Humans have spent several millennia trying to domesticate dogs but scientists recently managed to do that with foxes in only 60 years. The process can teach us some interesting facts about domestication.
Nature Ecology and Evolution journal published the study in which researchers analyzed the red fox genomes and found specific groups of genes that differed between the fierce and the friendly ones.
The research started in 1959 in Russia. The geneticist who started it, Dmitri Belyaev, unfortunately, didn’t live to see the final results of his hypothesis, but his hunch was confirmed.
