How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog) Read online

  HOW TO TAME A FOX

  (AND BUILD A DOG)

  HOW TO TAME A FOX (AND BUILD A DOG)

  Visionary Scientists and a Siberian Tale of Jump-Started Evolution

  Lee Alan Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut

  The University of Chicago Press

  Chicago and London

  The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

  The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

  © 2017 by Lee Alan Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

  Published 2017

  Printed in the United States of America

  26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 1 2 3 4 5

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-44418-5 (cloth)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-44421-5 (e-book)

  DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226444215.001.0001

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Dugatkin, Lee Alan, 1962– author. | Trut, L. N. (Lyudmila Nikolaevna), author.

  Title: How to tame a fox (and build a dog) : visionary scientists and a Siberian tale of jump-started evolution / Lee Alan Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut.

  Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016045441 | ISBN 9780226444185 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226444215 (e-book)

  Subjects: LCSH: Silver fox—Genetic engineering. | Domestication. | Evolutionary genetics. | Animal genetic engineering—Russia (Federation)—Siberia. | Genetics, Experimental—Russia (Federation)—Siberia. | Belyaev, D. K. | Geneticists—Soviet Union.

  Classification: LCC SF405.F8 D84 2017 | DDC 636.9776—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016045441

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  Dedicated to the memory of Dmitri Belyaev, the visionary scientist, charismatic leader, and kind soul behind it all

  Contents

  Prologue: Why Can’t a Fox Be More like a Dog?

  1: A Bold Idea

  2: Fire-Breathing Dragons No More

  3: Ember’s Tail

  4: Dream

  5: Happy Family

  6: Delicate Interactions

  7: The Word and Its Meaning

  8: An SOS

  9: Clever as a Fox

  10: The Commotion in the Genes

  Gallery of color plates

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Prologue: Why Can’t a Fox Be More like a Dog?

  Suppose you wanted to build the perfect dog from scratch. What would be the key ingredients in the recipe? Loyalty and smarts would be musts. Cute would be as well, perhaps with gentle eyes, and a curly, bushy tail that wags in joy just in anticipation of your appearance. And you might toss in a mutt-like mottled fur that seems to scream out “I may not be beautiful but you know that I love you and I need you.”

  The thing is that you needn’t bother building this. Lyudmila Trut (one of the authors of this book) and Dmitri Belyaev have already built it for you. The perfect dog. Except it’s not a dog, it’s a fox. A domesticated one. They built it quickly—mind-bogglingly fast for constructing a brand new biological creature. It took them less than sixty years, a blink of evolutionary time compared to the time it took our ancestors to domesticate wolves to dogs. They built it in the often unbearable minus 40°F cold of Siberia, where Lyudmila and, before her, Dmitri have been running one of the longest, most incredible experiments on behavior and evolution ever devised. The results are adorable tame foxes that would lick your face and melt your heart.

  Many articles have been written about the fox domestication experiment, but this book is the first full telling of the story. The story of the loveable foxes, the scientists, the caretakers (often poor locals who devoted themselves to work they never fully understood, but would sacrifice everything for), the experiments, the political intrigue, the near tragedies and the tragedies, the love stories, the behind-the-scenes doings. They’re all in these pages.

  It all started back in the 1950s, and it continues to this day, but for just a moment travel with us to 1974.

  One clear, crisp spring morning in that year, with the sun shining on the not yet melted winter snow, Lyudmila moved into a little house on the edge of an experimental fox farm in Siberia with an extraordinary little fox named Pushinka, Russian for “tiny ball of fuzz.” Pushinka was a beautiful female with piercing black eyes, silver-tipped black fur, and a swatch of white running along her left cheek. She had recently celebrated her first birthday, and her tame behavior and dog-like ways of showing affection made her beloved by all at the fox farm. Lyudmila and her fellow scientist and mentor Dmitri Belyaev had decided that it was time to see whether Pushinka was so domesticated that she would be comfortable making the great leap to becoming truly domestic. Could this little fox actually live with people in a home?

  Dmitri Belyaev was a visionary scientist, a geneticist working in Russia’s vitally important commercial fur industry. Research in genetics was strictly prohibited at the time Belyaev began his career, and he had accepted his post in fur breeding because he could carry out studies under the cover of that work. Twenty-two years before Pushinka was born, he had launched an experiment that was unprecedented in the study of animal behavior. He began to breed tame foxes. He wanted to mimic the domestication of the wolf into the dog, with the silver fox, which is a close genetic cousin of the wolf, as a stand-in. If he could basically turn a fox into a dog-like animal, he might solve the long-standing riddle of how domestication comes about. Perhaps he would even discover important insights about human evolution; after all, we were, essentially, domesticated apes.

  Fossils could provide clues about when and where the domestication of species had occurred, and a rough sense of the stages of change in the animals along the way. But they couldn’t explain how domestication got started in the first place. How had fierce wild animals, intensely averse to human contact, become docile enough for our human ancestors to have started breeding them? How had our own formidable wild ancestors started on the transition to being human? An experiment in real-time, to breed the wild out of an animal, might provide the answers.

