A Soviet Fox for Post-Soviet Man

An experiment to domesticate foxes began in the mid-twentieth century and continues to this day.

Last fall, a video of a fox traveling in the Moscow Metro appeared on the RuNet, or Russian internet. It got millions of views. The reddish-orange creature was perched on her owner’s shoulders, towering over the sullen hostages of rush hour, looking down on them utterly unperturbed.

The internet, however, unleashed a torrent of condemnation, and television stations started airing the video, bloodthirstily hinting that Anastasia, the fox’s owner, would have looked a lot nicer with a fox-fur collar. She said that in future she will travel by taxi if she has to take her pet Aska along:

Taking the fox in a carrier is hard, because the carrier weighs about three kilograms and the fox herself weighs about 10. But when she’s sitting on my shoulders the weight is distributed. Also, foxes are anxious animals, and traveling in a carrier is stressful for them; they have to see what’s going on around them. Most fox owners carry their foxes the same way, but it was just my “luck” to be caught on camera, and then I read a bunch of ridiculous comments that you can’t take them in the metro since they’ll attack people and that anyway, she might tear me to pieces some night. This hype upset me and after that I couldn’t go out in public. Now I’ll have to spend money because of some people’s silliness.

It is not likely that many passengers on the Moscow Metro have heard about Russian experiments to domesticate foxes. In Novosibirsk Oblast, however, these experiments are well known. It was there, in Akademgorodok (a section of Novosibirsk built as a scientific research center in the Soviet era), that one of the Soviet Union’s most successful utopian projects to tame nature was carried out. Unlike, for instance, the Siberian rivers that refused to change their course, the foxes these starry-eyed experimenters worked with did not disappoint. They were tame in no time.

In the mid-twentieth century, the Soviet Institute of Genetics was headed by the pseudo-scientist Trofim Lysenko, the recipient of ten Orders of Lenin and three Stalin Prizes. He promoted various pseudo-scientific ideas, including creating a strain of spring wheat by chilling the seeds of winter wheat. Lysenko rejected the cornerstone principles of classical genetics – anathematized as the “whore of imperialism.” In the 1940s, academicians who criticized his farfetched theories were persecuted. Some were shot or died in the camps; others simply lost their jobs.

Then, in the late 1950s, Professor Dmitry Belyayev launched an investigation into the domestication of foxes that helped put Soviet genetics back on a scientific footing. Subsequently, Belyayev played a role in restoring the legacy of Lysenko’s main opponent, the academician Nikolai Vavilov, who died in prison in 1943.

“The Novosibirsk Institute was a pioneer in this sense,” said Yuri Gerbek, an evolutionary behaviorist at the institute who defended his dissertation under one of Belyayev’s protégés. “This was where the disgraced geneticists who had been fired in 1948 came to work. I think that Belyayev survived because, instead of being at the Academy of Sciences, he was working under the Ministry of Trade, under Mikoyan, who was sensible enough to realize that genetics was helping producing ‘soft gold’ – furs.”

At the time, scientists hypothesized that domesticated foxes might reproduce twice a year, rather than just once, like wild foxes. But, as fate would have it (or perhaps because the scientists did not particularly care about generating profits for the fur trade), the hypothesis did not hold true. Some years, the experimental tamed foxes had two litters, some years not. Furthermore, domesticated foxes did not have particularly luxuriant fur. It is still unclear whether this was because of a genetic glitch, or simply because the foxes were selected based on their personalities, not on the quality of their fur.

The theory explaining how the wolf gradually evolved into the dog posits a transformation that occurred over millennia, and very naturally. Wolves that were friendlier toward people were more likely to be tossed a bone, giving them a reproductive advantage. Belyayev’s idea was that targeted crossbreeding of foxes who were more congenial toward people could produce a non-aggressive animal in far less than a millennium – within just a few years, in fact.

“For me, this was not just unlikely: I would say that this foresight was akin to genius,” Gerbek says. “And yes, some assumptions proved invalid, but the main idea that regulation of the systems governing not just behavior, but the overall physiology – hormonal systems, which are centered in the brain – that idea proved entirely correct. After four generations, none of the experimental foxes exhibited aggression – just four years! It’s another matter that there were varying scores for ‘tameness,’ which continued to improve, and by the twentieth generation a completely new fox had emerged, with all the primary and secondary hallmarks of domestication.”

In the Soviet Union, the still-heated international “nature versus nurture” debate (whether our upbringing or genetics should take the blame for how we turn out) was refracted through the prism of ideology. The state proclaimed that it had molded an entirely new brand of human, meaning that heredity had no significant role to play: what mattered was how children were raised. Anyone could be molded into the right shape. (Thus did the anti-scientific theories of Lysenko fall on fertile ground.)

