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Baby Foxes Going to the Dogs
February 8, 2005—Young foxes, or kits, scamper in a cage in Siberia, Russia, where they are part of a 45-year research project to domesticate foxes. Each generation has been selectively bred for tameness—fearlessness and nonaggression toward humans. By now the foxes in the project behave like pet dogs, barking and wagging their tails at humans.
Also like pet dogs, the domesticated foxes can "read" human cues (pointing, for example) much better than their wild cousins or even tame chimpanzees, according to a new study published today in Current Biology. The study authors call such behavior social intelligence. They say its appearance in domesticated foxes may help us better understand how intelligence developed in humans and other animals.
Source (with picture - they are as cute as a little pie too).
The paper:
Current Biology
Volume 15, Issue 3 , 8 February 2005, Pages 226-230
Social Cognitive Evolution in Captive Foxes Is a Correlated By-Product of Experimental Domestication
Brian Hare, Irene Plyusnina, Natalie Ignacio, Olesya Schepina, Anna Stepika, Richard Wrangham and Lyudmila Trut
Abstract
Dogs have an unusual ability for reading human communicative gestures (e.g., pointing) in comparison to either nonhuman primates (including chimpanzees) or wolves [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8]. Although this unusual communicative ability seems to have evolved during domestication [6 and 8], it is unclear whether this evolution occurred as a result of direct selection for this ability, as previously hypothesized [8], or as a correlated by-product of selection against fear and aggression toward humans [9]—as is the case with a number of morphological and physiological changes associated with domestication [11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 and 18]. We show here that fox kits from an experimental population selectively bred over 45 years to approach humans fearlessly and nonaggressively (i.e., experimentally domesticated) are not only as skillful as dog puppies in using human gestures but are also more skilled than fox kits from a second, control population not bred for tame behavior (critically, neither population of foxes was ever bred or tested for their ability to use human gestures) [11 and 12]. These results suggest that sociocognitive evolution has occurred in the experimental foxes, and possibly domestic dogs, as a correlated by-product of selection on systems mediating fear and aggression, and it is likely the observed social cognitive evolution did not require direct selection for improved social cognitive ability.