The new tensions threatened to reverse the gains made in exchanges between scientists in the West and their counterparts behind the Iron Curtain, which Dmitri Belyaev had been so influential in furthering. Aubrey Manning, who had reached out to Dmitri and invited him to attend the 1971 ethology conference in Scotland, was distressed that barriers were being thrown up again between the scientific communities. “I just felt, this is preposterous,” Manning recalls. “At that time the Cold War was absolutely at its pit,” he says. “There was virtually no contact whatsoever between Russian scientists and Western scientists.”20 He decided that he had to make a statement of some kind, and he wrote to Dmitri that if he was open to a visit, he would like to come to Akademgorodok to see the foxes. They had stayed in touch, and he knew that many exciting developments had transpired since Dmitri had presented the experiment’s findings in Aubrey’s Scotland back in 1971.
Dmitri wrote back straight away to say Manning was always welcome—what’s more, the Institute would pay all his expenses for the trip once he was in the USSR, which left Manning just the airfare to cover. “I wrote to the Royal Society [of London],” Manning recalls, “and said I thought it would be valuable to make contact. And they came up with a travel grant for me.”
Manning arrived in the spring of 1983, and he recalls with a smile, “I was treated like royalty. They had so few visitors from the West at this time, that it really was quite something.” Dmitri arranged a number of formal dinners and invited the heads of various of the Institutes of Akademgorodok and their spouses. These were sumptuous affairs featuring, as Manning recalls, “gigantic trays of delectable things.” Not familiar with the Russian tradition of lavish, multi-course meals, he recounts how, “somewhat to my embarrassment” at the first dinner, after having eaten his fill he discovered the main course was still to arrive. He was also amazed that between the courses, people lit up cigarettes. He told Dmitri, “You know, this could never happen in Britain, because nobody is allowed to smoke until there’s been a toast to the Queen, and that never happens until coffee is being served at the end of the meal.” Dmitri immediately proclaimed, “I think it is time to toast the Queen, Aubrey!” Manning did the only thing he could and raised a glass “to the Queen!” At that point, Manning realized just how special a friend he had made. “I thought,” Aubrey recalls, “it was a rather charming incident and very typical of Dmitri to make the whole thing into a joke. I loved it.”
Aubrey was impressed by the science he was introduced to at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics. The researchers were top notch, and they knew so much more about science in the West than Western scientists knew of what was happening in the USSR. But it was more than just their knowledge of science that he was impressed by. So many of the people he met seemed well acquainted with Western culture. “One day, we were eating sandwiches on this boat,” Aubrey recalls, “and I said jokingly, ‘oh, how very English that is!’” On the boat with Aubrey was Dmitri’s press secretary, Victor Kolpakov, who acted as an interpreter. “Without a pause,” Aubrey recalls, “Victor said to me, ‘there were no sandwiches in the market this morning, sir. Not even for ready money.’” Manning was floored. “That is a quotation from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest,” he explains. He discovered that many of those he met were similarly acquainted with the major works of Western literature and could readily quote writers like Graham Greene, Saul Bellow, or Jane Austen. “It was quite extraordinary and very humbling really,” he recalls.
This made the large gap in understanding between the West and the Soviets all the more tragic to him. Manning recalls a discussion of those tensions with Dmitri after dinner one night, when Dmitri invited him to the sanctum sanctorum of his home study. “He was smoking and we sat there chatting a bit,” Aubrey tells it, “. . . about the fact that there still was a great deal of mutual distrust between the West and the Soviet Union.” Dmitri responded, “Why is there this difficulty?” and Manning explained that the West felt dangerously threatened by the Soviet block. Dmitri was puzzled at this, asking “Afraid? Why are you afraid; there’s no possibility of an attack,” telling Manning that the Soviet Union was “a peace-loving nation.” Aubrey recalls thinking of a quote he himself had memorized, of the Scottish poet Robert Burns: “Oh would some power, the gift to give us, to see ourselves as others see us, it would from many a blunder free us from foolish notion.” On another occasion when the two talked politics, as Dmitri escorted Manning to a banya—a sauna where men sat around naked and shot the breeze—Dmitri turned to his friend and told him, “Aubrey, I think it a good thing if Andropov and Reagan take a banya together.” Manning replied, “You’re dead right,” and he remembers thinking, “he’s right, we are all naked human beings, the rest is less important.”
