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    How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog): Visionary Scientists and a Siberian Tale of Jump-Started Evolution
    How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog): Visionary Scientists and a Siberian Tale of Jump-Started Evolution
    How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog): Visionary Scientists and a Siberian Tale of Jump-Started Evolution
    Audiobook7 hours

    How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog): Visionary Scientists and a Siberian Tale of Jump-Started Evolution

    Written by Lee Alan Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut

    Narrated by Joe Hempel

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Tucked away in Siberia, there are furry, four-legged creatures with wagging tails and floppy ears that are as docile and friendly as any lapdog. But, despite appearances, these are not dogs-they are foxes. They are the result of the most astonishing experiment in breeding ever undertaken-imagine speeding up thousands of years of evolution into a few decades. In 1959, biologists Dmitri Belyaev and Lyudmila Trut set out to do just that, by starting with a few dozen silver foxes from fox farms in the USSR and attempting to recreate the evolution of wolves into dogs in real time in order to witness the process of domestication.

    Most accounts of the natural evolution of wolves place it over a span of about 15,000 years, but within a decade, Belyaev and Trut's fox breeding experiments had resulted in puppy-like foxes with floppy ears, piebald spots, and curly tails. Along with these physical changes came genetic and behavioral changes, as well. The foxes were bred using selection criteria for tameness, and with each generation, they became increasingly interested in human companionship. Trut has been the lead scientist on this work since Belyaev's death in 1985, and with Lee Dugatkin, biologist and science writer, she tells the story of the adventure, science, politics, and love behind it all.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateSep 5, 2017
    ISBN9781541479876

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    Reviews for How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog)

