Tame Foxes

An interesting look into what may have been the precursor to modern-day dogs.

From the U.K. Independent:

A study in evolution: foxes turned into man's best friend
They stare you in the face, wag their tails and whine with joy when anyone approaches. But these are not dogs; they are a domesticated breed of fox that looks and behaves just like man's best friend.

After 45 years of selective breeding, and almost as many fox generations, scientists have produced what nature could not, a tame fox who eagerly follows his master's gaze.

Foxes bred on a farm in Siberia since 1959 not only look like dogs, they act like them in their ability to read someone's face for visual cues on what they are expected to do. Dogs, domesticated from wolves more than 10,000 years ago, are among the few animals with enough "social intelligence" to follow the visual instructions shown in the expression of a face or movements of a hand.

Now a study with the Russian foxes has shown they are just as adept. Scientists from Russia, Germany and America report today on the results of intelligence tests on the Siberian foxes which clearly put them on a par with dogs, and even above chimpanzees in being able to read gestures of human communication, such as pointing to hidden parcels of food with eyes or hands.

Here is the story at Nature:

Friendly foxes are cleverer
For almost half a century, a population of foxes in Siberia has been bred to be unafraid of humans and non-aggressive. Now these foxes seem to have shown that social skills come as a perk of being friendly.

Dogs, domesticated from their wild wolf cousins over millennia, are not only less likely to bite or bolt, but have also gained the ability to communicate with their human companions. For example, if a human points or looks at an object, the dog will also look at it.

Brian Hare, an anthropologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had previously shown that dogs are more likely than undomesticated animals - even chimps - to be able to communicate in this way with humans. But was this social sophistication something that was specifically bred for during their domestication, or was it a by-product?

An opportunity to find out came from the Siberian foxes, which have been bred for friendliness but have had limited contact with humans. The project was set up in 1959 by Dmitry K. Belyaev of the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk to examine the genetics of domestication. Each fox is tested at the age of seven months to see whether they approach humans (and whether they bite). The 'friendlier' foxes are bred, and a separate, control, population is bred randomly.

And the obligatory cute picture:

Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwww...

The text of the paper is here.

And if breeding for friendliness also confers intelligence, this speaks a lot for the situation in the Middle East. Lots of inbreeding -- it is well known that people in Saudi Arabia have problems with hemophilia which is caused by inbreeding. One paper is here and the situation is bad enough that they hosted this conference: 1st Saudi International Symposium on Bleeding Disorders in February 2004. Funny thing - the speakers are all from outside the "kingdom" -- they must be running scared to listen to a dhimi...