The highlight of Manning’s trip was his visit to the fox farm on a hot August morning. The foxes did not disappoint. “I remember this particular fox,” Manning recalls, “was running around wagging his tail and coming up to me. And I was feeding it by hand and it was wagging his tail. It was astonishing.” He played with a number of foxes and he was struck that “they did feel like dogs . . . they were like a slightly foxy dog . . . a bit like a collie would be.”21 While the foxes on the farm were delighted by his attention, Pushinka’s descendants at the experimental house were another story. Galena Kiselev, one of the fox team members who was at the house when Dmitri and Lyudmila brought Manning over, remembers the visit well. The foxes weren’t paying any attention to Manning, they were “gathered around me,” she recalls, “trying to climb up my ankles, and looking into my eyes.” Dmitri said to her, “Hey, Galena, what are you doing? Let them go to Manning.” But, there was nothing that Galena could do. “The foxes that lived in Pushinka’s house,” she says, “they hated men and they loved women, because their caretakers were women.” What struck Manning was not that they didn’t care for him, but that they wanted to be loved by any humans.
At the end of the visit to the house, Dmitri and Lyudmila brought Manning to the most special place on the farm, the bench at the side of the house where nine years earlier, Lyudmila had been sitting with Pushinka at her feet when Pushinka had charged off into the night to defend her. Sitting on the bench with Manning, Lyudmila, Dmitri, and Galena shared many a fox story.
A few days after the visit to the fox farm, Aubrey headed back to Edinburgh. He was surprised when Dmitri showed up to accompany him to the airport. Directors of Institutes in the USSR simply didn’t perform such lowly functions as seeing visitors off. Aubrey had come to understand that. But Dmitri would not entertain the idea of letting Aubrey leave without a final farewell directly from him. “There was a woman at the [airport] gate,” Aubrey remembers, “. . . to see that we had boarding passes so we could go forward.” Dmitri, of course, didn’t have a boarding pass, and she told him that was as far as he could go. “He just quite gently but firmly pushed her to one side,” Aubrey continues, and “continued walking onto the tarmac with me.” Then, Aubrey says, Dmitri “hugged me and gave me a Russian kiss.” He was surprised, to say the least. “You know,” Aubrey says today, “I’d never been kissed by a man before. . . . I was profoundly touched by this . . . I had tears in my eyes.”
The warmth of the reception he’d been treated to in the Soviet Union made his reception back home all the more dispiriting. Arriving back in Scotland, Manning was interrogated by the MI5, Britain’s spy agency, about his visit. “I found it quite horrible,” Aubrey says, and he politely told them to go to hell, that he was there as a scientist, and he wasn’t going to answer any of the silly questions they were asking him about the “killer wheat” they thought the Soviets were developing.
A great deal more turmoil in the relations between the Soviet Union and the West would unfold before scientists on opposing sides of the Iron Curtain could resume a free exchange of ideas and develop the sort of mutual appreciation that Aubrey Manning and Dmitri Belyaev enjoyed.
7
The Word and Its Meaning<
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By the mid-1980s, more of the tamest foxes were displaying the distinctive dog-like behaviors Pushinka had first exhibited. They responded to their names and came to the front of their pen when called. Control foxes never did. To see what would happen when they were given a bit more free range on the farm, a very few were allowed for walks on a leash and they were well behaved, and even fewer were trusted to be allowed out of their cages off-leash, as Pushinka had been, because they would follow the caretakers around. Lyudmila recalls of one worker how “you’d never see her walking by herself, there was always a little fox following her.”
