Monday, August 15, 2011

Revisiting Question on Domestication - How Feasible Would it Be To Create a Truly Domesticated Fox?

We know about the Russian experiment in which silver (Vulpes) foxes were selectively bred by degree of tameness, creating a very calm handleable strain of silvers. An experiment was done here in the USA in which ranched silver (Vulpes vulpes) foxes were observed to have flight distances from humans based on color - fox chromatography if you will! Turned out in a big enclosure loose together, wild type reds kept the most distance, silvers slightly less, ambers less than that, and pearls almost no flight distance at all - they practically sat on the humans' feet. When the foxes were being pelted out the adrenal glands were weighed and the total body weight was recorded. Those with the longest flight distance had the heaviest adrenal glands relative to body weight, where those with shorter flight distances had shorter ones. The least reactive foxes had the smallest adrenal glands relative to body weight. Arctic foxes (Alopex lagopus) are much calmer to start with, even when wild caught. There is a photo of an adult blue fox sitting on an experimenter's lap just a couple of months after capture. Domesticating the blue fox would probably take much less time than domesticating the red fox. How feasible would it be to selectively breed a strain of domestic foxes that are by nature calm and easy to handle in a pet type situation?

No comments:

Post a Comment