How to Tame a Fox (and Turn it into a Dog): A Siberian Evolutionary Experiment

"Somewhere far away in Siberia live fluffy four-legged creatures, with floppy ears and cheerfully wagging tails. They are no less friendly and obedient to humans than any house dog. But these are not dogs, they are foxes. They emerged as a result of the most astonishing selection experiment in history, as if time was compressed, with an evolutionary path that took thousands of years in nature being traversed in just 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 the scientists wanted to reproduce the course of evolution from wolf to dog in real time, to see how the domestication process occurs. The book “How to Tame a Fox” is an amazing story about the history of this experiment, about the everyday work of the scientists, and the bonds that have connected us with domestic animals for thousands of years."