An interesting
Radiolab piece with evolutionary biologist
Brian Hare on Russian geneticist Dmitri Belyaev's celebrated
silver fox domestication experiment. Belyaev's foxes have gotten a fair amount of play in popular media -
as a part of the origin story of dogs. (Here's something I'm starting to think about: the canids who make dogs dogs, so that dogs can, as the saying goes, make us human. Another example would be the captive wolves, human-raised or not, who stand in as the foil of dogs in studies of social cognition,
for example these by Brian Hare.)
What I found most striking about the RadioLab version of the story: the cartoonish, disturbingly repetitive gun shot sound effects that point up the role of
culling in selective breeding (plus, these foxes were raised for fur in the first place...)
Related posts on
free-range dogs and
undesireable dogs.
Image courtesy of
http://www.gmilburn.ca/
Note: I tried posting an earlier version of this on Village Dog, my Tumblr experiment, but had some technical difficulties. It seems to fit better here, anyway.
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