Animal Domestication: Taming the Wild | Hacker News Reader

Animal Domestication: Taming the Wild

ngm.nationalgeographic.com

75 pointsdavid_west36 comments

I got a tour of this place a few years ago when I was in Novosibirsk for a genomics conference. I'll see if I can dig up the pictures and videos, but a few observations.

1. The different body characteristics (fur coat, ribs, ears, etc) do make the tame foxes look like dogs, more than a wild animal. It's fascinating why those two things co-evolve.

2. The tame foxes (and especially minxes) seemed more mentally challenged than tame. For example, the tame minxes and foxes would just sit around and purr/drool, and that's pretty much all they did.

3. The untamed ones looked very unhappy in their cages.

4. When I was there, they had already begun selling the foxes to rich westerners. I think the going rate was a few thousand dollars per fox.

I think your points get at Belyaev's original intentions for the experiments. His papers are not so much "wouldn't it be cool if we could domesticate foxes in just a few generations", but speak much more to the fact that, as you select for behavioral traits, physical traits are sort of unintentionally selected. The interesting thing about it (though I don't think Belyaev said this) is that the domesticated physical traits tend to be "cute" by our standards. For example, the domesticated foxes have proportionally wider skulls, which I can't help but read and think about this: http://www.exploratorium.edu/mind/judgment/cuteify/v1/

Well, our definition of "cute" stems from thousands of years of answering the question "will this animal kill me". Those who successfully answered that could procreate, the others not so much.

I'd say it's more likely that our definition of "cute" stems from the question "is this a human baby".

And what if I don't find other human babies cute? But still find all kittens and puppies cute?

There are already lots of videos of these foxes on Youtube. I don't know about the minxes, but the foxes basically behave like domestic dogs, possibly with more energy. They don't sit and drool. On the other hand, it's almost certainly true that they lost a lot of behaviors that they'd need to survive in the wild, but that applies to most domestic animals.

Perhaps it's anecdotal, and there were many that were pretty high energy in the sense they did act like a little puppy. They are ridiculously cute. From what I saw (was told), it depended on how long they were selected for and there were definitive differences in behavior by generation of selection, This effect was especially pronounced in the minxes (where the generation time is shorter so we can see more)

For example, compare the undomesticated minx [1] to the most domesticated one [2]. I have lots of other videos of the in between steps as well where the behavior changes from more and more energy to more and more passive. The same was basically true of the foxes. I apologize for the crappy video and inevitable dropbox bandwidth limit in advance.

[1] https://www.dropbox.com/sc/6o6j9s7ss8ux6ly/AAAvpqD0ybVfZdDqz...

[2] https://www.dropbox.com/sc/ey1nd1irvmw78be/AAADXhtFnGCtkVCh8...

I think you posted the same video twice, but I'm not disagreeing that domestic animals generally act less purposefully and intelligently than wild animals - they've lost the survival skills that they needed as wild animals. For example, many dogs like to dig big holes, but they are not remotely capable of building a proper den in which to raise a litter. And of course many of them bark at small animals, but most of them don't have any understanding of how to kill them (except some breeds which are selected for it).

I think these foxes are a lot like that - they love to hide in "dens" provided to them (plastic tubes), but I doubt they have the ability to build shelters or find food in the wild. Hence the less purposeful behavior - what are they going to do in their spare time, solve calculus problems? They play and wait for belly rubs and food. But I don't see the difference with pet dogs which are not bred and raised for specific work.

This reminds me of a difference between cats and dogs (and foxes). I've got a cat, she's over 13 years old now. She's from a line of thoroughly domesticated house cats, and yet in the summer she's sometimes gone for weeks.

We don't know why she does this and during the winter she's mostly content to lurk in the house. But during summer she goes out and stays away. She doesn't come to eat or sleep, she's just gone. We've seen her kill hares too, which are almost 1/3 of her body weight perhaps.

So cats (or maybe just this cat) don't lose their 'wild side' no matter how domesticated they become.

That behavior seems in line with the kind of behavior that caused us to domesticate cats in the first place. Historically, during the summer, food is abundant. During the winter, we store it. Cats find more rodents in storage during the winter.

That behavior seems in line with the kind of behavior that caused us to domesticate cats in the first place. During the summer, food is abundant, and during the winter, we store it. Cats can find more rodents in storage during the winter.

FYI, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/21/science/21birds.html?_r=0

Video on experiment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jFGNQScRNY&feature=youtu.be

You can see another here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-L58NPPQ5eI - this one is less of a documentary but better illustrates the contrast in behavior between the wild dark foxes versus the artificially selected tamer silver foxes. They're cool, I wouldn't mind having a fox as a pet.

