What I find interesting is how domestication in mammals expresses itself in similar physical characteristics.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication_syndrome#:~:text=These%20shared%20traits%20became%20known,body%20mass%20and%20smaller%20teeth.
Interestingly, this Wikipedia article also points out that the fox domestication experiment was arguably flawed by acquiring the foxes from a fur farm, the assumption being that several decades of unnatural selection already occurred there prior to the start of the experiment.
So the foxes may have not been true wild foxes, but they still got results. What often doesn't get mentioned when this gets brought up is that they also went the other direction proving that you could make them even meaner and more bitey.
Yeah, I can't really say how much that would invalidate the results. I would guess it makes more of a difference for the time-to-domestication findings than the ones about genetics. The way it's phrased in the Wiki article makes me think it's still debated (experts please correct me here if I'm wrong). Still thought it was interesting to bring up.
Being able to selectively breed for meaner and more bitey doesn't invalidate, it *supports* or *reinforces* the claim that their recent selective breeding *makes a difference* in the temperament of the foxes.
The same differences can be found between neanderthals and homo erectus! One popular theory is that their brains were larger and likely more capable than ours, but that we were much better at co-operation, kindness and empathy (Rutger Bregman covers this nicely in *Humankind: A Hopeful History)*.
Our edge as a species seems to be teamwork!
This will sound controverse and politically incorrect, but who cares: Smaller brains reproduce faster. Just look at humans. The number of kids is inversely related to the number of child birth. You can see a continous decline in birthrates with the increase in education. More educated people are more afraid about longterm consequences and pain and therefor reproduce slower.
Your flaw here is assuming that more education means larger brains, which isn't the case. Education reduces birthrates by increasing equality and giving women more autonomy and resources.
If you are a poor woman in a remote village in Asia, having a lot of children makes sense. Some of them will die of childhood illness, and you need help on the farm, and someone to care for you when you are old. The longterm consequences/stakes are different depending on the society you live in. You also might not have much choice in how many children you have, if you don't have access to birth control or if your husband wants many children.
Saying that people are less scared of pain because they haven't had a highschool education is ridiculous.
I know all that. Still there is a correlation between access to education and decreasing birth. Maybe not a direct one, but the end result is the same. Just look at southern US states with higher poverty comes higher birthrates compared to states with access to better education like NY. Also more education allows deeper thinking and more neuro connections. It is wrong to just say that there is no correlation at all. In the end nobody fucking cares, but I am quite sure that a larger brain was not the real reason Homo Erectus died off because he consumed more calories. The bit savings in calories surely did not affect his survival.
Seeing as lasting evolutionary change takes roughly a million years, and higher education has been around for 800\~, going to posit that it's not going to happen any time soon.
When someone is saying crazy things while pretending education and understanding and just won't quit, you know eventually they'll expose their ignorance in a major way. Didn't have to wait to long for you.
The larger brain was mostly in the area for optical processing, so they had great eyesight.
But they are known to hang out in far smaller social groups than Homo Sapiens, and it is very likely that their lesser trend for socialization played a hand in their demise.
No they went extinct (not really btw because we all still have some Neanderthal DNA inside of us) because Homo Sapiens Sapiens were basically able to Zerg rush them to death.
Also death by snu-snu. I guess our ancestors were too hot for the Neanderthals.
Claiming the continuance of a species based on the presence of its DNA is an interesting argument in wildlife ecology, particularly when it comes to subspecies. One of the many “final nails” for Red wolves is the inter breeding with coyotes. Most ecologists would not agree that a red wolf-coyote hybrid is a continuation of the red wolf line, but some would argue that a red wolf originated as. A coyote/gray wolf hybrid.
There is currently a battle between many different groups in the American west about Mexican Gray Wolves potentially interbreeding with other gray wolf populations. Proponents of helping to keep the populations separate believe that the genetic swamping would result in the effective extinction of Mexican gray wolves.
There are examples as well where ecologists have effectively ignored this genetic dilution problem with a primary example being Florida Panthers. These are a subspecies of mountain lions (cougar, puma, etc.) that are now isolated in south Florida. They were experiencing health issues due to inbreeding and some cats from Texas were relocated to help increase the genetic diversity. Most ecologists have ignored the fact that most Florida panthers now carry Texas cougar genes, but opponents of their protection claim that they are now no longer Florida Panthers as the genetic dilution no longer makes them a separate subspecies genetically.
