In early 1958, Lyudmila went to meet with Belyaev at his office at the Central Research Lab. She was immediately struck by how unusual he was for a male Soviet scientist, especially one of his rank. Many were quite high-handed, and condescending to women. Lyudmila, who has a genial, smiling manner and stands just five feet tall, with her wavy brown hair cropped quite short, looked young for her age, and she hadn’t even finished her undergraduate studies, but Dmitri spoke to her as an equal. She was riveted, she recalls, by his piercing brown eyes that so strongly communicated his intelligence and drive, but that also emanated an extraordinary empathy. As he asked her about herself, he seemed to perceive the essence of her, as though he had known her all her life, and she felt taken into his fold. She felt privileged to be invited into the confidence of this extraordinary man, who shared with her so openly about the bold work he was proposing. She had never experienced such a distinctive combination of confidence and warmth in a person.
Dmitri told Lyudmila what he had in mind. “He told me that he wanted to make a dog out of a fox,” she recalls. Probing how creative she would be about conducting the experiment, he asked her, “You are now located on a fox farm that has several hundred foxes, and you need to select twenty for the experiment. How will you do it?” She had no experience whatsoever with foxes, and had only a vague notion of what the fox farms might be like and what sort of welcome she might receive at them. But she was a confident young women and she did the best she could to suggest some reasonable possibilities. She would try different methods, she said, talk to people who had worked with foxes, read up on what was known in the literature. He sat back and listened, gauging how committed she would be to the work and to developing techniques for such a novel study. She must be not only rigorously scientific, but also quite inventive. Was she really ready to go to Novosibirsk, to move to Akademgorodok, he asked her. After all, moving to the heart of Siberia was a life-change not to be taken lightly.
He was also clearly concerned about the risk she would be taking, and he didn’t mince words about the dangers of being involved. In order to ward off the Lysenkoists, he explained, the work would be described as research in fox physiology. No mention of genetics would be made in regard to the experiment, at least for the time being. He also assured her that he could, and would, speak out against Lysenko when necessary. But Lysenko and his crowd still had the power to make an example of a team of geneticists, even those in far-off Siberia, and punish them and ruin their careers and reputations. Lyudmila knew that. Everyone knew that. Still, she was touched that he insisted that she be fully apprised.
Another serious concern he expressed was about the fate of her scientific career. He wanted to be very clear, he said, with great seriousness and looking directly and intensely into her eyes, that the experiment might not produce any meaningful results. He hoped that it would, and he believed that it would. But even if it did, that might take many, many years, even as long as the rest of her life. Her job would be to select the tamest foxes for breeding and to observe and record the details of all changes in both their physiology and their behavior from generation to generation. In addition, she would need to travel great distances away from the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk to visit fox farms scattered in remote terrain, because he could not yet set up an experimental fox farm at Akademgorodok. He hoped he could one day, but not yet.
Lyudmila thought carefully about his admonitions, but she had no real doubt. This work would be a great challenge, she could see, and Belyaev would demand nothing short of excellence of her, which was greatly inspiring.
Though she was a woman of great warmth and an unassuming demeanor, Lyudmila’s formidable energy and determination made her a force to be reckoned with. She had pursued her dream of becoming a scientist with great passion and had excelled at every step, despite Soviet science being almost entirely male-dominated. She wanted nothing more than to do path-breaking work. Belyaev had made it clear that she would be given a good deal of latitude and responsibility in developing her methods for working with the foxes, and that was enormously appealing. She had found, as she would later say, a “winning ticket.” Not only would she be one of the first generation of researchers in a new scientific city, which might become the very center of Soviet science, but she would do extraordinary work with this remarkable man. She was sure of it. She could see it in those mesmerizing eyes of his. She trusted him.
Lyudmila had never dreamed she would leave Moscow to live in Siberia. She had grown up outside of Moscow and she loved the city. All of her family lived there, and they were very close, getting together regularly for dinners and outings. What’s more, she had just married and had a baby girl. Taking her daughter, Marina, so far away from such a close circle of loving family members would be difficult. Meanwhile, who knew what sort of work her husband, Volodya, an aviation mechanic, could find, or what sort of living conditions they could expect. The only thing she knew about living in Akademgorodok was that, being in the heart of Siberia, it would be bone-chillingly cold for much of the year. But she had to go. As it turned out, her husband heartily supported the move and felt confident he could find work there. To her great delight, her mother also decided that she would join them once they had gotten situated. She would live with them and look after the baby while Lyudmila did her work. In the spring of 1958 they took the trans-Siberian railroad and headed to their new home.
THERE WAS NO SPACE IN Akademgorodok that Belyaev could commandeer for building an experimental fox farm. The academic city was still being built, and the Institute of Cytology and Genetics didn’t even have its own building yet, let alone grounds on which to house hundreds of foxes. So, at least to begin with, Lyudmila would have to conduct her work on the fox domestication experiment at a commercial fox farm. Over the years, Belyaev had developed many friendships with the managers of these farms, as with Nina Sorokina. He might have chosen to run the experiment at Kohila, but it was too small for the full-blown experiment and was also too far away. So, Lyudmila had to explore other options.
