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Comment by acquacow | Hacker News Reader

Been following this for a few years... more than tame foxes, they killed every fox that didn't carry the specific traits they wanted.

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Right, the process never really claimed to "tame" foxes. It is an experiment in selective breeding. Which as a goal aims to end up with domesticated foxes.

Selective breeding does mean that you take undesirables out of the gene pool, in this case, turning them into fur to be sold which further funds the experiment.

Maybe in 10 or 20 years when this is further along I would be interested in seeing how a Fox would do as a pet.

They make terrible pets because foxes mark their territory with a scent that is extremely pungent. You basically have to have enough land to keep them penned away from the home.

I'd assume that this would be considered in the selective breeding process.

Perhaps, but it wasn't mentioned in the article. I'd consider those kinds of secondary things that breeders would work for once the primary goal has been accomplished.

This project has been going on for decades. If smell is a serious issue with foxes, someone certainly brought that up and increasing the scope in this way is rather obvious. In fact it's not really increasing the scope much at all because if you're going for pets, clearly the smell issue needs to be solved.

The primary goal of showing that this can be done at all, apparently has also been accomplished apparently decades ago. I can't imagine that they're not already in the refinement stage.

They're already sold as pets. Reportedly they're pretty good pets if you don't mind the price tag.

I did see that part. However it's still being an 'early adopter'.

10 or 20 years later the risk you take has been dampened because people have had Fox pets for complete life-cycles which means more of the caveats of ownership are known. And the breeding location has had even more time to breed out undesirable behavior.

A win-win of sorts as a consumer. Of course with the caveat being that the place could go out of business because of a lack of buyers.

You did mention that they are Reportedly pretty good pets, do you have a source on that? I would enjoy reading more on the subject.

Youtube videos are a source.

One issue I have with them is how high pitched and loud they can be, despite being nice otherwise.

The breeding has been going on for 50-odd years.

It says so in the article.

>If the cubs continued to show aggressive or evasive responses, even after significant human contact, they were discarded from the population – meaning they were made into fur coats.

Culling non-desirable stock is an important tool in any breeding program. The essence of evolution is replacement, after all.

I suppose you could call it "unnatural selection", but it works on the same principles as Darwin's, only accelerated.

I believe "artificial selection" is the commonly accepted term.

Maybe he's a fan of The Far Side by Gary Larson?

https://www.amazon.com/Unnatural-Selections-Gary-Larson/dp/0...

And "breeding".

Controlled selection

I don't think humans are outside nature, it's a curious symbiotic relationship though.

That might be very true, but then the information content of the word 'natural' drops mostly to zero.

Since languages tend to drop words when that happens, we would need to find another word that conveys what natural means today -- at which point, why not just use the word as it is?

The word "natural" is a misnomer. For example you can buy "natural" fruit, despite the fact that a farmer planted and raised the plant, a chemist invented the chemicals used for pesticide, and a truck brought them to your farmers market. And of course all these things arose from natural systems being modified by us homo sapiens. Perhaps it's better to refer to things as person-made (or man-made if you must), to avoid the ambiguity of the word natural.

Given how deeply intertwined human society is with nature, any distinction between 'artificial' and 'natural' will always be somewhat arbitrary.

IMO, expecting precise definitions at this level is a lost cause.

That's how any economical selective-breeding programme is going to work. You gotta do something with the individuals not chosen to breed. Selling them for fur or food (or both), depending on what the market will bear is a rational solution.

The cruelty of this is mind boggling. The fact that they kept the animals in small cages for most of their lives, and expected tame behavior, is also shocking to me.

>The cruelty of this is mind boggling.

it still going on. Beside all these intelligent pigs and cows, just recently met a dog here in Palo Alto, a Beagle, who was rescued after doing time as a laboratory test subject - her vocal cords were removed so that her bark wouldn't inconvenience the lab employees, her health did took a hit from the lab time and diagnosing her issues and pains with her not being able to voice it makes it much harder. That deep sadness in her eyes...

While it doesn't make easy all that torture and suffering we, humans, imposed upon animals back then the reasons for what happened in the past are kind of understandable in the sense that we just didn't know it better. Today we do know, and thus there is absolutely no excuses, nor for animal testing, nor for pork&beef production (to start with), and the minuscule amount of money being invested in producing artificial meat is just a shame.

> we just didn't know it better

Well, when you struggle for survival daily, you have other things on you mind and priority list, I'd imagine.

It's been a long time since at least some people do not need to think about survival daily.

> and expected tame behavior

They didn't expect tame behavior -- the fact that they succeeded (and in just a few decades) was a surprise.

It should be noted that Lysenkoism was a Soviet state doctrine. In Belyaev's heyday, he had to dodge legitimate genetics research and make his work appear to be the study of animal psychology.

Seems he took idea of "survivorship bias" a bit literally.

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