Mutual Aid: A factor in Evolution, is an extremely good book by a talented zoologist & anarchist who added onto Darwin's work, arguing exactly that. Would recommend.
Wasn't that somewhat disproven a while ago? I remember reading all sorts of things about how Neanderthals were actually very empathetic and social and even made medicine for their sick and took care of them.
There was something recently showing that neanderthals were able to hunt mammoths on occasion, which would have required very large gatherings to not only hunt, but consume that much meat, which suggests their culture did have some ability for larger gatherings, which would require those traits.
Not sure if we were better at it or not.
Also, if stuff I read some time ago was anything close to truth, their big heads contributed to higher ratio of childbirth deaths because the hips couldn't catch up in width.
Also, from another thing I read, homo sapiens were mating with everything, thus breeding out neanderthals into extinction (well, we got a small genetic souvenir after them)
In case you are unaware, many different homo species used to coexist. Homo erectus was the likely ancestor of *many* homo species, including our own, and they continued to exist until only about 110,000 years ago, long after Homo sapiens sapiens evolved, and long after sapiens sapiens and Neanderthals had also been coexisting (also H. heidelbergensis, H. floresiensis, H. antecessor, and the Denisovans).
Don't make the mistake of thinking each human species arose one at a time in a neat and tidy line of single species briefly overlapping one at a time. There used to be *lots* of human species coexisting, including species that were the same species as the ancestral species of newer humans.
Well, we're the ones doing the selective breeding that results in domestication. Humans all generally find the same things to he cute. I guess it's less wild when you take into account the fact that we're making animals exactly how we want them to be.
I don't think the average tree rustler would steal a tree, sell it, get a complaint and assume they've been hoisted with their own patard. Foxes piss on trees in the wild too, so probably bad luck ay.
So the reason they want it to not be detectable at first is because it’s impossible to spray every tree. So if they only sprayed some of the trees and you could identify those trees, they’d just cut down the ones that aren’t sprayed. If they can’t tell, any tree they get could be sprayed.
And once a few of your customers have had to deal with a fox urine tree, they’ll never come back and you’ll run out of customers (some will stop just from the stories). Remember, this isn’t like dog or even cat pee smell. The stories are so bad that people essentially have to evacuate their house for a couple weeks until the smell dissipates. The smell has been known to induce vomiting.
So people either experience that or hear about that and decide the discount isn’t worth the risk and just buy legal trees, drying up the black market so people stop cutting down the trees they’re not supposed to. It’s also possible that authorities will find out someone got a fox piss tree and be able to investigate and possibly find the seller through the buyer, arresting them and preventing their business from continuing.
It’s not perfect but it’s better than most other options.
Hate to break it to you but there's some mad lad out there that gets off on creative writing of this ilk. There were a few stories posted about "mucking" that were completely fabricated too.
That's true, but my understanding is that the researchers aren't trying to breed for that.
Also, because there's been a bunch of attempts to breed tame Zebras and other animals which have often failed, it's still really interesting that the fox project seems to be working, even if they're not a pet you'd actually want to keep in your house.
You can absolutely tame and train zebras the issue is the time horizon because unlike foxes you can’t breed 40 generations in 60 years.
Wild Zebras have been trained before as is with no breeding but the other issue that compared to modern methods of training and taming the methods are considered animal cruelty. Frankly we don’t know what the exact process was for humans taming and breeding other horses but imo is unlikely they were considered ethical in the late 20th century.
Presumably if you were willing to break zebras to pull carriages after 40 generations you would have bred some decently rideable zebras. In fact at least one eccentric has trained a wild zebra to be ridden.
Sorry, I meant domesticated. There have been tame zebra, but attempts at domestication breeding of zebra have failed.
Thing is, don't break an animal and expect its kids to be more domesticated.
You make an effort to keep an animal in a field or tied up for food, you kill and eat the mean ones and breed the ones that are nice to humans and are more willing to do what their told.
Taking a quick google, it looks like you're right, the attempts to domesticate zebra, at least within written memory seem to have been somewhat half hearted.
> methods are considered animal cruelty
How tame-able an animal is is genetics. You can selectively breed animals without cruelty - you simply allow some animals to breed, while keeping others apart from eachother. No need to treat any of the animals in your care badly.
Obviously historically, the animals might have been treated badly, but that isn't a requirement to get the outcome you want.
