How To Tame A Fox (And Build A Dog)

In southern Siberia resides Mavrik, the size of a sheepdog, who wags his tail, rolls on his back, and pants in anticipation of human attention. He s as docile and playful as any lapdog. And yet he is a fox, the result of the most extraordinary breeding experiment ever conducted. More than a half century ago, a Soviet biologist named Dmitry Belyaev decided to gather up 130 foxes from Siberian fox farms and figure out just how long it would take to domesticate them. Their goal was to recreate the evolution of wolves into dogs. Most accounts of the natural evolution place it over a time span of about 15,000 years, but within ten years of starting the fox breeding program, Belyeav experiments had resulted in puppy-like foxes. Floppy ears appeared within one generation, then followed the piebald spots we are so used to seeing on the bellies and foreheads of dogsand pigs and cows for that matter. Belyeav had literally compressed thousands of years of domestication into a handful of years, and with the experiments, he then turned to unlocking the molecular mysteries of domestication. Belyaev died in 1985, but not before recruiting Lyudmila Trut to the experiment, who has run it ever since53 generations of foxes have been domesticated. And this is their story, recounted for the first time in book form. "