The Benefits Of Canine Domestication

The domestication of animals was an essential step in early human civilization. The ability to utilize the strength or speed of larger mammals provided us with the leisure time essential to innovation. These days, the most visible example of domestication is with canis familiaris, the domestic dog. Our canine friends provide humans with the more nebulous benefit of companionship, though they once were essential to any hunting party. In the mid-20th century, Soviet geneticist Dimitry Belyaev proposed that he could recreate the centuries of canine domestication with artificial selection for a new species: the fox. The timeframe for Belyaev’s experiment was short, but he had a more discerning strategy. Rather than the unclear direction and semi-intentionality …show more content…
He picked far more vixens than male foxes for the sake of maximizing generation capacity. Once they had brought back the tame foxes to their experiment location, they designed a system whereby they could rate the animals for tameness. The team ranked the foxes from Class III, the most aggressive, to Class I, the most amenable to human contact. The experimenters administered tests by which they could sort the foxes into their respective categories. The tests consisted of the degree to which the animals responded positively to the presence of humans. Belyaev was strict with which animals would be allowed to breed, choosing only the upper echelons of both sexes. The experiment necessitated that the foxes have limited human exposure, both so that they received little training, and so that the category sorting would be more …show more content…
The defining feature of Class IE was an extreme eagerness for human contact, to the point where the foxes would whimper and beg for the chance at human affection. The proportion of elite group members grew exponentially within a few generations. The most astonishing feature of the elite group is the morphological changes they took on. All domesticated species have the tendency to take on certain traits, and the foxes were no exception. Most noticeably, the foxes developed shorter legs and tails, and piebald patterns on their foreheads. A less incidental adaptation is that the foxes’ window of bonding expanded, and their fear response was delayed. These traits are intrinsically linked to the proclivity of the foxes towards craving human attention. Overall, the results of the experiment were even more extreme and impressive than even Belyaev could have