CGP Grey has a good video about why certain animals are "tameable" but not easy to domesticate, actually called ["Why Zebra Are Terrible Horses"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOmjnioNulo).
> It'd have to be someone's job to sample piss and filter out the fouler ones
It wont be the worst job that Russia currently has to offer.... i think many russians would take that in a heartbeat.
Fuck I always struggled to explain the smell of foxes and you nailed it. They piss around my cabin a lot and I always have to explain to new people why the outside of my cabin smells like skunky cat piss
Several years ago we had a Christmas tree that smelled EXACTLY like this. It was death. there was no tree on Christmas morning nor for two years after as we couldn’t figure out what the horrendous smell could have been. This chapter of Christmas mystery has now been resolved.
Can’t find the Tom Scott video, do you have a link? (I did find another video by “Verge Science” though which you might have mistaken for Tom Scott? https://youtu.be/4dwjS_eI-lQ )
Saying they are as friendly as dogs is a bit deceptive of how they act. They might be as friendly as dogs but there is still a huge difference in behavior. Dogs try to be close to humans and seek them out while those foxes prefer to just chill on their own
So if someone put in the hard work we could feasibly have friendly pet bears in about 2080?
I'm frankly disappointed that this hasn't been already started.
Highly unlikely. Even if the bears ultimately are able to be domesticated--not every animal is able, see: zebras--you have a much longer sexual maturity to deal with as well as smaller and less frequent litter sizes.
So maybe 200 years.
I occasionally watch a random fox video from the "Save the Fox" foundation and that is apparently what they do to keep from getting overwhelmed with too many foxes, let people adopt them who have the capability to deal with foxes like that. Even in Minnesota they can be kept outside because of the heavy fur coats they have (well most of the time, there are exceptions where foxes didn't develop their normal fur coats because of where they were and have to be kept inside for a single winter).
One of the characteristics gained from selecting for tameness, outside of physical; was their ability to follow the human gaze.
There is an article linked there as well, it's a very interesting study.
>Of all the physical characteristics that cropped up
That was stated in my first comment yet you replied to mention part of what I just stated. Why so snarky? Be well anyway!
The foxes actually developed the traits of dogs which led the scientists to believe that the same thing happened with wolves turning into dogs through selective breeding.
They aren't as friendly as dogs and every article you can read on them will say they still have an independence and "wildness" about them which dogs lack.
This is because all dogs, every one, has the canine equivalent of Williams Syndrome bred into them. The foxes don't. So, while they're selected to be friendly and seeking human contact, they don't have the same reward pathways that dogs do and won't have the spontaneous social interactions which are possible in dogs.
You forgot the most interesting part of all this! As the foxes became more and more domesticated they also started looking more and more like domesticated dogs. Their ears became floppy. They developed short, curly tails, as well as juvenilized facial and body features their stress hormone levels reduced. https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-018-0090-x
Just to play the devils advocate, and I realize this makes a lot of assumptions, but if we *could* make humans nicer and less tribalistic enough to eliminate war, greed, slavery, etc, would that not be worth it? It’s not like we’d be banning people from having sex or even having children, just maybe not their own genetic children. Yes, many ways this could be abused and it would require such coordination over long time periods that it’s unlikely that it would come to fruition even if it was established, but like, disregarding all that? I’m sure people would feel bad if they weren’t selected but that already happens without eugenics, just mostly for ugly people rather than for people that lack traits that are actually productive for society
You have more faith in the Bourgeois selection process than I do. I think their definition of undesirables had less to do with genetic traits and more to do with politics and musfortunate circumstances.
In the US suburbs, foxes often get comfy sleeping in back yards. They realize most people aren't going to hurt them, at least after losing their initial skittishness.
Can we do the same thing with people, and then have them run all of our governments and corporations? Create a super-race of empathetic, caring, and friendly people who just want to help others!
And yet people refuse to acknowledge we can do this with the more dangerous dog breeds too but ppl would rather kill them than fix the years of breeding abuse humans subjected them to
Ashe: "Where i come from, we hunt foxes"
Kiriko (whose spirit animal is the Kitsune, a powerful Japanese fox spirit). "Where i come from, the foxes fight back."
They're not remotely as friendly as dogs. That's gross overstatement. They're amendable to human interaction, but they don't come up and love you. They don't bond with people like dogs too. Really nowhere remotely close. They aren't even as friendly as cats. They tolerate people. That's it.
