How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog): Visionary Scientists and a Siberian Tale of Jump-Started Evolution
Lyudmila Trut / Lee Alan
Somewhere far away in Siberia live furry four-legged creatures, lop-eared and affably wagging their tails. They are no less friendly and obedient to humans than any lap dog. But these are not dogs, but foxes. They appeared as a result of the most amazing selection experiment in history, as if compressing time, when the evolutionary path that took thousands of centuries in nature was completed in some sixty years. In 1959, biologists from Akademgorodok Dmitry Belyaev and Lyudmila Trut began working with several dozen foxes kept on Siberian fur farms. Foxes belong to the canine family, and scientists wanted to reproduce in real time the course of evolution from a wolf to a dog, to see how the process of domestication proceeds. The book How to Train Your Fox is an amazing story about the history of this experiment, about the daily work of scientists and the bonds that have been connecting us and pets for many millennia.
