How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog)

by Lee Alan Dugatkin

  Though initially hoodwinked by Lysenko, over time, as he looked into Lysenko’s claims, Vavilov became suspicious of his results, and he asked a student to conduct research to see if he could replicate Lysenko’s findings. In a series of experiments conducted from 1931 to 1935, Lysenko’s claims were disproven.13 Having revealed that Lysenko was a fraud, Vavilov became his fearless opponent. In retaliation, in 1933 Stalin’s Central Committee forbade Vavilov from any more travels abroad and he was publically denounced in Pravda, the government’s mouthpiece. Lysenko warned Vavilov and his student that “when such erroneous data were swept away . . . those who failed to understand the implications” would also be “swept away.”14 Vavilov was undeterred and kept up his fight against Lysenko, and in 1939 at a meeting of the All-Union Institute of Plant Breeding he gave a talk in which he declared, “We shall go into the pyre, we shall burn, but we shall not retreat from our convictions.”15 Shortly later, in 1940, while traveling in the Ukraine, he was picked up by four men wearing dark suits and thrown into prison in Moscow. Then, the man who had collected 250,000 domesticated plant samples, had cheated death repeatedly, and had worked to solve the puzzle of famine in his homeland was slowly starved to death over the course of three years.

  Dmitri had devoured Vavilov’s work. He admired both the scope of Vavilov’s accomplishments and his defiant defense of genetics. He hoped that the fox domestication project would help keep Vavilov’s example of innovation and fortitude alive, and he expected Vavilov would have heartily approved.

  Dmitri knew that his brother Nicholai would also have been an enthusiastic proponent of the fox domestication experiment, despite his own tragic fate at the hands of Lysenko. The Belyaev family had suffered many blows in the waves of brutal crackdowns that followed the 1917 revolution, but they had stayed true throughout to their convictions.

  Dmitri’s father, Konstantin, had been a parish priest in the village of Protasovo, with a population of only several hundred, situated in a picturesque landscape of wide meadows and lush forests a four-hour drive south of Moscow. By all accounts, the villagers adored him. The Russian authorities did not. Soon after the 1917 revolution, the government declared the state to be atheist. It cracked down hard on religion, confiscating church property and harassing believers. Dmitri’s father was imprisoned repeatedly.

  By 1927, when Dmitri was ten, the harassment of the clergy had so intensified that his parents were worried for his safety. They sent him away from his hometown of Protasovo to live with Nikolai, who was eighteen years his senior and was married and living in Moscow. Nikolai had been lucky enough to enter Moscow State University before the suppression of religion would have barred him, as the son of a priest. He majored in the new field of genetics, conducting work on butterflies.

  Dmitri idolized Nikolai and, whenever Nikolai was home from college, would help him catalog butterfly specimens, while Nikolai explained how these delicate creatures might help geneticists unravel such wonders as metamorphosis. When Dmitri moved in with his brother, Nikolai was studying at the Koltsov Institute of Experimental Biology and working in the laboratory of Sergei Chetverikov, one of the country’s most respected and well-known geneticists.16 Chetverikov’s lab was producing many of the country’s finest scientists, and Nikolai had become a favored protégé, seen by many in the research community as one of the leaders of the next era of Russian genetics. Each Wednesday the members of the Chetverikov lab would meet for tea and discuss the most recent findings. Nikolai took Dmitri to many of these meetings. The younger brother would sit in the back, fascinated by the unbridled passion of the debates, which featured a great deal of yelling, leading Dmitri to refer to them as the “yelling meetings.”

  Nikolai Belyaev’s reputation continued to rise, and in 1928 he was offered a job at the Mid-Asian Institute of Silk Study in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, where he moved to research silkworm genetics. This was a prime appointment, as any improvement in the production of silk might prove a boon for the Soviet industry. Dmitri had hopes of following in his brother’s academic path, but he was sent next to live with his older sister Olga and her family in Moscow. Because they were struggling to make ends meet for their two children, Dmitri was enrolled in a seven-year vocational program, in which he trained to be an electrician.17 He hoped he might still pursue a university education, but when he tried to apply for admission to Moscow State University at age seventeen, he received a rude awakening. The university was no longer admitting the sons of priests. Dmitri was forced to attend a trade college instead, enrolling at Ivanova State Agricultural Academy. At least he could study biology at the agricultural school, and many top-notch scientists visited there to give lectures on the newest advances in genetics.

  In the winter of 1937, Dmitri’s family received the news that Nikolai had disappeared. His research on silkworm genetics had produced important results, and he’d been appointed head of a government-funded institute in Tbilisi. During a trip to Moscow to visit family and friends in the fall of 1937, Nikolai was warned that arrests of his geneticist colleagues had begun in Tbilisi. In spite of the danger, he went back for his wife and twelve-year-old son. Only many years later did the family finally learn that soon after he returned, he and his wife were arrested. On November 10, 1937, Nikolai was executed.18 His mother searched for Nikolai’s wife for years, and finally learned that she had been sent to a prison near the city of Baysk, but she could never make contact with her or find news of what had happened to her grandson.