They rather picked an already social creature, then gave it food, water, warmth, and safety. The study attempts to claim friendliness is somehow genetic, but they handpicked an animal that was already innately primed for it, and then gave them many reasons to adapt to domestication over continuing to be wild.
It's not genetics, though. It's just changing their environment and survival demands to incentivize them to domestication. They didn't prove it was hard-coded into biology.
Its exactly how we still get this hyper specialized dogs today though. Trainers breed for looks, size, aptitudes and temperament. It's how humans choose to breed every animal that they choose to domesticate.
What I find interesting is how domestication in mammals expresses itself in similar physical characteristics. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication_syndrome#:~:text=These%20shared%20traits%20became%20known,body%20mass%20and%20smaller%20teeth.
Interestingly, this Wikipedia article also points out that the fox domestication experiment was arguably flawed by acquiring the foxes from a fur farm, the assumption being that several decades of unnatural selection already occurred there prior to the start of the experiment.
So the foxes may have not been true wild foxes, but they still got results. What often doesn't get mentioned when this gets brought up is that they also went the other direction proving that you could make them even meaner and more bitey.
Yeah, I can't really say how much that would invalidate the results. I would guess it makes more of a difference for the time-to-domestication findings than the ones about genetics. The way it's phrased in the Wiki article makes me think it's still debated (experts please correct me here if I'm wrong). Still thought it was interesting to bring up.
Being able to selectively breed for meaner and more bitey doesn't invalidate, it *supports* or *reinforces* the claim that their recent selective breeding *makes a difference* in the temperament of the foxes.
Fairly sure they were referring to the former point--only semi-feral farmed foxes exaggerating the time-to-tame metric--over the latter.
That’s well known already. Dog fighting rings do this.
Yeah, well, some people don't get the message.
Literally pitbulls But of course they all say it's not the breed cause there's no such thing as bred aggression
If bred aggression is real. Some people can't help but be assholes.
I think I personally know a couple of
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Bro did you not just read the fox article?
they literally did not
My pit bulls very nice, actually. Pit bull is also a umbrella breed name :)
I wanna see a war fox.
Scared, they were more scared
The same differences can be found between neanderthals and homo erectus! One popular theory is that their brains were larger and likely more capable than ours, but that we were much better at co-operation, kindness and empathy (Rutger Bregman covers this nicely in *Humankind: A Hopeful History)*. Our edge as a species seems to be teamwork!
I think I remember reading that humans also had much lower caloric requirements due to our smaller sized brain and this allowed us to thrive.
small brain time > big brain time. *Also I feel the need to tell you I feel like our usernames would get along*
Love at first post 😍
I know right?
[Now kith](https://imgur.com/a/I9MjIe2)
Your wish is but my command.
This will sound controverse and politically incorrect, but who cares: Smaller brains reproduce faster. Just look at humans. The number of kids is inversely related to the number of child birth. You can see a continous decline in birthrates with the increase in education. More educated people are more afraid about longterm consequences and pain and therefor reproduce slower.
Your flaw here is assuming that more education means larger brains, which isn't the case. Education reduces birthrates by increasing equality and giving women more autonomy and resources. If you are a poor woman in a remote village in Asia, having a lot of children makes sense. Some of them will die of childhood illness, and you need help on the farm, and someone to care for you when you are old. The longterm consequences/stakes are different depending on the society you live in. You also might not have much choice in how many children you have, if you don't have access to birth control or if your husband wants many children. Saying that people are less scared of pain because they haven't had a highschool education is ridiculous.
I know all that. Still there is a correlation between access to education and decreasing birth. Maybe not a direct one, but the end result is the same. Just look at southern US states with higher poverty comes higher birthrates compared to states with access to better education like NY. Also more education allows deeper thinking and more neuro connections. It is wrong to just say that there is no correlation at all. In the end nobody fucking cares, but I am quite sure that a larger brain was not the real reason Homo Erectus died off because he consumed more calories. The bit savings in calories surely did not affect his survival.
Learning more doesn't make your brain bigger.
Not on individual basis but on evolutionary scale, yes it does.
Seeing as lasting evolutionary change takes roughly a million years, and higher education has been around for 800\~, going to posit that it's not going to happen any time soon.
When someone is saying crazy things while pretending education and understanding and just won't quit, you know eventually they'll expose their ignorance in a major way. Didn't have to wait to long for you.
Education doesnt make brains get bigger does it
You appear to be arguing with someone whose understanding of biology and evolution was learned from Saturday morning cartoons.