  Belyaev’s plan for the experiment was audacious. The domestication of a species was thought to happen gradually, over thousands of years. How could he expect any significant results, even if the experiment ran for decades? And yet, here was a fox like Pushinka, who was so much like a dog that she came when her name was called and could be let out on the farm without a leash. She followed the workers around as they did their chores, and she loved going for walks with Lyudmila along the quiet country road that ran by the farm on the outskirts of Novosibirsk, Siberia. And Pushinka was just one of the hundreds of foxes they had bred for tameness.

  By moving into the house on the edge of the farm with Pushinka, Lyudmila was taking the fox experiment into unprecedented terrain. Their fifteen years of genetic selection for tameness in their foxes had clearly paid off. Now, Belyaev and she wanted to discover whether by living with Lyudmila, Pushinka would develop the special bond with her that dogs have with their human companions. Except for house pets, most domesticated animals do not form close relationships with humans, and by far the most intense affection and loyalty forms between owners and dogs. What made the difference? Had that deep human-animal bond developed over a long time? Or might
this affinity for people be a change that could emerge quickly, as with so many other changes Lyudmila and Belyaev had seen in the foxes already? Would living with a human come naturally to a fox that was so domesticated?

  Lyudmila had chosen Pushinka to be her companion within moments of first setting eyes on her, when she was an adorable little three-week-old, frolicking with her brothers and sisters. When Lyudmila looked into Pushinka’s eyes, she felt an intense sense of connection, more than with any fox before. Pushinka also showed a remarkable enthusiasm for human contact. She would wag her tail furiously with excitement whenever Lyudmila or one of the farm workers came near her, whimpering with glee and looking up eagerly at them with an unmistakable request that they stop and pet her. No one could walk by her without doing so.

  Lyudmila had decided to move Pushinka into the house after she had turned one year old, mated, and was carrying a litter of pups. That way, Lyudmila would be able to observe not only how Pushinka adjusted to living with her, but whether pups born in the company of humans might socialize differently than did other pups born on the farm. On March 28, 1975, ten days before she was due to deliver, Pushinka was taken to her new home.

  The 700-square-foot house had three rooms in addition to a kitchen and bathroom. Lyudmila had moved a bed, a small couch, and a desk into one room to serve as her bedroom and office combined, and she had built a den in another room for Pushinka. The third room was used as a common area, furnished with a few chairs and a table, where Lyudmila ate her meals and where, on occasion, research assistants or other visitors could gather. Pushinka would be free to roam throughout.

  When Pushinka arrived early in the morning of the first day, she began racing around the house, in and out of rooms, highly agitated. Normally, pregnant foxes so close to giving birth spend most of their time lying down in their dens, but Pushinka paced and paced from one room to the other. She’d scratch at the wood chips that lined her den floor and lie down briefly, but then she’d jump right back up again and make another circuit of the house. Though she was comfortable with Lyudmila and came over to her often for some petting, Pushinka was clearly unsettled. These strange new surroundings seemed to be causing her extreme anxiety. She wouldn’t eat anything all day except for a small piece of cheese and an apple that Lyudmila had brought with her for her own snack.

  That afternoon, Lyudmila was joined by her daughter, Marina, and Marina’s friend, Olga. The girls wanted to be there for the big move-in day. At about 11:00 p.m., with Pushinka still pacing around the house, the three of them turned in for the night, the two girls lying down on the floor under blankets next to Lyudmila’s bed. To their great surprise, and Lyudmila’s relief, as they began to drift off to sleep, Pushinka silently sneaked into their room and lay down right alongside the girls. Then, she, too, finally relaxed and went to sleep.

  As Lyudmila would discover over the course of many months with Pushinka, the lovable little fox would not only become perfectly comfortable living with her, she would become every bit as loyal as the most loyal of dogs.

  1

  A Bold Idea

  One afternoon in the fall of 1952, thirty-five-year-old Dmitri Belyaev, clad in his signature dark suit and tie, boarded the overnight train from Moscow to Tallinn, the capital of Estonia on the coast of the Baltic Sea. Across the waters from Finland, but at the time, a world away, Tallinn was shrouded behind the Iron Curtain that divided Eastern and Western Europe after World War II. Belyaev was on his way to speak with a trusted colleague, Nina Sorokina, who was the chief breeder at one of the many fox farms he collaborated with in developing breeding techniques. Trained as a geneticist, he was a lead scientist at the government-run Central Research Laboratory on Fur Breeding Animals in Moscow, charged with helping breeders at the many commercial fox and mink farms run by the government to produce more beautiful and luxurious furs. Belyaev was hoping that Sorokina would agree to help him test a theory he had about how the domestication of animals had come about, one of the most beguiling open questions in animal evolution.