    4.5/5

    54 ratings9 reviews

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    • 3/5
      In 1959, two Russian geneticists, Dmitry Belyayev and Lyudmila Trut, began a selective breeding experiment to see if they could witness the process leading to domestication. They weren't sure that it would work or, if it did, whether it would happen quickly enough for them to witness the results. Fortunately for them, their experiment was successful, eventually resulting in foxes that displayed some of the same behavioral and morphological features present in dogs, which allowed them to then more closely study how their wild and tame foxes differed from each other in terms of hormone production, vocalizations, etc.The first half of this book was more heavily focused on Soviet-era history and politics and the way they influenced this experiment. Due to Trofim Lysenko's restrictions on genetic research (Lysenko rejected Mendelian genetics), Belyayev and Trut had to be careful how they presented their experiment. In order to cover up their true intentions, they worked at a fox fur farm and claimed they were studying fox physiology in order to see if some foxes could be bred more frequently and therefore be more useful to the fur trade. While this portion was interesting, and I particularly enjoyed the descriptions of the increasingly tame new generations of foxes, I went into this expecting it to be more of a popular science book and was a bit disappointed at how little science was discussed.The second half focused a little more on scientific topics: gene activation and expression, the science of domestication, the idea of humans as "self-domesticated," studying fox vocalizations, etc. The cynical part of me sometimes wondered if the sudden increase in scientific background info was intended to distract readers from the rough patch (to put it mildly) that the fox domestication experiment hit after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Due to a sudden lack of funding, they had trouble keeping the foxes alive and had to resort to killing some of them (the book said they focused on the wild ones rather than tame, but still) and selling their fur for money.I don't do well with print nonfiction so I listened to this instead. Unfortunately, it was a little hard for me to follow along during some of the more science-heavy portions. Also, apparently the print version has pictures of the foxes, so I missed out on that.While I don't regret listening to this, it was too heavy on Soviet politics and history for me to call it a good popular science book. I'm also fairly certain that it wasn't a balanced look at the fox domestication experiment, and not only because Lyudmila Trut was one of the co-authors. The text was filled with fawning praise of Dmitry Belyayev - he had bucketloads of charisma and was apparently good to everyone. I couldn't help but note the one mention in the text of the time someone brought up potential ethical issues with one of his ideas (can't remember the specifics, something to do with chimps, maybe?) and the way he dismissed them as "short-sighted."The way the domesticated fox descriptions were handled also seemed overly glowing. The narrator's tone warmed every time he described the foxes playing, bonding with their handlers, or doing cute things - I mean, yes, the foxes were fun, but the line between "these foxes are part of an experiment" and "these foxes are cute pets" was really blurred. And then the Institute really did start selling some of the foxes as pets. I had to laugh as Lyudmila Trut's supposed concern that she might not find enough people willing to take in foxes as pets - there are plenty of people who literally try to keep tigers and wolves as pets, so I imagine the real concern was more with whether there'd be enough people willing to pay handsomely for them and then deal with the issues involved with having an exotic pet, not that the book touched on that aspect at all. Plus, from what I've read even "tame" foxes have behavioral quirks you can't train them out of - again, not touched on in this book at all.Overall, this made for a decent enough few hours of listening, but it felt pretty biased and people looking for a more science-focused read will probably be disappointed.(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)
    • 4/5
      As teenagers, many years ago, Lee Alan Dugatkin and I used to be playground teachers together, each of us secretly pocketing softcovers to read when our assigned areas were devoid of frolicking children. This may have been an early clue of his love of books and penchant for an academic career. Dugatkin, an evolutionary biologist who teaches at the University of Louisville, is also a science writer with a journalistic touch who is a master of finding little known,interesting stories. His Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose revealed fascinating debates not just about evolution and biology but also between snobby Europeans and their upstart revolutionary cousins in the New World. How to Tame a Fox gets into some interesting territory about how the Cold War affected East-West scientific relations and challenged funding for this amazing 60 year old experiment, and going, to domesticate wild foxes into something like a dog. The book excels in describing the scientists who pioneered this brave experiment (in the face of official Soviet hostility to genetics), especially its brave leader, Dmitri Belyaev and Dugatkin's co-author, Lyudmila Trut. They do a great job, as well, of describing the true stars of the book, the foxes, whose behavior continues to range from wild and defensive to truly tame and dog-like, depending on how they were bred. But as the book shows, the foxes have also changed physically, becoming more like dogs, so much so that in recent years some brave souls in Russia, Western Europe, and North America have even adopted them. The experiment may last another 60 years. And it is amazing to see living proof, in the blink of an eye, of the theory of evolution. The parts that most heavily engaged in the science of genetics was the one area that I struggled with, much like when Michael Lewis attempt to explain financial derivatives in The Big Short. It's a fine line between writing a science book for the layman and someone more knowledgeable. Dugatkin probably got it right for had there been less science, someone surely would be bitching about it. To me, the book's pleasures are in its more human details and stories.
    • 4/5
      In the 1950s, a Russian biologist named Dmitry Belyaev began a dangerous experiment in fox domestication. It was dangerous not because of the foxes, but because of the primacy in Russian science of Trofim Lysenko, an agronomist who rejected Mendelian genetics. Belyaev and his partner, Lyudmila Trut, persisted anyway, working with Russian commercial silver fox farms. Initially, they presented their work as an effort to increase the productivity of the fox farms. Many domesticated animals can breed more that once a year, and this could be a great boost to productivity.

      But in time, as Lysenko's grip on Soviet science faded, and as the first generations of their fox work began to show results, they were slowly able to come out of the shadow. Belyaev became director of the Institute of Cytology & Genetics, while Trut directly headed the silver fox project. She selected the calmest foxes, bred them and selected the calmest of the pups, and in just a few generations, they had calm, friendly, even affectionate foxes.

      These foxes also had curly tails, floppy ears, white patches, and shorter, rounder snouts.

      The domestication of the wolf is believed to have taken thousands of years. Under the controlled conditions of the fox farm that Belyaev and Trut created, Trut and her assistants produced domesticated foxes in just a decade or so. As they became more secure in their positions, and the work progressed, they also maintained unchanged control foxes, and foxes selected for aggressiveness. In the process, they learned an amazing amount about the process of domestication, that in turn teaches us about the process of the domestication of the wolf, cattle, and other animals, with insights into why some animals have been successfully domesticated and others, seemingly similar, haven't been.

      This is a fascinating story, about foxes, genetics, and science, and about the effects of politics on science.

      It also has both delightful stories of individual tame foxes, and pictures of incredibly cute tame foxes.

      This is a definite win. Highly recommended.