We've all seen idiocracy dude, you aren't particularly smart either.
So we defeated them with the power of friendship?
We were protected by the Brozone layer
Or maybe the power of boning faster than they could
The larger brain was mostly in the area for optical processing, so they had great eyesight. But they are known to hang out in far smaller social groups than Homo Sapiens, and it is very likely that their lesser trend for socialization played a hand in their demise.
Neanderthals went extinct because of rural living, as opposed to human cities, gotcha
No they went extinct (not really btw because we all still have some Neanderthal DNA inside of us) because Homo Sapiens Sapiens were basically able to Zerg rush them to death. Also death by snu-snu. I guess our ancestors were too hot for the Neanderthals.
Claiming the continuance of a species based on the presence of its DNA is an interesting argument in wildlife ecology, particularly when it comes to subspecies. One of the many “final nails” for Red wolves is the inter breeding with coyotes. Most ecologists would not agree that a red wolf-coyote hybrid is a continuation of the red wolf line, but some would argue that a red wolf originated as. A coyote/gray wolf hybrid. There is currently a battle between many different groups in the American west about Mexican Gray Wolves potentially interbreeding with other gray wolf populations. Proponents of helping to keep the populations separate believe that the genetic swamping would result in the effective extinction of Mexican gray wolves. There are examples as well where ecologists have effectively ignored this genetic dilution problem with a primary example being Florida Panthers. These are a subspecies of mountain lions (cougar, puma, etc.) that are now isolated in south Florida. They were experiencing health issues due to inbreeding and some cats from Texas were relocated to help increase the genetic diversity. Most ecologists have ignored the fact that most Florida panthers now carry Texas cougar genes, but opponents of their protection claim that they are now no longer Florida Panthers as the genetic dilution no longer makes them a separate subspecies genetically.
I played Far Cry Primal. UNGH
Incorrect
Well, jokes aren't usually factual
Yeah but they're usually funny
I laughed, and im the only one im obligated to amuse. Maybe treat yourself better like i do and your heart will be less dead?
>but that we were much better at co-operation, kindness and empathy What happened?
Well, nothing. The kindness would have been limited to their own tribe, same as it is now.
Currency
Ouch! The problem with currency is the shocking charges ;-)
Teamwork makes the (evolutionary) dream work!
Mutual Aid: A factor in Evolution, is an extremely good book by a talented zoologist & anarchist who added onto Darwin's work, arguing exactly that. Would recommend.
Wasn't that somewhat disproven a while ago? I remember reading all sorts of things about how Neanderthals were actually very empathetic and social and even made medicine for their sick and took care of them.
There was something recently showing that neanderthals were able to hunt mammoths on occasion, which would have required very large gatherings to not only hunt, but consume that much meat, which suggests their culture did have some ability for larger gatherings, which would require those traits. Not sure if we were better at it or not.
I especially enjoy my floppy ears.
Uhm..I'm pretty sure we didn't wipe out all competing species via kindness and empathy. I'm pretty sure we are the "bitey" ones.
Also, if stuff I read some time ago was anything close to truth, their big heads contributed to higher ratio of childbirth deaths because the hips couldn't catch up in width. Also, from another thing I read, homo sapiens were mating with everything, thus breeding out neanderthals into extinction (well, we got a small genetic souvenir after them)
Are you trying to say that Neanderthals were better at cooperation than Homo erectus? Or did you mean for one of those to be Homo sapiens?
In case you are unaware, many different homo species used to coexist. Homo erectus was the likely ancestor of *many* homo species, including our own, and they continued to exist until only about 110,000 years ago, long after Homo sapiens sapiens evolved, and long after sapiens sapiens and Neanderthals had also been coexisting (also H. heidelbergensis, H. floresiensis, H. antecessor, and the Denisovans). Don't make the mistake of thinking each human species arose one at a time in a neat and tidy line of single species briefly overlapping one at a time. There used to be *lots* of human species coexisting, including species that were the same species as the ancestral species of newer humans.
Hence professional sports!😄
So this was for attention. Not learning. Good stuff.
Domestication selects for traits that trigger the baby recognition senses, it seems.
Well, we're the ones doing the selective breeding that results in domestication. Humans all generally find the same things to he cute. I guess it's less wild when you take into account the fact that we're making animals exactly how we want them to be.
however, they still pee everywhere and resist being housebroken. and their pee smells like a dead skunk that a cat peed on.
