Dog Sense by John Bradshaw Page B

of domestication upon canids’ appearance, though this is largely unsubstantiated. The appearance of some of the tame foxes produced in the experiment is different from that of the wild variety; a few, though by no means all, of the tame foxes have unusual dog-like features, such as curly tails, floppy ears, and white patches on their coats. Some authorities have claimed that such features are part and parcel of domestication, that selection for tameness inevitably brings with it all these changes in appearance. Unfortunately the data don’t support this idea. True, more “tame” foxes have floppy ears than do the “wild” ones, but they are still in a tiny minority—fewer than a quarter of 1 percent. Fewer than one in ten of the tame foxes have a curly tail. Fewer than 15 percent have a white “star” on their forehead. Exactly how these changes became slightly more common in the “tame” foxes is still something of a mystery, but they are still rare, and probably tell us little or nothing about domestication.
    While the Siberian experiment produced tame foxes, there is a significant difference between these foxes and domestic dogs in terms of the extent to which they are—or, it seems, can be—“domesticated.” In dogs, the process of acclimatizing to humans does not disrupt normal social relations with other dogs. By contrast, when the foxes develop a relationship with humans they seem to lose interest in socializing with other foxes. Red foxes—the same species as the farm-fox—are rather sociable animals, often living in groups of four to six animals. Yet thetame farm-foxes are solitary animals—as devoted as dogs but as independent as cats. This contrasts with both the domestic dog (and the domestic cat), whose social relationships can and indeed normally do develop simultaneously with humans and with members of their own species (and perhaps other species as well).
    Thus if the tame foxes can tell us anything useful about the dog, it is that tameness, while a useful first step, is not the same thing as full domestication. Tameness permits the replacement of one set of social responses—directed at members of the same species—with another—directed at humans. Dogs, by contrast, need to retain both, in order to continue functioning as members of their own species while simultaneously establishing and maintaining relationships with their human owners. Nothing in the farm-fox experiment sheds any light on how this capacity might have come about during the domestication of the dog.
    The farm-fox experiment does show that selection for tameness can be extremely rapid—indeed, it seems to be fast enough to suggest a plausible first stage in the domestication of the wolf. The key difference between the two animals is, of course, that the foxes were a captive, isolated population that was deliberately selected for tameness. The wolves that were sufficiently tolerant of humans, on the other hand, selected themselves to be the ancestors of domestic dogs: Those that were easily tamed could start breeding in the proximity of humans; those that could not rejoined the wild population. The appearance of dog-like behavior in the tame foxes, such as licking of humans’ faces and hands, and whimpering, also supports the idea that the dog’s social repertoire is drawn not from that of the wolf exclusively but, rather, from an ancestral palette of possibilities inherited from the canids as a whole.
    The farm-foxes tell us that natural variation in tameness within a species can be sufficient, in at least one of the canids, to produce individuals that could be the ancestors of a domestic animal. This experiment thus provides us with a model for the initial separation between wild wolves and those that were naturally tame enough to live alongside people. The resources that the naturally tame wolves were able to obtain from humans must have been