      I bought this book.
    • 4/5
      Great story of this long term (almost 60 years) experiment in domesticating foxes. Mixes the science of genetics with the history of Russian science and the Soviet Union, plus the people who made the work possible.
    • 5/5
      Fascinating tale of the decades-long Soviet, then Russian, experiment to domesticate a line of silver foxes being raised in fox farms for their fur. I'd heard of this experiment before, but knew nothing about it in detail. It started in the early 1950s, breeding the calmest vixens to the calmest dog foxes. In the first years, "calmest" was not very different from "normal" - which meant aggressive. And that again, and again, and again. The book introduces us to the scientists most involved with the program, and their sometimes difficult relationship with the government. The researcher who started this, Dimitri Belyaev, had "sell" the research as a means of improving the lucrative fur farming business. This book described the chilling effect of Lysenko's campaign against genetics and science-based research made on biologists and especially geneticists in the Soviet Union. It made me wonder how much similar anti-scientists in power in America will stunt the pursuit of evidence-based science research in America. Belyayev also reached out to Western researchers, and they reached out to him to keep the international scientific community in the loop, even during the depths of the Cold War. His part of the story is often about keeping the research going. The book also follows the primary "on-the-ground" researcher, Lyudmila Trut, and how she interacted with the foxes, took meticulous notes, and did experiments Her part of the story is about getting the data to prove or disprove various theories on the larger scale, and getting to interact with individual foxes with individual personalities on the smaller scale.The timeline of the experiment is the backbone of the book, propelling it forward as each new generation of foxes becomes incrementally more domesticated. Subsequent generations change more than their tolerance for humans: their manner changes, their looks change, their social awareness changes. The theories of the cause of the changes are put forward. Then the experiments that they did to test those theories are explained at a lightly technical level.The experiment is still on-going. This is a fascinating book explaining the scientific issues being understood, as well as areas yet to understand. It is also a fascinating tale of the more political level of being allowed to do the studies, and how precarious life as a scientist can be in a culture that denies science. Belyayev's elder brother, a geneticist, was arrested and executed for his belief, as a researcher in population genetics, in Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics. And a final theme is the exploration of what it means to be domesticated, or tame. This sheds light on how dogs became domesticated from wolves. It also provides insights on the chimp and the bonobo societies. Finally, have humans, in essence, domesticated themselves?Highly recommended to those interested in how the tame fox experiement happened, and how it is going. Also highly recommended as a meditation on the place of science in society and humans in the world.
    • 5/5
      This was a charming look at epigenetics, and one of the only downsides was that word wasn't mentioned at all. It's a well known study, but I've not come across the details before. There is a very skilled blend between telling the personal stories of the scientists involved (hardly and easy proposition for some of the Russians) and a pop-sci level explanation of genetics and epigenetics (the difference between heritable traits through DNA sequence, and modifications that activate (or not) those changes. Epigenetic markers were not previously thought to be heritable (cf Lamark vs Darwin). I could easily have coped with considerably more discussion one this point.The scientific story starts way back in coldwar russia before the structure of DNA had been elucidated, and the concept of genes was limited to 'something which is heritable'. A visionary scientists thought that russian's silver fox fur farms would be an ideal place to study some of the factors that influence domestication. It had long been known that domesticated animals vary significantly (but along common lines) from their wild ancestors. Dimitriev thought that maybe the fox had enough ability to re-create the process that wolves had gone through. He started out small, but had already seen promising signs of change within 5 generations (1 per year) which is astonishingly fast. - by breading the tamest of the trapped populations with each other, and taking meticulous notes.
    • 5/5
      An excellent and fascinating book. Take an amazing science experiment, add in some fascinating political history, plus a great story - and add in pet foxes! Who wouldn't love a pet fox?(and this is coming from me - look at my profile pic). The author certainly had a great story to tell, but did a nice job of presenting and explaining the science behind this story of an ongoing experiment in Russia (started during the peak of the cold war) on how animals were domesticated (using wild foxes as a proxy for the wolf to dog transition). The telling is also admirable for being just the right length - I like reading about science, but too often popular science books feel like padded magazine articles. This book actually left you wanting a bit more! But then the story isn't done, so that makes sense.
    • 5/5