While still a young revolutionary in Georgia, Joseph Stalin published an article on this topic. The battle continued even after his death and the end of persecution against scientists. For example, in the 1960s, Dmitry Belyayev became embroiled in a public debate with Nikolai Dubinin, the founder of the genetics institute of which he (Belyaev) was then head. Dubinin rejected the idea that genetics had a significant influence on behavior, offering quotes from Marxist-Leninist theory as evidence. Then, in the 1970s, one domestication ideologue came up with some of the most convincing evidence ever contributed to the nature versus nurture debate. The embryos of aggressive foxes were transplanted into docile ones and vice versa. It turned out that nurturing and environment mattered little: foxes conceived by aggressive parents and born to domesticated mothers grew up to be as unfriendly as wild foxes, and those conceived by docile parents and transplanted to wild foxes also retained their genetically determined personalities.

Things have changed radically since Belyayev was performing his experiments: gone is the state that once vainly hoped to double its fur production and provide a new kind of human with collars from a new kind of fox. Furthermore, a new ethical sensibility arrived that has made fur collars less popular. Even in Russia, it is now more fashionable to buy live foxes than fur.

In 2011 it become possible to buy foxes, provided they have vaccination certificates, and, if needed, to have them shipped to a different city. Now we see people enthusiastically saving foxes from fur farms, and the farms themselves can now make money off both the heartless and the soft-hearted. For example, the website of the Saltykovsky Fur Farm outside Moscow offers visitors the option of putting not just pelts into their virtual shopping carts, but also a young animal with fur to match.

As Anastasia describes it:

You go there and they’re so happy to see you, wagging their little tails, and you realize that they will soon be killed. It’s so sad to see. There are people who give in to their emotions and buy them by the dozen and then don’t know what to do with them. Now it’s winter, and there are plenty of abandoned animals that people bought just like that, before it sank in how hard it is owning a fox, and then they try to get rid of them however they can. I’ve been dealing with foxes for three years, and for me they’re fine, but to get to that point I had to spend a lot of time, effort, and money and essentially become a cynologist.

Aska was just such a reject, and she was passed from owner to owner until she finally wound up with someone who could take proper care of her. According to Yevgeny Mikhnin, a fox enthusiast and moderator of an online community about domesticated foxes:

Sometimes the animals are bought from dealers who provide totally inaccurate information. This has become common practice across our vast motherland. It’s even hard to say how many foxes are in the capital, the figure keeps changing. If people buy, let’s say, a hundred foxes at the beginning of the year from Saltykovsky, no one knowns how many dozens are still with their owners by the end of the year – some die because they haven’t been given proper care, others are simply tossed out, and some people attempt to find new owners. We try to help: the community has a form that anyone who wants can fill out to be published on the wall.

Mikhnin bought his own pet fox in Novosibirsk, but he believes that even there you could have the bad luck of getting a fox with aggressive tendencies. As Anastasia explains it:

If it fits with your convictions and you have the money, you can buy one in Novosibirsk (there, foxes start at 50,000 [about $760], whereas at the fur farm outside Moscow you can buy one for 10,000 [about $150]). But there is a disadvantage: the institute considers the foxes to be their intellectual property and sells only neutered ones, and you can’t castrate pups, so they sell older ones. But training an adult is, of course, harder. So for me, Novosibirsk foxes are just a brand, like an iPhone instead of a Samsung – it’s a matter of what you want.

Together with an affinity for people and a desire to interact with them, tame animals acquire a number of other traits. The structure of the jaw changes, and their biorhythm is no longer as rigidly tied to daylight as it is for wild animals. Their ability to communicate also changes.

But the most amusing and well-known feature of domestication is the change of pigmentation and the appearance of white spots: the familiar stars we see on the foreheads of horses or cows.

“The white appears because this is not a color, not an added element, but rather the absence of something – in this case, melanin,” Gerbek explains. “With the destabilization of certain genes, there is a destabilization of the movement of particular cells responsible for color. They simply don’t reach these parts of the skin. We don’t yet know specifically which genes cause this disruption – this will be a topic for our future research.”

Studying the genes responsible for friendliness, anxiety, and aggression could yield important discoveries. Researchers believe that the “fox model” could contribute additional information to our knowledge of human behavior and the human mind, in particular on the nature of schizophrenia, autism, attention deficit disorder, and Williams syndrome. But as long as scientists are full of enthusiasm for this research, the foxes will continue to suffer: a laboratory cage may be better than a short life on a fur farm, but it seems safe to assume that neither of these options are what the foxes themselves would choose.

Adoption as a pet also does not always have a happy ending. Being hyperactive, foxes often get themselves into dangerous situations – strangling themselves with their collars or becoming the victims of stray dogs. Or they may simply run away, and these tame pets are no longer capable of surviving on their own in the wild.

Paradoxically, by training foxes to trust us, humans have turned the animals into hostages of their genetically modified love.