I Can't Stop Thinking About Domesticated Foxes
Men born in buildings with no electricity lived to see the moon landing.
Life is mostly a pretty dull affair. Go to work. Drink your coffee. Make some small talk. Do some typing. Go home. When you wake up in the morning, do you really expect the unexpected? Do you anticipate being thrilled by a new discovery, hearing word of some great leap forward for mankind?
I sure don’t. And I suspect that the world didn’t always feel like this, before the internet and mass communication filled in all the edges of the map. Humans lived for most of history in a state wherein fresh knowledge must’ve felt like a revelation, thrilling and likely very terrifying. Think about being the first caveman to discover fire, or the first bystander to watch an airplane take flight. Think about meeting a man who sailed in from another country and being able to ask him “what’s life like over there?” with real fascination, rather than the polite curiosity that might punctuate your conversation with the exchange student who sat next to you in your freshman seminar.
Even if new things could still astound, there just isn’t much that’s new. On the modern scientific and technological front, much has been written about this: how a man who lived from 1890 to 1960 would have lived to see a world radically transformed in front of him in every way imaginable. Not so in recent decades.
Economists fret about this perceived stagnation from a human progress perspective; I just think it means Gabe is more bored with life every day.
Life was far worse in most ways prior to right now, and I wouldn’t genuinely want to live in 1950, much less 1450. But I do feel confident that many have lived before me at times when the astounding nature of the daily world had the capacity to really, truly astound them. This is all the definition of comfortable ennui, I know, but I imagine I don’t sound completely crazy.
With all of that said, however—Have you heard about the silver fox breeding program going on in Siberia?:
For the last 59 years, a team of Russian geneticists led by Lyudmila Trut have been running one of the most important biology experiments of the 20th, and now 21st, century…Today, the domesticated foxes at an experimental farm near the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk, Siberia are inherently as calm as any lapdog. What’s more, they look eerily dog-like. All of this is the result of what is known as the silver fox, or farm fox, domestication study.
Is this news to you?? Has everyone known about this and just not bothered to tell me?
For over 60 years now, Lyudmila Trut—now 89 years old, apparently still running the show, having joined as a graduate student shortly after the program’s inception—and her team of scientists have been selectively breeding Siberian silver foxes. When raising new generations, the sole trait she and the team look for in the pups is warmth towards humans. If a fox tolerates or even enjoys human contact, that fox is allowed to breed the next generation. And so and and so on.
Dog. Cat. Fish. Rodent. Bird. You thought we had all the pets we were going to get, didn’t you? Thank God, you were wrong.
The scientific impetus for the program is the study of a phenomenon called “domestication syndrome,” wherein all species domesticated by humans tend to develop sets of common physical traits over time: floppy ears, short curly tails, juvenilized facial and body features, reduced stress hormone levels, mottled fur, and relatively long reproductive seasons.
Blah blah blah. You can go do some book-learning on your own time. What really matters here, is that foxes are now cat-dogs that laugh when you rub their stomachs(!). They wag their tails in excitement when they greet their favorite human. They walk around on leashes. What would it take to make you feel like the first yokel in your town to see a Model T sputter by?
I’ve seen cute fox videos on Instagram. I think I was dimly aware that some people kept foxes as pets, but I assumed it was just as a somewhat dangerous, ill-advised exotic curiosity. I didn’t know a team of wizards in the cold, remote East were spending a century facilitating this for us.
It’s been clear for awhile that the domestication of foxes has promise. Trut wrote in 1999 that by the tenth generation, 18 percent of fox pups were “elite” (her term for the most ideally-docile and human loving pups); by the 20th, the figure had reached 35 percent. Today elite foxes make up 70 to 80 percent of the experimentally selected population.
Judging by the spat of articles on the Russian program over the past six years, there’s been a recent surge in interest on the topic. PBS did an article on the Russian fox domestication program in 2017. The article talks about how adorable the foxes are, and how they behave like dogs. But, cowardly defeatists that they are, PBS flatly states that foxes make poor indoor housepets because they still have so many messy behaviors that are too difficult to train out of them.
Fucking buzzkill poetry assassins. I like the First Amendment just fine, but in my cult-of-personality dictatorship, publishing something like this will carry criminal penalties.
It gets worse, my friends: PBS notes that the Soviets funded Trut’s program extensively, something the modern Russian government now has little interest in doing. I’ve also discovered that 35 U.S. states actually ban the ownership of foxes outright, including Illinois. I’m not here to hard-sell you on the need for a communist revolution, I’m just stating some facts.
People born in buildings without electricity lived to see a spaceship carry men to the moon and back, but we can’t be solutions-oriented about finishing off the home stretch of the greatest miracle of the modern age. I refuse to let media hacks, dead-eyed bureaucrats and activist legislators rob me of my sense of wonder here.
Sicko elites can slash funding and cram through legislation to try to kill a font of pure whimsy and joy, but there is no fighting nature itself. A Science.org article from 2020 reports that in the U.K., rural red foxes are self-domesticating, entering towns and developing an affection for humans. The global ruling class can do what they like; God Himself wants you to have a fox curled up in your lap in the winter.
I’m going to go back to work soon. But even as today blurs into tomorrow blurs intothenextdayblursintothenextday, I’m going to think about foxes to cheer myself up. I’m going to remind myself that it isn’t all just the same, forever.
(Follow Save A Fox Rescue for some great content.)
I love this. Thank you for this delightful essay, and your fox-optimism.
Here is something I recently wrote on dog domestication, that includes links to articles on domestication of dogs:
https://doctrixperiwinkle.substack.com/p/the-paragon-of-animals
This is the valuable intel that the internet was invented for.
Where is the Kickstarter for supporting cat-dog fox research?