      Awesome read. I learned about the research and a lot about Russia and difficulties its scientists have had over the past 60 years. The main project was to breed domesticated foxes and observe them. Research projects focused on behavioral, morphological, and by the end of the book, genetic changes in the domestic foxes. Book draws from comparisons to other domesticated species. In summary some of the identified differences line up with dogs but not perfectly. The differences noted between tame foxes and control foxes provide insight to how domestication of dogs and other animals (including us) might have occurred.
    • 4/5
      Short but fun book about the Soviet/Russian project to breed tame foxes. Wolves and foxes are related enough to make the attempt plausible, but zebras and horses are also closely related enough to breed, and zebras haven’t been successfully domesticated despite numerous attempts, nor have deer except reindeer (even though they live near humans and aren’t usually aggressive towards us, not to mention being important food animals, all of which suggests domestication would be favored if it were feasible). The Soviets picked the least reactive and aggressive foxes and bred them; calmer foxes appeared within three breeding seasons. And slightly greater tameness also shortened their breeding cycle and raised fertility a bit higher, bolstering the theory that in-bred tameness had complex effects on the whole animal. (Unfortunately, these shorter mating cycles didn’t allow multiple fox generations within the same year—although the scientists had sold the project to the Soviet government on the promise of increasing fur production, the shorter cycles meant that the mothers didn’t produce enough milk for their pups, whom they ignored. The scientists hypothesized that a longer transition might have let milk production catch up with increased fertility, as with dogs and cats and pigs and cows.)Later generations began to exhibit tail-wagging, whining, licking hands, and rolling over for belly rubs—still later, some of the tame foxes’ tails curled, again like dogs. Tamer foxes retained juvenile behaviors longer than wild foxes—wild fox pups are “curious, playful, and relatively carefree when they are very young,” but that changes at around 45 days, when they become more cautious and anxious. After only a decade of breeding, tamer pups stayed curious and playful twice as long.Tame foxes began gazing into humans’ eyes, which for wild animals is a challenge that can start an attack. Humans themselves, though they weren’t supposed to interact differently with the foxes, couldn’t resist talking to them, petting them, and loving them. When dogs and owners gaze at one another, both see increased oxytocin, leading to increased interactions/petting, “a chemical lovefest.” Adult foxes began to engage in object play—extended play with objects that are known—which wild animals don’t do. (Birds, chimps, and even ants play (with mock fights), but play is usually skill practice.) The tamest fox one year lived with the main researcher for a while, like a dog, and when she returned to her group, she began seeking out caretakers when other foxes were being aggressive toward her. Tame foxes began to demonstrate loyalty to particular caretakers (unlike simply being calm around humans) and jealousy of other foxes who might take their favorites’ attention. They began to bark like guard dogs when strangers appeared. They learned social intelligence: tame fox pups were as smart as dog pups in interpreting human behavior, and smarter than wild fox pups. So selection acting on tameness brought social intelligence along with it, suggesting that there was no need for humans to have bred dogs to be smarter: it could just happen.The Soviets also tested their work by creating a line of incredibly aggressive foxes using the same selection procedures. Workers were terrified of the new line. When aggressive fox pups were swapped with tame fox pups and raised by mothers from the other line, the pups behaved like their genetic mothers. Genes clearly played vital roles, though tame foxes’ bonds with individual people also showed the role of learned behaviors. The genetic changes worked by changing production of hormones and neurochemicals, like oxytocin. These chemical pathways might help explain why the changes could happen so fast. Tame foxes had higher levels of serotonin than their wild cousins, as dogs have more than wolves. The evidence supports a theory of destabilizing selection—genes may be similar, but the activity of those genes is very different as between wolves and dogs, chimps and humans. The dramatic changes of domestication seemed to come not primarily from new genetic mutations that were then favored by selection, though that played a role, but from changes in the expression of existing genes that led to very different results. For example, tame foxes started being born with white stars on their foreheads, which happened because the embryonic cells responsible for coloring hair had been delayed in migrating to their places by two days, causing an error in the production of hair color. The expression of the relevant gene was affected by the other changes caused by selecting for tameness. We may even have selected ourselves for tameness using similar mechanisms—we have lower levels of stress hormones in groups than our chimp cousins, we can breed all year round, and our kids stay juvenile longer, like those of other domestic species. And the bonobo may be in the process of doing the same thing, though I’m not sure they’ll have a planet to inherit when their brains get as big as ours.Speaking of which, the collapse of the Russian economy nearly led to the fox project’s demise. Many foxes starved or nearly starved; others were selected for sale for fur to keep the project alive, a process that also deeply traumatized their caretakers. In 1999, however, a popular science article about the project came out in the US, and they received enough donations to stay afloat, because humans are sentimental. Maybe someday you’ll be able to get your own tame fox pup.