I wonder if this type of domestication wouldn't be possible with raccoons or some of the great apes, maybe giving other traits like intelligence equal footing with docility. Uplift, in the David Brin sense.

Cats were smarter and self-domesticated themselves

There's some sort of "exotic pet" start-up here. It may take 10 years of development, but the research costs would be relatively low. I wonder what the ethics of that would be.

Breeding animals as pets is gently problematic when there are so many unwanted animals that would make very good pets.

Traditional breeding is notoriously bad at avoiding genetic defects and temperament problems. Mutts avoid a bunch of those.

If you charge enough you could fund humane death for surplus animals (tricky to persuade people this is a good thing) or better animal shelters, which would help reduce some of the problems.

> Traditional breeding is notoriously bad at avoiding genetic defects and temperament problems. Mutts avoid a bunch of those.

A large number of mutts are also either born or placed into bad situations and end up developing social and temperamental issues as a result, which become increasingly difficult to overcome the older they get.

They already sell those as pets, as you can see by googling "Russian pet foxes". Unlike a lot of exotic pets, it seems that they do fine as long as there is a fenced-in backyard and a local veterinarian who is willing to work with foxes.

But how about other exotic domesticated species. Squirrels or possums or tigers? My original question was a bit facetious, although I am interested in the ethics, and it does look like this is something that will happen one day.

I don't know about domesticating tigers. Look at house are which have need domesticated for thousands of years. Most cat owners have stories of their pet cat going berserk on them. Now imagine a 400 pound tiger going berserk. The owner would not have a chance.

A meat eater who benefits from experimentation on species that are very closely related to him, namely chimps, wonders about the ethics of breeding pets.

They're already selling them, but all the various laws around animals in other countries make it difficult.

I'm glad you brought up ethics, as it was absent from the article. If you believe that God put other species on this planet as a resource for humans, there's no limit to the creative possibilities. Otherwise it's hard to argue that human exploitation of other species can be ethical at this point in our technological development.

Here's the article I originally wanted to post but couldn't find. Does a much better job than the more cursory nat geo piece. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/807641/posts

What patience these scientists had! What dedication to their discipline! Imagine losing your brother to a labor camp and still continuing the work he was punished for. Amazing!

And these were not experiments that gave results in just a few months. These guys were laboring for decades!

The description of the article following the title is flawed. It reads Only a handful of wild animal species have been successfully bred to get along with humans. The reason, scientists say, is found in their genes.

But that's not what the article says - well, not directly or explicitly. Yes, I am being pedantic, and yes, I agree that this is likely the case. But as the article points out later on, Identifying the precise genetic footprint involved in tameness, however, is proving extremely tricky science... domestication is driven not by a single gene but a suite of genetic changes.

It's an interesting project, to be sure. Might it identify a complex of genes necessary (but not sufficient) to domestication? Maybe.

Or maybe not.

RadioLab had an episode on this:

http://www.radiolab.org/story/91696-new-nice/

awesome article.

if only it would be as easy to domesticate humans. sadly there is no life form on earth that has the intelligence to domesticate us into a more peaceful species.

Domestication of humans is what came to my mind on this topic. I'm not sure I would agree with you that we aren't being domesticated. Maybe countries domesticate humans? Maybe the most violent countries have the least domesticated humans? Maybe freedom and individuality combat domestication? It's definitely worth thinking about!

If you look at the driving causes of domestication in animals, it's typically the fact that surviving is no challenge — e.g. food and shelter are easy to come by, danger is rare, and there's little need to fight with other animals or those of the same species.

Following this, I'd think that the same conditions would domesticate humans. There's no reason it wouldn't; there's little value for aggressive behavior in a world where aggressiveness simply isn't necessary (and possibly even looked down upon).

My wife pretty much domesticated me )

My wife is convinced it will take at least two more generations to domesticate me...

Does anyone know how many foxes they started with for the experiment?

I suspect something like this happens with entire societies and humans.

When you first travel to the US you realize there is a different breed of people there. The native American population was basically exterminated and replaced with a European population that were tired of the State, of the kings and the Church and leaved all behind for going there . Also they send to the US lots of prostitutes as women, and then withing America, they send the "wild women" to the West.

You almost could feel the Mustang or Maverick spirit. I have only seen this spirit in some places in Africa.

On the other side when you go to Asia, you find the other side of the coin, submissive to the limit, society not tolerating any minimal deviation of the norm of the pack.

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