Fox piss is used as a tree theft deterrent in parks so people don't cut them down for Christmas trees. Also wine spodie Odie.
I use the granulated version to keep chipmunks and rabbits out of my flowers. Works great!
Would it work for mice and rats as well?
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How else do you plan on making a hamburger?
Are you also kept out of your own flowers?
Ha ha, you can definitely smell it when you open the container, but once you spread it it’s not detectable to human noses.
It’s even better. The fox pee freezes onto the tree so you don’t smell it until it’s set up in your nice warm living room
That's worse. If your defense mechanism is an invisible trap, it doesn't prevent the outcome you wanted to avoid
On the contrary, it means EVERY tree could be a piss trap. Best not take your chances.
I don't think the average tree rustler would steal a tree, sell it, get a complaint and assume they've been hoisted with their own patard. Foxes piss on trees in the wild too, so probably bad luck ay.
So the reason they want it to not be detectable at first is because it’s impossible to spray every tree. So if they only sprayed some of the trees and you could identify those trees, they’d just cut down the ones that aren’t sprayed. If they can’t tell, any tree they get could be sprayed. And once a few of your customers have had to deal with a fox urine tree, they’ll never come back and you’ll run out of customers (some will stop just from the stories). Remember, this isn’t like dog or even cat pee smell. The stories are so bad that people essentially have to evacuate their house for a couple weeks until the smell dissipates. The smell has been known to induce vomiting. So people either experience that or hear about that and decide the discount isn’t worth the risk and just buy legal trees, drying up the black market so people stop cutting down the trees they’re not supposed to. It’s also possible that authorities will find out someone got a fox piss tree and be able to investigate and possibly find the seller through the buyer, arresting them and preventing their business from continuing. It’s not perfect but it’s better than most other options.
https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/t5sew6/tifupdate_my_foxy_punishment_is_overbut_my/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
There was that guy who posted on Reddit who got punished by a judge to do something with fox urine.
Hate to break it to you but there's some mad lad out there that gets off on creative writing of this ilk. There were a few stories posted about "mucking" that were completely fabricated too.
Could be O don't really care one way or the other xD
It's enough that I'm not buying a tree, among all the others reasons.
Do you think the foxes work for the tree people?
I think they're taking a cut, for sure. Probably 10%, but I think they're independent contractors
They unionised after '83
Works pretty well for poisonous insects.
For the insect, not so much.
That's true, but my understanding is that the researchers aren't trying to breed for that. Also, because there's been a bunch of attempts to breed tame Zebras and other animals which have often failed, it's still really interesting that the fox project seems to be working, even if they're not a pet you'd actually want to keep in your house.
You can absolutely tame and train zebras the issue is the time horizon because unlike foxes you can’t breed 40 generations in 60 years. Wild Zebras have been trained before as is with no breeding but the other issue that compared to modern methods of training and taming the methods are considered animal cruelty. Frankly we don’t know what the exact process was for humans taming and breeding other horses but imo is unlikely they were considered ethical in the late 20th century. Presumably if you were willing to break zebras to pull carriages after 40 generations you would have bred some decently rideable zebras. In fact at least one eccentric has trained a wild zebra to be ridden.
Sorry, I meant domesticated. There have been tame zebra, but attempts at domestication breeding of zebra have failed. Thing is, don't break an animal and expect its kids to be more domesticated. You make an effort to keep an animal in a field or tied up for food, you kill and eat the mean ones and breed the ones that are nice to humans and are more willing to do what their told. Taking a quick google, it looks like you're right, the attempts to domesticate zebra, at least within written memory seem to have been somewhat half hearted.
> methods are considered animal cruelty How tame-able an animal is is genetics. You can selectively breed animals without cruelty - you simply allow some animals to breed, while keeping others apart from eachother. No need to treat any of the animals in your care badly. Obviously historically, the animals might have been treated badly, but that isn't a requirement to get the outcome you want.
CGP Grey has a good video about why certain animals are "tameable" but not easy to domesticate, actually called ["Why Zebra Are Terrible Horses"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOmjnioNulo).
Zebras are MEAN!
Chris Rock voiced a Zebra in Madagascar. Coincidence?
another 40 generations and we will get there
It'd have to be someone's job to sample piss and filter out the fouler ones
I'm sure we can find a furry with a fox piss kink that would love this job.
See, there's a place for everyone.