  Nikolai’s disappearance and murder fueled Dmitri’s commitment to repudiating Lysenko. He knew he had to take measured steps, and while he was finishing his college degree, one of his professors had become the head of a section of the Central Research Laboratory on Fur Breeding Animals in Moscow. Upon Dmitri’s graduation in 1939 the professor secured Dmitri a job there as a senior lab technician, working to breed silver foxes with beautiful fur, for sale overseas. Less than a year later, World War II had broken out. Because Dmitri had distinguished himself in service, sustaining multiple life-threatening injuries in four years of intense fighting on the front, the army was reluctant to decommission him at war’s end. But his fox breeding work was deemed so important by the Minister of Foreign Trade that he was released from service to rejoin the laboratory and he was eventually appointed head of the Department of Selection and Breeding. Due to the stellar reputation he had rapidly developed for the excellence of his breeding work, Dmitri felt confident that he could begin openly speaking out against Lysenko, and he did so vigorously.

  In July 1948, as part of Stalin’s anti-intellectualism and anti-cosmopolitanism program, a grand plan to “transform nature” was put into place by the Soviet government and Lysenko was placed in charge of all policy regarding the biological sciences.19 Shortly thereafter, at the August 1948 meeting of the All-Union Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Lysenko presented a talk that is widely regarded as the most disingenuous and dangerous speech in the history of Soviet science, titled “The Situation in the Science of Biology,” in which he once again railed against “modern reactionary genetics,”20 by which he meant modern Western genetics. At the end of his ranting, the audience stood and cheered wildly.21

  Geneticists at the meeting were forced to stand up and refute their scientific knowledge and practices. Those who refused were ejected from the Communist Party and lost their jobs.22 Reading the news of the speech, Dmitri was both distraught and furious. Belyaev’s wife, Svetlana, remembers the moment her husband approached her the next day at home, having just read in the newspaper about the meeting, recounting, “Dmitri was walking toward me with tough sorrowful eyes, restlessly bending and bending the newspaper in his hands.”23 A colleague recalls running into him that day and how Dmitri had fumed that Lysenko was “a scientific bandit.” Belyaev began speaking out urgently about the evils of Lysenkoism to all fellow scientists, whether friend or foe.

  Though protected from being fired by the importance of his fur breeding work, Dmitri was not
entirely immune to Lysenko’s influence. A cartoon in a Moscow magazine lampooned him, depicting him descending from the sky in a parachute with the caption “Come down to Earth,” and a group of Moscow scientists sympathetic to Lysenko organized a meeting in which they lambasted the reactionary geneticists “guided by Belyaev.” Dmitri appeared at the meeting and made a defiant, impassioned speech about the importance of continuing genetic research. As a result, he was banned from teaching at the Moscow Fur Institute, and the scientific papers he submitted to journals were instantly rejected. His laboratory pay was cut in half, his staff was reassigned, and he was demoted from department head to senior scientist.

  Belyaev had nonetheless managed to continue to investigate genetics through his work with minks and foxes. And some of this work gave him hope that it might just be possible that the pilot experiment Nina Sorokina was running would produce significant results in shorter time than a classic interpretation of Darwin’s theory of evolution would suggest. He had an idea about why so many different changes in animals—floppy ears, curly tails, and spots, the breaking of the once-a-year mating rule—came along with the process of domestication, and why they might emerge relatively quickly. He hadn’t shared this with Nina Sorokina when he visited in 1952; the idea was too provisional to share with anyone yet, especially because it cut against the grain of the prevailing wisdom about the nature of evolutionary change.

  Darwin had argued that evolutionary change would usually occur in small incremental steps, and that changes of the kind associated with the dramatic modifications seen in domesticated animals would take eons to accumulate. But Belyaev had noted that with the minks brought in from the wild for the breeding program, which had begun less than thirty years earlier, striking changes in the colors of their fur had emerged in just that short time. Minks in the wild have dark brown fur. But suddenly some minks had been born with beige, silvery-blue, and white fur. And this seemed to happen over and over, much more often than any geneticist could attribute to new mutations. Belyaev thought this must mean that the wild mink possessed the genes for producing these fur colors already in their genomes, but that those genes had been what he called inactive. He proposed that the change in their environment, being brought into captivity, and the new selection pressure of being bred for fur quality must have triggered these “dormant” genes to become active.

  With the foxes, he had seen that white patches that had once appeared on the feet of some foxes and then stopped showing up had suddenly reappeared in later generations, but now on the faces of some foxes. Some geneticists had suggested that genes that were inactive could be “turned on” in some way, and also that genes might for some reason start producing different effects, like the change in the location of the white patches in the foxes. Dmitri thought these kinds of changes in gene activation were behind the many changes in domestication. This suggested to him that domestication could perhaps occur much more rapidly than the standard interpretation of Darwin’s theory implied.

  Belyaev hoped that his fox experiment might produce such rapid change. But, then again, he could be wrong and it might produce no notable results at all. That was science. He’d come up with an idea too intriguing not to pursue, he’d set the test in motion, and now all he could do was wait for some word from Nina.

