Diane K. Boyd
speaker
610 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Diane K. Boyd’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Yeah, and urban coyotes are not real wild. They'll eat whatever they get. They habitualize, right? Totally.
Totally.
Yeah, and it's really interesting to me how amazingly versatile coyotes are because I am starting to see wolves. being the same, that they're much more generous than I would have thought, and that they can adapt to situations pretty easily, like that wolf pack raising its pups in the subdivision. Crazy.
Right.
They do eat dogs. Yeah. When every time I go up to my little cabin, I am very conscientious about not leaving my dogs outside without me there. Yeah. I did have a big Malamute killed by a Moutline about 35 years ago.
It's a big dog. Yeah. Moutline killed it. They don't care.
Yes. Very strange.
So this is interesting. I mean, you're a voracious reader, obviously. Have you ever heard of the study in Russia? Yes, I know what you're going with.
Go ahead, explain it. The book title is How to Tam a Fox and Create a Dog. One of the most interesting books I've ever read, but this is true. I'm not saying that the 400 wolves is not true, but I doubt it. This is true science supported by photos that in the 50s or so, this Russian scientist was starting a study of foxes. And he wanted to select simply for tameness.
And by selecting the tamest male and female from these different fur farms, these are captive fox to start with. that he would see if their morphology or their physical appearance changed. So he went to fur farms and he was picking just for tameness. And eventually, after many years, he'd go to the fur farm and this fox would lunge at him and snarl, he'd leave it.
And they'd say, oh, this one over here in the corner, she rubs against the fence. When you go to feed her, you take that one. But over years, they have photographs of these foxes, and they start changing. They were silver fox, a lot of them, instead of red. And they're black and white. They kind of look like border collies. And they start to have, you know, tipped over ears.
And they got pictures of the guys in the pens. One person's bent over, and there's a fox standing on their back while they're putting out the food bowl. Crazy. Yes. And so that was in a very short time that they changed the behavior – the picture –
Go ahead.
Right.
Friendly.
I'm glad you read it because I suggested it to friends because I'm passionate about all canids, well, all things wild. And it was one of the most amazing pieces I read. Because if you think about humans domesticating animals, we took some kind of a primitive form of a horse and a cow and a sheep and we got our breeds now.
For years, they had bears in captivity, brown bears in Europe forever, living in king's castles and riding the bicycles in the circus and whatever. But in terms of North America, of course, we've been here anywhere in the world. Nobody's domesticated the African wild hunting dog. Nobody's domesticated European lynx.
Nobody has successfully taken a wild predator and bred it long enough with heavy artificial pressure by our selection, like shooting them in the head if they aren't friendly, and turned it into a different animal with the exception of wolves.
I know. A lot of people have. Or coyotes. Yes. You keep coyotes, and after 15 generations, they still look like coyotes.
They do. And this little thing with the fur fox, it was extraordinary artificial selection pressure to see that.
Showing 481–500 of 610 · page 25 of 31
← Previous
Next →