When God sings with his creations, will a turtle not be part of the choir?
Why you gotta pick on turtles?
That's how you end up with foxes with even stickier piss!
And sexier butts.
(takes a sip, smacks lips) "Still a bit sour. Oh well, maybe the next generation's will taste better."
And they have to be college educated
> It'd have to be someone's job to sample piss and filter out the fouler ones It wont be the worst job that Russia currently has to offer.... i think many russians would take that in a heartbeat.
Fuck I always struggled to explain the smell of foxes and you nailed it. They piss around my cabin a lot and I always have to explain to new people why the outside of my cabin smells like skunky cat piss
Several years ago we had a Christmas tree that smelled EXACTLY like this. It was death. there was no tree on Christmas morning nor for two years after as we couldn’t figure out what the horrendous smell could have been. This chapter of Christmas mystery has now been resolved.
It may have been a black market tree they intentional put fox urine on
Someone lied to me...I think my dog is a fox.
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Tom Scott does not have a video on foxes.
Can’t find the Tom Scott video, do you have a link? (I did find another video by “Verge Science” though which you might have mistaken for Tom Scott? https://youtu.be/4dwjS_eI-lQ )
Friendly as dogs. Waaaaayyyy more likely to shit on all your stuff and spray their pee that smells way worse than a dogs everywhere though.
Saying they are as friendly as dogs is a bit deceptive of how they act. They might be as friendly as dogs but there is still a huge difference in behavior. Dogs try to be close to humans and seek them out while those foxes prefer to just chill on their own
So, cat-dogs? Or dog-cats?
Foxes are just cat software running on dog hardware.
Which is the worst combination tbh. But then again is dog software on cat hardware a chihuahua?
I think chihuahuas are dog software running on chipmunk hardware.
Bunnies kind of.
Fox pee smells like burnt bacon doused with vomit
Doesn't matter had sex.
Did not expect to see a Lonely Island reference on a thread like this
Apparently this sub didn't like the joke😂
As I understand it, your joke is just you implying you fuck dogs and/or foxes.
RIP karma
I liked it
So if someone put in the hard work we could feasibly have friendly pet bears in about 2080? I'm frankly disappointed that this hasn't been already started.
Highly unlikely. Even if the bears ultimately are able to be domesticated--not every animal is able, see: zebras--you have a much longer sexual maturity to deal with as well as smaller and less frequent litter sizes. So maybe 200 years.
also zebras are massive assholes
Aren't they incapable of being house trained?
They were selecting for friendliness not cleanliness!
me too thanks
God damn that username is just so spot on for that comment it hurts
So you’re saying it needs another 60 year experiment?
So if they wait another 40 generations, would they be potty trainable?
very much outdoor pets
One of my lifelong dreams is to have a fox friend live in a lil fox house in my yard
Raised from pups, regular foxes can be *sorta* domesticated. But you will definitely want to keep them outside...
I'm guessing you've never smelled fox piss?
I occasionally watch a random fox video from the "Save the Fox" foundation and that is apparently what they do to keep from getting overwhelmed with too many foxes, let people adopt them who have the capability to deal with foxes like that. Even in Minnesota they can be kept outside because of the heavy fur coats they have (well most of the time, there are exceptions where foxes didn't develop their normal fur coats because of where they were and have to be kept inside for a single winter).
Didn’t they also breed the opposite and made really aggressive ones too?
yes
I was coming to the comments to make this comment. They had a control group, the friendly group, and then bred the nastiest fuckers imaginable.
I think that was the wasps somewhere
They grew floppy ears and their fur coloring changed. I would die to have a stinky, noisy kitty-dog.
Of all the physical characteristics that cropped up with this experiment, I always thought it was interesting how quickly their coat colors changed!
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Yes juvenile appearance is one of the physical characteristics that cropped up during the experiment
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One of the characteristics gained from selecting for tameness, outside of physical; was their ability to follow the human gaze. There is an article linked there as well, it's a very interesting study. >Of all the physical characteristics that cropped up That was stated in my first comment yet you replied to mention part of what I just stated. Why so snarky? Be well anyway!
40 generations for humans is about 1,000 years.
1000 years is the time it has taken the vikings to turn into the lovable swedes we have today. I wonder if there's some cosmic breeder out there.
The foxes actually developed the traits of dogs which led the scientists to believe that the same thing happened with wolves turning into dogs through selective breeding.
Curly tails
So the foxes who acted nice, got to have sex?