  2

  Fire-Breathing Dragons No More

  Belyaev’s idea that the silver fox was a good candidate for domestication made sense. Many at the time knew that wolves and foxes had descended from a relatively recent common ancestor, so the odds seemed good that foxes would also have some of the genes that must have been involved in wolves becoming dogs. But Dmitri was well aware that genetic closeness was no assurance that the experiment would work.

  One of the most puzzling things about the history of animal domestication was that multiple efforts to domesticate the close cousins of domesticated species had failed. The zebra, for example, is such a close relative of the horse that the two can sometimes be bred. This produces a hybrid zorse, if the mating is between a male zebra and a female horse, or a hebra, if the mating is between a male horse and female zebra. But despite the close genetic link to horses, the zebra has not been successfully domesticated. Many attempts were made in Africa in the late nineteenth century. The horses brought to Africa by colonial authorities were dying off due to diseases carried by the tsetse fly, but zebras were immune to many of these diseases. They were so much like horses that it seemed perfectly logical they’d make good replacements. But those who made the attempt to breed them were in for a rude awakening.

  Though zebras are herbivores, who live with the wildebeests and antelopes who graze alongside them, they’re also prime targets of lions, cheetahs, and leopards, and that predatory pressure instilled in them a fierce fighting spirit. They have a mighty kick. Some brave souls did nonetheless manage to train zebras to be docile enough so that they could be ridden. The flamboyant British zoologist Lord Walter Rothschild even imported a team of them to London and once made a display of them by driving a carriage pulled by four zebras to Buckingham Palace. But they resisted actual domestication. The difference is that many animals can be trained to submit to human control, but domestication involves genetic change so that animals become naturally tame, though given individuals may be less so, as with horses that can’t be broken.

  Deer offer another interesting case in which close relatives have responded very differently to attempts to domesticate them. Of the dozens of deer species around the world, arguably only one—the reindeer—has been domesticated. One of the last mammals to be domesticated, perhaps twice and independently by people in Russia and by the Saami people of Scandinavia, reindeer became vital to the lives of many groups of people living in the arctic and subarctic climates.1 That no other deer species has been domesticated is especially interesting, given that they are among the wild animals that humans have long lived in the closest proximity to, and they are not generally aggressive towards us. Deer were also one of our most important sources of food for many thousands of years; we had a strong incentive to want to raise docile herds of them. But deer are generally nervous animals, and they can be aggressive if they feel their young are in danger. If a herd is spooked, they may also stampede. As with the zebra versus the horse, deer might just not have enough genetic variation in tameness to get domestication going.

  Dmitri knew full well that the fox might very well turn out to be another close relative that simply couldn’t be domesticated. After all, silver foxes had been bred by humans for many decades by the time he asked Nina to help him with his experiment, and most of them were anything but tame.

  The silver fox was a special breed of the red fox, which is not particularly aggressive in the wild, unless backed into a corner by predators. Though red foxes have made their way into suburban areas in Europe and the United States, where they hunt small cats, they naturally prefer to stay well away from humans, and in the wild they generally hunt smaller prey. They particularly favor rodents and small birds, although as omnivores they also eat fruits, berries, grass, and grains. They don’t hunt in packs as wolves do, and apart from the period right after the birth of their pups, when parents care for the pups until they are ready to set out on their own, foxes live solitary lives. They don’t mate for life, instead finding a new partner every mating season. So adept are they at staying out of sight that even the red fox, with its bright orange-red coloring, can be difficult to spot in the wild.

  Foxes in captivity are a different story. Most are highly aggressive when approached by caretakers, snarling at them viciously, and some are truly ferocious. A hand coming too close to a fox in a cage risks being badly bitten, so those working at fox farms, like Nina Sorokina’s Kohila farm, wore those cumbersome, but necessary, thick protective gloves.

  The rewards of fox farming have been worth the risks. While foxes had long been trapped for their fur, it was only in the late 1800s that people started breeding them commercially. Two enterprising Canadians dec
ided to start a fox farm on Prince Edward Island and see whether they could breed red foxes and produce more striking colors and textures of fur. The most popular coats they produced were of a shiny, blackish-silver, and they fetched enough in the fur market that many more fox farms were started on the island. The locals called the boom the “silver rush.”

  Records from the London market show that, by 1910, the price of high-quality “silver fox” pelts from Prince Edward Island had shot up from a few hundred dollars per pelt to more than $2,500, and the finest breeding pairs were selling for tens of thousands of dollars. With such riches to be made, some Russian fur breeders decided they wanted in on the action, and they imported some of the Prince Edward Island foxes. By the 1930s the Soviet Union was exporting as many silver fox furs as any country, and the Russian breeders were building the extensive network of industrial scale farms like Kohila.

  Nina Sorokina and her team, which included other breeders, as well as the common workers who kept the whole operation up and running, were well aware of the aggressive responses to expect when they approached foxes to test them as Dmitri described. He suggested that they all approach the foxes in a standard way. Keeping to a limited range of behaviors would help control for differences in their gestures that might make the foxes respond differently. If one researcher approached the foxes and put his or her face up close to the front of the cage, for instance, that might elicit a different reaction than a researcher who waved a hand in front of the cage. Approaching the foxes more slowly might elicit less response than approaching rapidly.