{"id":4582,"date":"2013-01-04T08:33:42","date_gmt":"2013-01-03T22:33:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/?p=4582"},"modified":"2013-01-04T08:33:42","modified_gmt":"2013-01-03T22:33:42","slug":"rapid-domestication-or-omg-cute-foxes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/2013\/01\/04\/rapid-domestication-or-omg-cute-foxes\/","title":{"rendered":"Rapid Domestication (or OMG Cute Foxes!)."},"content":{"rendered":"

I have this obsession with esoterica; things that are hard to find or to track down trigger this thing in the back of my head that just won’t go away until I find them. Most of the time its pretty harmless stuff, usually only sending me down a flurry of Google searches, but sometimes it can drive me to apparent madness like when I scoured eBay for hours looking for a copy of Uncharted 3 Explorer Edition<\/a> when I found out they were no longer available through stores. One of the weirder times this desire for the esoteric hit me was back when I was researching dog breeds for a potential new puppy and I stumbled across something quite intriguing.<\/p>\n

Back in the 1950s a Russian scientists by the name of\u00a0Dmitry Belyaev began a breeding program with wild foxes. His aims were simple, he wanted to study the origins of domestication and gain insight into the differences between our dogs and their wild counterparts. For this experiment he selected the Silver Fox<\/a>\u00a0and began selectively breeding them for more domestic tendencies. The results were quite remarkable<\/a> and within a few generations\u00a0Belyaev had foxes that were nothing like their wild counterparts, even to the point of them developing different coats, curling their tails and behaving much more like your garden variety canine than anything else.<\/p>\n