

Tauntauns come from a somewhat warmer region of the planet, where they were once domesticated and have since gone wild, like mustangs. Many years later, the Rebels tamed some for use in the glacial region where Echo Base was built. Wampas could either hunt for other animals in the glacial region, under pack ice (if there's any in the area) or could be recent arrivals from the warm regions who followed the scent of tauntauns. I saw a National Geographic special about bears, and their range of smell is over 300 times stronger than a bloodhound, which can pick up scents several miles away. The wampa seems very much like a polar bear, and may have simply followed the meat North.

[Ziggy Stardust]

The script for ESB reads as follows:

Luke clicks off his transmitter and reins back on his
nervous lizard. He pats the beast on the head to calm it.

LUKE: Hey, steady girl. What's the matter? You smell something?

Luke takes a small device from his belt and starts to
adjust it when suddenly a large shadow falls over him from
behind.

This brings up two questions, in my mind:

1) Is there any possibility that the tauntaun knew the wampa was nearby? Yes, we know it reared at its reigns and Luke asked if it smelled something, but, as others have explained, if a near-feral creature thinks a threat is nearby it runs. Is there any possibility that the tauntaun simply did not realize there was a predator nearby? Hell, all we have is Luke's word that it actually smelled something. Maybe it smelled another tauntaun, maybe it was complaining about the cold. Would this be a reasonable explanation? I haven't read the novelizations, and it's been a while since I've actually seen the movies, so maybe that is why I am looking at this differently.

2) The tauntaun is called a "nervous lizard." Is there any way for the tauntaun to even be vaguely reptilian? Not only does the tauntaun appear at least somewhat mammalian, but terrestrial reptiles can't survive in the type of environment Hoth offers.


EDIT: And as for the fact that the tauntaun didn't move for two seconds, that is hardly a cohesive argument. If the tauntaun knew of the wampa beforehand, and I am false with my hypothesis above, then I would concede that the tauntaun should have been running. But, as others have said, not all prey will be able to react to every predator. Saying otherwise is ridiculous. If prey had perfect reaction times and never succumbed to shock then ambush predators would go extinct. And animals do, indeed, succumb to shock. Have you ever handled wild animals? I can't say that I have any personal experience with a large mammal like a tauntaun, but I know that in my dealings with other species, you have to deal with them delicately, because shock can often be fatal.

I think the best hypothesis is simply that Luke's tauntaun was, for whatever reason, the slow one, and succumbed to shock when ambushed.

[Batman]

Ziggy, have you actually read the thread? All of it?

[Ziggy Stardust]

Yes, and so far as I can tell all that has been covered is that tauntauns are probably not native to the planet of Hoth, are at the very least not the particular area of Hoth that the Rebel base was located.

However, when I read through, I did not see anyone address the possibility of the tauntaun simply not knowing the wampa was there (everyone seems to have taken for granted that the tauntaun smelled the wampa beforehand, which is why I brought up the admittedly farfetched possibility that it didn't sense danger). But I must admit even I do not really beleive that particular argument, I simply put it out there for purposes of discussion.

As for the other part of my post, regarding the reaction-time, so far the argument has been that prey animals do not succumb to shock. As I said, I do not have experience with large mammals, but there are many other animals that do, indeed, get shock if given a big enough surprise. That's how many ambush predators hunt.

I do not see how my post was frivolous, as I did not simply rehash arguments that have already been refuted. If perhaps I missed a post in which they were, I apologize (I admit that some of the longer posts I only skimmed through instead of reading thoroughly).

[Batman]

Ziggy, one of the main points of contention between Wyrm and Bladed_Crescent (and Elfdart to an extent) was wether or not a prey animal would freeze, and if so would it do for that long.
As for the 'the Tauntaun didn't know the Wampa was there', what, pray tell, else was it nervous about? We know it was nervous, we know there was a Wampa out there, we know that Luke assumed it was nervous because it smelled something.
There's no reason to assume it was nervous about anything else.
I didn't mean to imply your post was frivolous, but those points HAVE been examined at length in this thread excepting the 'the Tauntaun didn't know the Wampa was there' one which fails parsimony. Evidence the Tauntaun was nervous, evidence the rider suspected it smelled something, evidence there was a Wampa. NO evidence of anything else that might have made the Tauntaun nervous.

[Cykeisme]

So it's pretty much established that Luke's tauntaun was not a wild or tamed (it had to be at least domesticated) member of a species that is naturally preyed upon by wampas, right?

What does that leave us with?
a) Tauntauns may be from another planet.
b) They're from another region of Hoth that has no (or few) wampas.
c) It's native to the region, but is genetically ill-equipped to survive.
d) The tauntaun we saw is native to the region, but is domesticated.
Did I miss anything?