Some of the foxes now also looked so much like dogs that Lyudmila was confident that their anatomy was changing in the same ways that wolves’ anatomy transformed as they became dogs. In particular, the snouts of the tamest foxes looked shorter and more rounded, making their visages friendlier to go along with their friendlier behavior. They had begun to look so dog-like, in fact, that one of the elite foxes, a female named Coco, who was something of a favorite at the farm, was mistaken one day as a stray dog by a young man from a suburb of Novosibirsk in the vicinity of the farm. Coco then went on quite an odyssey.
Coco was so appealing in part because from early on, she made a lovable chattering noise that sounded something like “co co co co co.” Lyudmila says fondly of Coco, “She gave herself her own nickname.” Everyone on the farm had followed her fate with great concern her first few weeks after birth. She was so tiny and weak that it looked like she wasn’t going to survive. Even after the veterinarian gave her glucose supplements and vitamins every day, and hand fed her milk, she was still failing. Every morning when workers showed up at the farm, their first question was “How is Coco?” Even staff members over at the Institute wanted daily updates.
One staff member, Galya, always told her animal-loving husband, Venya, who was a computer technician in Akademgorodok, about how Coco was progressing when she got home at night. The two of them had discussed that if the veterinarian determined Coco had no hope, they wanted to make their small apartment into a fox hospice, allowing her to die with loving humans caring for her. Lyudmila agreed that they could take her in, and when the word came from the vet that there was nothing more he could do, they came to the farm to collect her. To their great surprise, when they got her home, Coco perked up and began to eat more. Within days, she was a new fox, and miraculously, she survived. Rather than bringing her back to the farm, Lyudmila was happy for her to live with Galya and Venya, who had become deeply attached to her. Coco, in turn, would become deeply bonded to them, and especially to Venya.
Venya was so enamored of Coco that he wanted to bring her into work with him, but that wasn’t possible. Every evening when he got home, he would take her for a long walk in the nearby woods, keeping a firm grip on her leash. Coco was fine with the leash, and behaved well. But one evening when Venya got stuck late at work and Galya was walking Coco, the fox spotted a man walking way off in the woods and bolted toward him, breaking free from Galya. In a moment, Galya lost sight of her. Coco probably thought that the male figure in the distance was Venya and shied away when she discovered otherwise. Galya called out to her, but Coco didn’t return, and Galya rushed home, hoping to find Venya so they could search for her.
For the next several days, Venya went back to the woods frantically searching for his dear friend, asking anyone he encountered if they had seen Coco. Finally someone told him they had heard that a young man from the town had found a fox that looked like a dog and taken it in. But by the time Venya tracked him down, Coco was gone. Later they learned that the very first night, Coco had screamed and scratched at the man’s door so relentlessly that he finally just let her out.
Venya then heard rumors circulating among the kids at a local playground that Coco had been picked up by a woman who lived in the same building as the young man who had first taken her in. Venya managed to get her name and went to her apartment, but she refused to open the door. When he pleaded with her that Coco was a special fox, part of an experiment at one of the institutes at Akademgorodok, she only opened her chained door a crack and said tersely, “I do not have it.” But later that night, she apparently got nervous about holding on to such a special fox, and she also let Coco out. The odyssey still wasn’t over.
Venya now got word that the kids at the playground had seen Coco with a local teenage boy, who was known to be a bully, but they said they didn’t know the boy’s name or where he lived. All they would say is that they thought he was about twelve years old. So with Lyudmila’s help, Venya set up an appointment with the principal of the middle school, and he and Lyudmila explained the situation. Right then, the teachers were instructed to make an announcement to every class that Coco was a special fox and if anyone had any information that would help find her, they should say so. It paid off. The boy’s name was quickly coughed up, and Venya and Lyudmila rushed to his apartment. They arrived just in time to find the boy’s mother in the process of sedating Coco, apparently preparing to kill her for her beautiful fur. Venya tore Coco away from the woman and ran out to the street with her limp body in his arms. As Coco breathed the fresh air, she began to revive.
