So Belyaev cloaked his domestication experiments in the guise of improving the fur-farming business. Fox researchers started by testing the temperament of about 100 silver foxes each year.

Like many breakthroughs in science, Dmitri Belyaev’s silver fox domestication ... and other traits. The fox experiment has shed light not only on domestication but on the entire process of evolution ...

Long time readers of Dog O’Day may recall a previous article about the experiments in fox domestication. One notable experiment mentioned started in Siberia in 1959, the silver fox domestication ...

For the last 60 years, scientists in Siberia have bred silver ... foxes weren’t totally wild to begin with, and some of the traits attributed to domestication existed long before the experiment ...

In 1959, the Soviet zoologist Dmitry Belyaev began selectively breeding silver ... to breed tamer foxes. But the Russian experiment fell short of proving the existence of domestication syndrome ...

Lyudmila Trut, the geneticist who led the decades-long experiment ... on the silver fox, a variant of the red fox, has become the gold standard for understanding the process of domestication.

Perhaps the most famous experiment in domestication is a project in Russia that turned silver morphs of the wild red fox into tamer and more dog-like silver foxes in just 40 generations.

In a number of other Psychology Today posts (here and here), I have written about the remarkable silver ... fox experiment and thought it presented a unique opportunity to study how domestication ...

Researchers have been, year after year, preferentially breeding ... I learned of the famous silver fox domestication experiment which, at that point, had been going in Siberia for thirty years.

After generations ... they devised an experiment to replicate the earliest days of dog domestication, but using a canid that had never before been domesticated: the silver fox.