Is it possible that there may have been a pre-existing smuggler base or some other small settlement that may have been present on Hoth for a significant period of time? This would be small and insignificant enough to account for Piett's report. Indeed, a smuggler base, by nature, would be secret.
Of course, even if smuggler's had domesticated tauntauns, you'd have to find a rationalization as to how the Rebels got hold of the process.
Still, this seems to be the only way that d) is possible.

[Wyrm]

I didn't mean to imply your post was frivolous, but those points HAVE been examined at length in this thread excepting the 'the Tauntaun didn't know the Wampa was there' one which fails parsimony. Evidence the Tauntaun was nervous, evidence the rider suspected it smelled something, evidence there was a Wampa. NO evidence of anything else that might have made the Tauntaun nervous.

Exactly. It's not 100% definite that the tauntaun smelled the wampa, but the proximity of the wampa in the area (which actually popped up and took a shot at the tauntaun) makes it a more likely source for the odor than, say, a pepperoni pizza.

I can't find the film of the crocodile killing the wild pig, but I remember the pig was standing next to a pond or stream where the croc was hiding. The crocodile lunged and missed. The pig didn't run away or fight. It just stood there, apparently in shock for a good 30 seconds. The narrator was just as puzzled as anyone watching. After the crocodile gathered itself for another lunge it attacked again, only this time it didn't miss.

Are you saying that the pig didn't seem to react at all? Or did it jump back a distance and tried to scrutinize the croc? I need a look at the film or a damn better description of what happens than you present here to be sure.

Remember, pigs have poor vision. After he jumps back (if he jumps back), the piggy still might not have really seen the croc and not really sure that he's in danger any more. In this case, he's still head and shoulders over the tauntaun's non-attempt to escape.

Tauntauns come from a somewhat warmer region of the planet, where they were once domesticated and have since gone wild, like mustangs. Many years later, the Rebels tamed some for use in the glacial region where Echo Base was built. Wampas could either hunt for other animals in the glacial region, under pack ice (if there's any in the area) or could be recent arrivals from the warm regions who followed the scent of tauntauns. I saw a National Geographic special about bears, and their range of smell is over 300 times stronger than a bloodhound, which can pick up scents several miles away. The wampa seems very much like a polar bear, and may have simply followed the meat North.

The problem is still that we have a certain lack of competent tauntaun trainers and riders. Unless Rebels found a record of "Tauntaun Husbandry for Total Dummies" at the nearest Imperial public library, they're still starting from scratch figuring out how to break tauntauns for use as mounts again. It takes about a year to train a horse so it can be ridden by an experienced rider, and I wouldn't trust a horse with under five years of experience to take an inexperienced rider. If the tauntauns have only now been brought out of being feral for the first time in thousands of years, then no one is an experienced rider.

So it's pretty much established that Luke's tauntaun was not a wild or tamed (it had to be at least domesticated) member of a species that is naturally preyed upon by wampas, right?

Basically right. If the tauntaun is not domesticated to some degree, then it's definitely not native to any region that has wampas (or other large predators), and in any case it shows signs of being domesticated.

What does that leave us with?
...
c) It's native to the region, but is genetically ill-equipped to survive.

Which would imply that the tauntaun's time in this region is evolutionarily recent, and doesn't count as "native" to these parts of Hoth in my book.

Is it possible that there may have been a pre-existing smuggler base or some other small settlement that may have been present on Hoth for a significant period of time? This would be small and insignificant enough to account for Piett's report. Indeed, a smuggler base, by nature, would be secret.
Of course, even if smuggler's had domesticated tauntauns, you'd have to find a rationalization as to how the Rebels got hold of the process.
Still, this seems to be the only way that d) is possible.

Domestication takes on the order of dozens, perhaps hundreds of generations of the target creature's breeding cycle. It's possible, due to how damn old SW things tend to be, however, I would think that any smuggling settlement that could domesticate the tauntaun would soon evolve beyond mere smuggling into a full-fledged functioning society.

Alternately, it could be that the long-term human habitation had just ended. The colony failed due to some freak circumstances and the settlement had to be abandoned. However, that would leave domesticated tauntaun herds on their own for a long period of time, during which the more experienced mounts would die off, the younger but less experienced mounts would gain no more experience, and the babies would not be broken or have any experience as a mount at all. You'd be basically starting from feral animals, unless the Rebels are extremely lucky to catch the settlement just after it had failed.

[Elfdart]

Are you saying that the pig didn't seem to react at all? Or did it jump back a distance and tried to scrutinize the croc? I need a look at the film or a damn better description of what happens than you present here to be sure.

