"The moral is that you can tame wild ducks, but you can't wildify tamed ducks (that's why there isn't even such a word as wildify)."
Well, I don't know about ducks, but it's certainly possible to re-introduce animals that have been raised by humans into the wild, e.g. with hand-raised foxes. Moral of the story: don't make wild claims about things you don't know anything about if you want people to take your main point seriously.
1 (of animals and plants) existing in a wild or uncultivated state, esp. after being domestic or cultivated.
I don’t know of a verb form, but perhaps that reflects the fact that it doesn’t require human agency to occur; animals just go/become feral (and, as you say, humans can also take active steps to help reintroduce them to the wild).
Meh, I think the point still stands even if there are exceptions. And it certainly doesn’t invalidate the rest of the article. Perhaps the author should have written, “it’s much more difficult to wildify a tamed duck”. But it wouldn’t have made the article any better had they done so.
There actually is a word. It's "feral". Some animals have been engineered to the point of helplessness but not all of them. Feral pigs are actually very hardy and aggressive.
Well, I don't know about ducks, but it's certainly possible to re-introduce animals that have been raised by humans into the wild, e.g. with hand-raised foxes. Moral of the story: don't make wild claims about things you don't know anything about if you want people to take your main point seriously.