Raffaela Lesch

It is really, really difficult to get a very

super clean, non-biased data set because you just have that variability across the population in personality.

Yeah, no, the Russian fox fur experiment was started by Dmitry Beliaev.

They basically wanted to domesticate a population of foxes within a human lifespan.

And they took foxes from Canada that were already in a fur farm setup and then basically continued to select those for the most tamest individuals.

And those foxes now would be considered domesticated.

So that specific line that has been

selected for tame behaviors, they are incredibly, incredibly friendly and eager to interact with humans.

So that could be a population of foxes that you can consider domesticated.

Yeah.

So their argument really was not that they started this whole process, that they weren't already pre-domesticated.

They were really just kind of trying to accelerate that process in like almost step two rather than

that initial step one.

So that criticism around the FOX experiment is very much present in domestication research.

And I think probably until we're able to really test the neural crest domestication syndrome hypothesis in a lot of detail, I assume that criticism won't go away because the neural crest domestication syndrome hypothesis also to a large degree is connected to the FOX experiment.

So I think a lot of that criticism is also connected to

that hypothesis in general.

But personally, I don't quite see all those points of criticism as an actual... Like invalidation of the hypothesis.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, so the blind spots here really are that we just looked at the entirety of the US and it was really that first glance of is it worth to investigate more?