  He carried with him several packs of cigarettes, a simple meal of hard-boiled eggs and hard salami, and a number of books and scientific papers. A voracious reader, he always traveled with a good novel or book of plays or poems, along with a number of science books and papers, on his many long train rides to the fox and mink farms scattered across the vast expanses of the Soviet Union. Even as he was intent to keep up with the rush of important new findings and theories in genetics and animal behavior pouring out of labs in Europe and the US, he always made time for his love of Russian literature. He was a particular enthusiast of works reflecting on the hardships endured by his countrymen through hundreds of years of political turmoil, works that were all too relevant to the upheavals Stalin had inflicted on the Soviet Union since his ascent to power decades earlier.

  Dmitri’s taste in literature ranged from the cunning folktales of the country’s beloved storyteller Nikolai Leskov, in which unschooled peasants often outwit their more learned superiors, to the mystical poetry of Alexander Blok, who wrote presciently shortly before the 1917 revolution that “a great event was coming.” One of his favorite works was the play Boris Godunov, by Russia’s great nineteenth-century poet and playwright Alexander Pushkin. A cautionary tale inspired by Shakespeare’s Henry plays, it recounts the tempestuous reign of the popular reformist tsar, who opened up trade with the West and instituted educational reform, but also dealt harshly with his enemies. Godunov’s sudden death from a stroke in 1605 ushered in the bloody era of civil war known as the Time of Troubles. That brutal period 350 years ago was mirrored in the terror and devastation Stalin had perpetuated as Dmitri was growing up in the 1930s and ’40s. Stalin’s purges and his ill-conceived agricultural policies produced wave after wave of famine.

  Stalin had also supported a brutal crackdown on work in genetics, and in 1952 it was still a very dangerous time to be a geneticist in Russia. Belyaev followed the new developments in the field at great risk to himself and his career. With Stalin’s backing, for more than a decade Trofim Lysenko, a charlatan who posed as a scientist, had wielded enormous influence over the Soviet scientific community, and one of his primary causes was a vehement crusade against genetics research. Many of the best researchers had been deposed from their positions, either thrown into prison camps or forced to resign and accept menial positions. Some had been killed, including Dmitri’s older brother, who was a leading light in the field. Before Lysenko’s rise to power, Russia was a world leader in genetics. A number of the best Western geneticists—such as American Herman Muller—had even made the long journey east for the chance to work with Soviet geneticists. Now Russian genetics was in a shambles, with any kind of serious research strictly prohibited.

  But Dmitri was determined not to allow Lysenko and his thugs to keep him from conducting research. His work in fox and mink breeding had given him an idea about the great outstanding mystery of domestication, and it was simply too good for him not to find a way to test it.

  The methods of breeding employed by our ancestors who domesticated the sheep, goats, pigs, and cows that were so vital to the development of civilization were well understood. Dmitri employed them in his work every day at fox and mink farms. But the question of how domestication had gotten started in the first place had remained a riddle. The ancestors of domesticated animals, in their wild state, would likely have simply run away in fear or attacked if a human had approached. What happened to change this and make breeding them possible?

  Belyaev thought he might have found the answer. Paleontologists had argued that the first animal to be domesticated was the dog, and by this time, evolutionary biologists were sure that dogs evolved from wolves. Dmitri had become fascinated by the question how an animal as naturally averse to human contact, and as potentially aggressive as a wolf, had evolved over tens of thousands of years into the lovable, loyal dog. His work breeding foxes had provided him an important clue, and he wanted to test the theory he was still in
the early stages of developing. He thought he knew what had first set the process in motion.

  Belyaev was traveling to Tallinn to ask Nina Sorokina to help him get started on a bold and unprecedented project—he wanted to mimic the evolution of the wolf into the dog. Because the fox is a close genetic cousin of the wolf, it seemed plausible to him that whatever genes were involved in the evolution of wolves into dogs were shared by the silver foxes raised on the farms all over the Soviet Union.1 As a lead scientist at the Central Research Laboratory on Fur Breeding Animals, he was in the perfect position to conduct the experiment he had in mind. Dmitri’s breeding work was of such importance to the Soviet government, because of the badly needed foreign currency the sale of furs brought into the government’s coffers, that he believed as long as he explained the experiment as an effort to improve the production of furs, it could be run safely.

  Even so, the fox domestication experiment he had in mind was sufficiently risky that it would have to be run far away from the prying eyes of Lysenko’s goons in Moscow. That’s why Dmitri had decided to ask Nina to help him get it started under the auspices of her breeding program at a fox farm in faraway Tallin. He had collaborated with her on several successful projects to produce shinier and silkier furs, and he knew she was very talented. They had developed a good relationship, and Dmitri believed he could trust her and that she would trust him.

  His plan for the experiment was on a scale never before carried out in genetic research, which worked primarily with tiny viruses and bacteria, or fast-breeding flies and mice, not animals like foxes, which mate only once a year. Due to the time it would take to breed each generation of foxes, the experiment might take many years to produce results, perhaps even decades, or longer. But he felt launching it was worth both the long commitment and the risk. If it did produce results, they might well be groundbreaking.