The pig did nothing but squeal.

Remember, pigs have poor vision. After he jumps back (if he jumps back), the piggy still might not have really seen the croc and not really sure that he's in danger any more. In this case, he's still head and shoulders over the tauntaun's non-attempt to escape.

The crocodile only barely missed. There is an excellent book about the tigers in the deserted palace complex at Rathambore. Link

The area is cross-cut with rivers where crocodiles prey on wild boar and sambar, the Indian version of the red deer. It shows a photo sequence of a sambar being attacked and killed. The crocodile made a lunge, and only nicked the deer's ear. Then it circled around for several minutes before finally killing and eating the deer. What did the sambar do the whole time?

Nothing. It just stood in the water and made no effort to escape.

The problem is still that we have a certain lack of competent tauntaun trainers and riders.

Says who? Just because there's no outright mention of animal wranglers among the Rebels doesn't mean they don't exist.

Unless Rebels found a record of "Tauntaun Husbandry for Total Dummies" at the nearest Imperial public library, they're still starting from scratch figuring out how to break tauntauns for use as mounts again.

Who says tauntauns weren't tamed on Hoth or moved from Hoth and later tamed elsewhere? It's no different than the reintroduction of the horse to North America, where many went wild and a select few are tamed and ridden.

It takes about a year to train a horse so it can be ridden by an experienced rider, and I wouldn't trust a horse with under five years of experience to take an inexperienced rider. If the tauntauns have only now been brought out of being feral for the first time in thousands of years, then no one is an experienced rider.

Who says it's thousands of years?

[Wyrm]

Are you saying that the pig didn't seem to react at all? Or did it jump back a distance and tried to scrutinize the croc? I need a look at the film or a damn better description of what happens than you present here to be sure.

The pig did nothing but squeal.

Remember, pigs have poor vision. After he jumps back (if he jumps back), the piggy still might not have really seen the croc and not really sure that he's in danger any more. In this case, he's still head and shoulders over the tauntaun's non-attempt to escape.

The crocodile only barely missed. There is an excellent book about the tigers in the deserted palace complex at Rathambore. Link

I'm suspicious of your evidence already. Last time I checked, tigers weren't crocodiles. [/joke ]

The area is cross-cut with rivers where crocodiles prey on wild boar and sambar, the Indian version of the red deer. It shows a photo sequence of a sambar being attacked and killed. The crocodile made a lunge, and only nicked the deer's ear. Then it circled around for several minutes before finally killing and eating the deer. What did the sambar do the whole time?

Nothing. It just stood in the water and made no effort to escape.

So far, only the wild pig seems to show a clearly maladaptive response, by only squealing. Then again, this is eyewitness testimony. I sugggest you look for the film and put it up on YouTube or somewhere else if you can, so we can see for ourselves what the pig is actually doing.

Also, if a half-remembered film is bad, a half-remembered sequence of photos is worse. What's the source? And how do we know that the sambar tried to run once it thought it saw a chance to get away, only to be caught? The sambar being in water (rather than just near it) implies that the croc can be swimming around underwater, and thus partially concealed from the sambar's vision.

The problem is still that we have a certain lack of competent tauntaun trainers and riders.

Says who?

Says you, by implication.

Tauntauns come from a somewhat warmer region of the planet, where they were once domesticated and have since gone wild, like mustangs.

The implication is that the tauntaun tamers are dead, or otherwise no longer there, because why go to the wild tauntauns if you can get properly broken ones from the tauntaun wranglers?

Unless Rebels found a record of "Tauntaun Husbandry for Total Dummies" at the nearest Imperial public library, they're still starting from scratch figuring out how to break tauntauns for use as mounts again.

Who says tauntauns weren't tamed on Hoth or moved from Hoth and later tamed elsewhere? It's no different than the reintroduction of the horse to North America, where many went wild and a select few are tamed and ridden.

Domesitcation elsewhere makes it a different species. The ancestors of tauntauns may be native to Hoth, but that's a different thing from saying that tauntauns themselves are native to Hoth. What you're saying is like saying dingos are native to India (where their ancestors, the Indian Wolf, came from); dingos are from Australia (and SE Asia) and they drink Fosters, dammit. In this case, the argument's right back where it started.

If the tauntauns were domesticated on Hoth, and their domesitcators are still existant on Hoth, then this collapses into one of my previous hypotheses, which I've already covered. If the domesticators are dead, they are likely long dead, a hypothesis I've already covered.

(Also, as a side issue, the horse was never ridden in North America prior to its reintroduction by the Spanish, and the horses today are likely to be quite genetically distinct from the native horse population 10,000 years ago. The horse phenotype emerged in North America, but the modern horse proper originated in Central Asia where it was domesticated.)