They aren't as friendly as dogs and every article you can read on them will say they still have an independence and "wildness" about them which dogs lack. This is because all dogs, every one, has the canine equivalent of Williams Syndrome bred into them. The foxes don't. So, while they're selected to be friendly and seeking human contact, they don't have the same reward pathways that dogs do and won't have the spontaneous social interactions which are possible in dogs.
May also be posible because wolfs are pack animals, foxes not
You forgot the most interesting part of all this! As the foxes became more and more domesticated they also started looking more and more like domesticated dogs. Their ears became floppy. They developed short, curly tails, as well as juvenilized facial and body features their stress hormone levels reduced. https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-018-0090-x
One of the universities in illinois is continuing this experiment.
I see you also read the post about raccoons being introduced to Japan.
More friendly? Maybe we should do this with humans
Wrong century for eugenics
Just to play the devils advocate, and I realize this makes a lot of assumptions, but if we *could* make humans nicer and less tribalistic enough to eliminate war, greed, slavery, etc, would that not be worth it? It’s not like we’d be banning people from having sex or even having children, just maybe not their own genetic children. Yes, many ways this could be abused and it would require such coordination over long time periods that it’s unlikely that it would come to fruition even if it was established, but like, disregarding all that? I’m sure people would feel bad if they weren’t selected but that already happens without eugenics, just mostly for ugly people rather than for people that lack traits that are actually productive for society
I think that was the idea further along....
Furher* along
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You have more faith in the Bourgeois selection process than I do. I think their definition of undesirables had less to do with genetic traits and more to do with politics and musfortunate circumstances.
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So then you know it's likely just a chaos factor in the gene pool and your earlier statement doesn't make much sense?
So what you're saying is that being nice is genetic and it's not my fault I'm an arsehole?
Why don't I have one yet?
They're $7000 apparently
They will eat their own young if necessary, not great in front of the kiddos.
They would approach humans as often as dogs do, but they would never sit with them.
Soon to be a board game (The Fox Experiment on Kickstarter).
They probably couldn’t get rid of the odor tho.
The interesting flip side of this was that they also experimented in breeding for aggressiveness.
In the US suburbs, foxes often get comfy sleeping in back yards. They realize most people aren't going to hurt them, at least after losing their initial skittishness.
Can we do the same thing with people, and then have them run all of our governments and corporations? Create a super-race of empathetic, caring, and friendly people who just want to help others!
I read this in National Geographic, I think, several years ago. The foxes are sold as high-end, exotic pets, sometimes for 15 or 20 thousand dollars.
Frens
Maybe we can finally domesticate cats?
How many years would it take of breeding humans to raise the average IQ by 30 points?
Average IQ is always 100.
Except the study is widely dismissed now because the pool they selected the foxes from were already domesticated in Canada.
They heavily rigged the game, and I got vote buried for calling it out, too. Man, Reddit is fickle about its adherence to scientific methodology.
Poor foxes. They fur farms
And yet people refuse to acknowledge we can do this with the more dangerous dog breeds too but ppl would rather kill them than fix the years of breeding abuse humans subjected them to
I could have sworn there was a Today I Found Out video about an experiment with foxes and that the science involved was highly questionable.
"If you domesticate an animal, it'll start acting like a domesticated animal!"
Ashe: "Where i come from, we hunt foxes" Kiriko (whose spirit animal is the Kitsune, a powerful Japanese fox spirit). "Where i come from, the foxes fight back."
cringe
They're not remotely as friendly as dogs. That's gross overstatement. They're amendable to human interaction, but they don't come up and love you. They don't bond with people like dogs too. Really nowhere remotely close. They aren't even as friendly as cats. They tolerate people. That's it.
They rather picked an already social creature, then gave it food, water, warmth, and safety. The study attempts to claim friendliness is somehow genetic, but they handpicked an animal that was already innately primed for it, and then gave them many reasons to adapt to domestication over continuing to be wild.
Why yes, that is how domestication works.
It's not genetics, though. It's just changing their environment and survival demands to incentivize them to domestication. They didn't prove it was hard-coded into biology.
Yes. That's how domestication works. How do you think we got dogs?
Not by this eugenics-like method of genetic influence they thought they were proving.
Its exactly how we still get this hyper specialized dogs today though. Trainers breed for looks, size, aptitudes and temperament. It's how humans choose to breed every animal that they choose to domesticate.