So it was that Lyudmila found herself in the fall of 1959 traveling on slow trains through vast expanses of Soviet wilderness, passing through village after village that modernity had not yet touched. She disembarked at tiny rail stations buried deep in forests and walked down dirt pathways to visit one industrial fox farm after another, looking for the best location for running the experiment.
When she arrived at a farm, she explained to the director the nature of the experiment she and Belyaev wanted to run. They’d need some space of their own and access to hundreds of foxes to test, though, she explained, they would only end up using a very small percentage of those for the breeding they’d do in their experiment, just those that were the most calm. Many at the commercial farms were mystified why anyone would want to take the time to do what Lyudmila was describing. “It is quite possible,” she recalls with amusement, “that before people knew that Belyaev had sent me, they thought I was crazy, thinking, what is she up to, wanting to pick out the tamest foxes!” But as soon as she mentioned whom she was working with, their attitude changed completely. “A single word from Dr. Belyaev,” Lyudmila recalls, “was enough to guarantee respect.”
Eventually Lyudmila settled on a giant commercial fox farm called Lesnoi, a 225-mile ride southwest of Novosibirsk, in remote terrain about halfway down to where the borders of Kazakhstan and Mongolia meet. Like all commercial farms in the Soviet Union, it was owned by the State, and at any given time, this farm housed thousands of reproductive female foxes and tens of thousands of young pups. Lesnoi was a cash cow for the government, and the tiny space the director allocated for Lyudmila to keep the foxes she would breed would hardly change that. She would import about a dozen foxes from the Kohila pilot population to Lesnoi, and a few more from other commercial farms over the next few years, but most of the first group of foxes she would mate in the experiment would come from the Lesnoi population.
The Lesnoi farm took
some getting used to. It was an enormous complex, with rows and rows of open-air sheds, each shed holding hundreds of cages, with one fox per cage, often pacing restlessly around. Even that wasn’t enough space, with fox cages seemingly covering every spare inch of space. The smell, especially for Lyudmila, who was a novice, was overwhelming. And the noise, especially at meal times, could often be deafening, a cacophony of yelps and screeches. The small armies of workers who fed the foxes and cleaned their cages paid little attention at first to the intense young woman methodically going about her strange testing of the foxes. They had little time for curiosity; each was responsible for the care of about 100 foxes.
Having had no prior experience with foxes, Lyudmila was taken aback at first by how aggressive they were. Becoming acquainted with these “fire-breathing dragons,” as she called them, snarling and lunging at her when she approached their cages, she found it hard to believe that they could ever be tamed. Now she understood why Dmitri had warned her that the experiment might take a very long time.
At Lyudmila’s behest, the manager of Lesnoi agreed to construct some large pens for the female foxes with wooden dens built into the front corner for them to give birth in, cushioned with wood chips to make the dens comfortable for the mothers and their pups. In the wild, a pregnant female builds a cozy den for her pups-to-be, at the base of a tree, under its roots, or under a rock cleft or on a hillside, with a narrow tunnel entrance that broadens into the main den area. Once the young are born, typically in litters of two to eight, she watches over them in the den zealously, and her male mate brings her food. It was important to Lyudmila that pregnant females were provided this comfort.
The next step, in the fall of 1960, was to bring about a dozen foxes to Lesnoi from the pilot project at Kohila. Nina Sorokina and her team had bred eight generations of foxes at Kohila by this time. For the most part, the changes they had seen in the foxes were still quite subtle. A dozen of the tamest foxes were sent to Lesnoi, and in general, they were only slightly calmer than foxes at a fur farm. But two foxes, which were both from the latest breeding season at Kohila, stood out. They were noticeably calmer. When Lyudmila saw these two, she was amazed. They would even allow her to pick them up. These astonishing creatures, already so much more dog-like than other farm foxes, gave her faith that the experiment would succeed. She named them Laska (“gentle”) and Kisa (“kitty”). From then on, Lyudmila gave all of the foxes born into the experiment names, with each pup’s name always starting with the first letter of its mother’s name. As the years went by and colleagues and caretakers joined her in her work, they took joy in selecting these names along with her.
Lyudmila’s first order of business at Lesnoi was to increase the number of foxes in the study, and to do that, she would select them from the large population there. She would have to travel from Akademgorodok four times a year, starting in October, to select the calmest foxes for mating, then in late January to oversee the mating process, again in April to observe the pups shortly after birth, and finally in June, to make more observations of them and how they were maturing. Year after year. Though Lesnoi was only 225 miles away, given the state of the Soviet train system, the trip was exhausting. She would leave Novosibirsk at 11 p.m. and reach the small city of Biysk, an hour from Lesnoi, the next morning at about 11 a.m., where she caught a bus for the last leg of the journey.