It takes about a year to train a horse so it can be ridden by an experienced rider, and I wouldn't trust a horse with under five years of experience to take an inexperienced rider. If the tauntauns have only now been brought out of being feral for the first time in thousands of years, then no one is an experienced rider.

Who says it's thousands of years?

It makes little difference if it's twenty years or twenty thousand years since the Hothian tauntaun wranglers died off; the know-how is gone and there's no chance a broken tauntaun still exists.

It's far more likely that the native Hothian tauntaun taming tribes are thousands of years dead than even a few decades dead, given that a settlement-destroying disaster can occur at any time after settlement in a potential timeframe of tens of thousands of years humanity has been zipping around the SW galaxy... and it matters little whether it is a "few decades dead" or longer. If the settlement has been dead any longer than 15 years, we can't expect there to be any tauntaun that has had any riding experience still existing. That means starting from scratch and learning to tame these things.

Otherwise, the Rebels are DAMN lucky to catch them with their human handlers only a few years dead, in time to catch a few old trained tauntauns that are still alive, finding them among the unbroken new generation of tauntauns.

[Cykeisme]

What does that leave us with?
...
c) It's native to the region, but is genetically ill-equipped to survive.

Which would imply that the tauntaun's time in this region is evolutionarily recent, and doesn't count as "native" to these parts of Hoth in my book.

Oops, I dropped the ball there. My bad.

Domestication takes on the order of dozens, perhaps hundreds of generations of the target creature's breeding cycle. It's possible, due to how damn old SW things tend to be, however, I would think that any smuggling settlement that could domesticate the tauntaun would soon evolve beyond mere smuggling into a full-fledged functioning society.

Hrm, you're right. If the smugglers were there long enough to breed domesticated tauntauns, they would have had to been there pretty damn long.
I know I'm introducing extraneous terms in an effort to prop up an unlikely hypothesis again, but could there be some way that Star Wars people have of accelerating the domestication process? Perhaps tampering with genetics or using some sort of drugs? I understand that the biology of life from one planet would be very different from that from another planet, but maybe over the span of SW civilization they've discovered and developed some methods (that are now commonplace) for more quickly subjugating a diverse range of animals?

[Wyrm]

I know I'm introducing extraneous terms in an effort to prop up an unlikely hypothesis again, but could there be some way that Star Wars people have of accelerating the domestication process? Perhaps tampering with genetics or using some sort of drugs? I understand that the biology of life from one planet would be very different from that from another planet, but maybe over the span of SW civilization they've discovered and developed some methods (that are now commonplace) for more quickly subjugating a diverse range of animals?

I imagine that there may be some techniques to speed up domestication, but to speed up a process normally taking thousands of years to under five is still quite a trick. Five years, remember, is the optimistic estimate to bring up a single generation of tauntaun, and five years is the upper limit of the time Rebels have been on Hoth.

First off, drugs do not domesticate. Domestication actually makes genetic changes to the base creature, and without genetic changes, the offspring would be just as onery as the parents would be undrugged. Second, drugs right off the Rebels' shelf will likely be very nonspecific if it were to affect a creature never given serious biological study, and a dosage able to drug them into docility would probably do so at the expense of actual ridability. Third, a drug with enough specificity to make tauntauns ridable would have to work with the neurophysiology of the tauntaun. That requires actual study of the neurophysiology of the tauntaun, and the development of drugs with enough specificity to make tauntauns trainable without stoning them out of their tiny little minds. This takes time, on top of the time required to devolop training techniques to make a tauntaun usable as a mount, and time is something that the Rebels are very short on (at least, for what you're asking them to do).

That takes care of drugs. What about advanced genetic engineering? Well, it still takes something the Rebels clearly don't have a lot of: time. First, you have to study the neurophysiology of the base creatures, find all the genes that are responsible for making them untrainable, make the changes, then grow some genetically altered tauntauns and figure out whether your changes make a more ridable creature. I say "more ridable creature" because they will not come out of the growth tank ridable -- even the clonetroopers required a useful base soldier to work off of; you'll need to train the neo-tauntaun to take a mount. Of course, you need a trainable creature to develop the techniques you need to make them usable mounts. All this, again, takes time.

Even if the above methods are used to tame/domesticate tauntauns, the time it takes to develop both the domestication or the taming drug and the tauntaun training regimen requires there to be a preexisting and still-existing tribe of Hothian wrangers. If the drug method was used, then the Rebs would need a constant supply of tauntaun spice to keep their herd under control. Although a great racket, it still requires a group of people who make their living taming tauntauns.