Coco lived happily in Venya and Galya’s apartment for six more months, but when mating season came around, she became restless. She began scratching at the apartment door and keeping Venya and Galya up all night. Clearly she was longing to find a mate, so they consulted with Lyudmila and a worked out a plan. They would bring her back to the farm to mate, and then she would be moved into Pushinka’s house. To smooth over the transition to a different home, she was first placed in the human half of the house, and then in time, joined the other foxes over on their side.
For years Coco lived in Pushinka’s house, and Venya would visit every weekend, occasionally spending the night on a couch there. They also took regular walks together. When years later, Coco’s health started to fail, Venya and Galya brought her back to their apartment to spend the last days of her life in their loving care. Lyudmila remembers Coco “behaving peacefully and spending that last period of her life very content and happy.” Coco’s greatest joy was sitting on a chair with Venya and looking out the window. On one such occasion she jumped off of the chair and fractured her right front paw. Shortly after that, she developed a bone sarcoma. Venya cared for her, but he knew it was the beginning of the end. Soon thereafter, Coco had a heart attack and died, with Venya and Galya by her side. They buried her, in a tradition we now know goes far back in our ancestry, on a small hill in the woods where she and Venya loved to walk.
Venya visits her grave regularly to this day.
THE SPEED WITH WHICH DMITRI AND LYUDMILA’S FOXES HAD BECOME an animal capable of being such a lovable pet was particularly striking given the natural inclination of foxes to live as loners once they mature to adulthood. This difference between foxes and wolves, who are such social animals, might be a key factor in why wolves were domesticated so much earlier than any other animal. We speak of lone wolves, but wild foxes are the loner of the two. The gap of thousands of years between the domestication of dogs and that of the several other animals—cats, sheep, pigs, cattle, goats, and more—suggests that something about the wolf ancestors of dogs made them especially well-suited for adjustment to life with human groups, and one idea is that the special factor was how social an animal wolves are.
The first wolves that laid by our ancestors’ fires and shared their food not only were tamer than other wolves, they already had highly evolved social skills. Grey wolves live in strictly structured packs, typically containing 7–10 members (though packs can range up to 20–30 individuals), including an alpha—dominant—male and female. The family unit is central to the pack, which defends a large territory, using complex vocalizations to communicate with one another, as well with those in nearby packs. Bonds between group members are very tight, as can be seen during cooperative hunting and when pups nurse not just from their mother, but from other females in a pack.1 Jane Goodall
has argued that “[wolves] survive as a result of teamwork . . . They hunt together, den together, raise pups together . . . This ancient social order has been helpful in the domestication of the dog. If you watch wolves within a pack, nuzzling each other, wagging their tails in greeting, licking and protecting the pups, you see all the characteristics we love in dogs, including loyalty.”2 Their experience in cooperating with one another apparently equipped them for cooperating with us as well.
Dmitri thought that exceptional pro-social skills might have played a key role in the domestication of another species—Homo sapiens. While many animals, such as prairie dogs, parrots, and the leaf-cutter ants whose social lives E. O. Wilson described so memorably in The Insect Societies, live in close-knit social groups and watch out for one another’s interests, we humans have distinguished ourselves as one of the most social species on the planet, especially if you include norms, cultural rituals, and forms of communication in the definition of sociality. The increasing strength of social skills and depth of social bonds were central features of human evolution from primate ancestors, facilitating our transition first to life in small family-based groups of hunter-gatherers and then to life in the more complex social environment of steadily larger and more complex inter-family communities. Dmitri thought that his theory of destabilizing selection provided a compelling explanation of what had set this transformation in motion.
The confirmation by the mid-1980s of many of Dmitri’s conjectures about how domestication would follow from selecting for tameness in foxes emboldened him to take his thinking a big step further. He thought the time was now right for him to let the world know of his nascent ideas on destabilizing selection and domestication as they applied to human evolution. He had hinted at the end of his talk at the International Congress in 1978 that he thought his theory of destabilizing selection might offer insights about how humans had evolved from apes. Now he decided to develop his argument on this topic as the subject of the keynote address he would make at the next International Genetics Congress, to be held in India in 1983.
How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog) Page 15