Each day, starting at 6 a.m., Lyudmila made her way methodically from cage to cage. Wearing the same sort of two-inch thick protective gloves that Nina used at Kohila, she gauged how each fox reacted to her presence as she approached the cage, as she stood by the closed cage, as she opened the cage, and as she placed a stick inside the cage. Each fox was given a score on a 1 to 4 scale for each interaction, and those with the highest aggregate score were designated the calmest. She tested dozens of foxes every day, which was both physically and mentally grueling.
The majority of foxes reacted aggressively when she approached or when she put the stick into their cages. Given the chance, Lyudmila felt sure, they would have loved to rip her hand off. A much smaller number cowered in fear at the rear of their cages, also far from being calm. The smallest number stayed calm throughout, observing her intently but not reacting. She selected from that 10% of the population to become the new parents for the next generation, joining the handful of foxes that had been brought from Kohila.
Lyudmila would take a short break for lunch in the middle of the afternoon, at the little restaurant in the village which served delicious borscht, Russian meatballs, and pancakes, then she’d head back to the farm after that for several more hours of testing, and after that, in the small room she was given at the quarters of the breeding researchers on the farm, she would record every detail of her observations that day. Finally, at about 11 p.m. she would unwind with a light dinner in the kitchen, sharing stories and jokes with the others at the house. Most of her time was spent alone with the foxes, and though she was developing a rapport with them, she often felt quite lonely.
Her visit to oversee the first mating of the foxes, in January of 1960, was quite challenging. She had written a detailed plan during her October visit for which foxes to breed with which, pairing the calmest males with the calmest females while also avoiding any inbreeding. Most of the animals complied when they were brought together for mating, but some of the females rejected their proposed partners and Lyudmila had to act quickly to find another suitable mate, which was stressful. She did not want to let Dmitri down. She was out in the unheated sheds for hours and hours in temperatures that regularly dipped to −40 or −50 degrees, and she missed her husband and daughter, Marina, terribly. Though she knew her mother was taking good care of Marina, she felt horrible that she was missing so many of the exciting moments of her daughter’s early development. She couldn’t even call home very often, as there was no phone at the Lesnoi farm, and long-distance calls from the private phone of the director of the farm were next to impossible to arrange. The letter service between Lesnoi and Novosibirsk was also notoriously slow and unreliable.
Thankfully, her visits to Lesnoi in April and June offered compensation. Observing the fox pups as they first opened their eyes and made their way out of their dens in April was a wonderful treat. As are the young of so many animals, fox pups are adorable. When first born, they are a little bigger than the size of a human hand and weigh only about four ounces. They are entirely helpless at first, both deaf and blind, and they don’t open their eyes until eighteen or nineteen days after birth. They look like little balls of puffy fur.
By their fourth week, pups in the wild begin timidly venturing forth from their dens during the day, returning to them to sleep. They stay quite close to one another at first, rolling around on top of one another playfully and nipping at one another. Their mothers keep a close watch over them. Soon they become quite rambunctious, playing more vigorously with one another, often pouncing on each other, pulling each other’s tails with their mouths and biting one another’s ears. By summer, mothers are finished lactating, and the dens are abandoned. As the pups continue to mature, their play becomes more aggressive, and they establish a pecking order, with one or two becoming dominant. The father and mother bring food to the pups until autumn, when they’ve learned to forage and hunt and are ready to fend for themselves. At that time fox families disperse, with the pups going off on their own and the mates also separating. They look for a new mate again the following January.
To simulate the normal rearing process, Lyudmila kept the pups in the experiment in their mother’s pen at all times until they were two months old, and they stayed bundled up together in the den for the first month, just as in the wild. Once they started venturing out of the den, they were allowed out into a yard by the shed to play for some time each day.
Lyudmila arrived within days of their births in April, and she wrote detailed descriptions of each of them, including their fur color, size, and weight, and made note of every little step of their growth; when they open
ed their eyes, when they could hear, when they first began to play. By her June sortie to Lesnoi, the two-month-old pups were unbearably cute. They seemed to savor playing with one another, rolling around in the dust. When they looked up at her with their little eyes wide open, Lyudmila couldn’t help but smile. She was struck by how charming these children were and marveled anew at how much animals’ behavior changes as they mature.
Lyudmila felt she was making good progress getting the experiment started, and she loved her time with the foxes, but the work was taking a heavy toll on her. The long absences from her daughter continued to weigh on her, and she sometimes wondered whether she shouldn’t try to find another research project, based at the Institute.
One day after her second January trip to Lesnoi, Lyudmila was waiting at the small train station in the town of Seyatel where she caught a bus to Akademgorodok. The temperature was about forty below zero, and the station was barely heated. When it was announced that there would be no buses for quite a long time, she decided that was it, she would give Belyaev her resignation the next day and her family would move away from this land. But the next morning, after a cup of hot coffee, she realized she couldn’t leave. She had fallen in love with the work.
How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog) Page 5
