When Hare saw the tame foxes uncontrollably wagging their tails at him, he immediately fell in love with them, like everyone does. Getting down to the task at hand, he decided that he should expand on the object choice test done on dogs and wolves.18 The test with the foxes would be done using two different experimental set-ups. In the first, which was very similar to the test he had given to the dogs and wolves, he would hide food under one of two cups placed on a table that was about four feet in front of a fox.19 One of the researchers working with him on the study would point and gaze at the cup that had the food under it, and then which cup, if either, the fox preferred would be recorded. The second type of test would not involve food. Instead, two identical toys, that the foxes knew and loved, would be placed on the right and left end of a table placed in front of a fox pup in its home pen.
Hare had the protocols all sketched out and ready to go, when a series of unexpected problems emerged. For one thing, he needed a table to place the cups and toys on, which didn’t strike him as a problem until he got a taste of some of the relics of the managed economy that had been a hallmark of life in the USSR. When he asked for a table, he was told that one would be made for him by the shop at the Institute. He was to be provided not with any shoddy contraption, but with a marvel of Russian engineering that even Belyaev would be proud of. The job order went in, and two weeks later, the table arrived. “It was the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen,” Hare recalls fondly. “I dubbed it ‘Sputnik,’ which everyone thought was hilarious.”20
The second problem to be solved before the experiments could begin was a bit trickier. For the test to be fair, the fox had to be standing in the middle of its pen at the start, not on the right or left side. But how could he make sure they were? Some on the fox team suggested he train them to stay in the middle, which they assured him would be possible, but he didn’t have time for that, and what’s more he wanted to avoid the training procedure as an experimental confound. Instead he thought that if he put a wood plank on the floor of each pen, in the middle, the foxes might prefer to sit or stand on it rather than the chicken wire of the pen’s floor. Once again the Institute provided for his needs, and after boards had been placed in the pen of each fox to be tested, when Hare went to the farm the next day, he remembers quite vividly that every single fox was lying on the boards in the middle.
He tested seventy-five fox pups, each one many times.21 The results were crystal clear. When tame pups were compared to dog pups, they were just as smart as the dogs. And when the tame pups were compared to control fox pups, they were smarter—much smarter—both at finding the hidden food in the pointing and gazing task, and at touching the same toy that Brian or his assistant had touched.22
The results were completely in line with Wrangham’s hypothesis. The control foxes were clueless on the social cognition tasks, which the domesticated foxes aced, performing even a little better than dogs. Social intelligence, somehow or another, just came along for the ride in their domestication.
“Richard was right,” Hare admits, “and I was wrong . . . it totally rocked my world.”23 Suddenly, he saw the evolution of intelligence, and the process of domestication also, very differently. He had thought that early humans intentionally breeding dogs to be smarter had led to dogs’ social intelligence. But if the trait could emerge, instead, from selection for tameness, then that was evidence in support of the view that the domestication of the wolf might have started without breeding for social intelligence being involved. Hare now believed that selection acting on tameness could have brought wolves onto the path to domestication, because those that were inherently a little tamer, and began hanging around human groups, would have had the survival advantage of more plentiful food. Wolves might have started the process of domestication themselves, just as Dmitri Belyaev had conjectured, and had argued about human domestication too. This change of understanding was what led Hare to collaborate later with Richard Wrangham on their study of bonobo self-domestication.
Lyudmila knew Dmitri would have been delighted with Brian’s finding: the results were entirely in keeping with the theory of destabilizing selection. Shake up the fox genome by placing foxes in a new world where calm behavior toward humans is the ultimate currency, and you’ll get lots of other changes—mottled fur, curly, wagging tails, and better social cognition as well.
Hare’s work on social cognition inspired one of the members of the fox team to test how well the tame foxes could learn to perform many of the tasks dogs have been trained to do. Irena Muchamedshina, who had long been immersed in training her own pet dogs, joined the fox team as a nineteen-year-old undergraduate student at Novosibirsk State University. After she’d been working on the farm for a time, she recalls, “I had seen these foxes daily wiggling their tails and jumping to get a tiniest bit of human attention, and got really curious about the possibility of working with them the same way as I did with dogs.”24 She got Lyudmila’s approval to raise one of the pups from the elite tamed line, named Wilj’a, in her little flat from the time that Wilj’a was just six weeks old, so she could start the training young. She also worked every day with another tame pup, Anjuta, at the farm. Each day for three weeks she spent fifteen minutes rewarding the animals with tasty treats for responding correctly to commands such as “sit,” “lie down,” and “stand up.” Both pups learned to recognize the commands quickly and they performed the tasks with the discipline of show dogs. This gave Lyudmila more hope that in time she would be able to convince people to take pups of the elite foxes into their homes. If they could be taught to perform at command so easily, they could almost surely be taught to be consummate house pets.
ANIMAL BEHAVIOR RESEARCHERS ALSO made great headway in the 1980s and ’90s in understanding animal communication. Lyudmila knew of this work and was hopeful—up to this point, she had not been able to study the new “ha ha” vocalizations the tame foxes were making, but maybe now that would change.
The bar was long set high for claims about animal communication, especially communication between humans and nonhumans, because of a horse named Clever Hans. At the turn of the twentieth century, William von Osten became something of a celebrity because of the prodigious abilities he claimed for his horse, Clever Hans. Von Osten asserted that Hans could solve mathematical puzzles, identify different pieces of music, and answer questions regarding European history. Of course, Hans didn’t talk; he just used his hoof to tap out the solution to a math problem, or shook his head up and down or sideways, “yes” or “no,” to questions. The Prussian Academy of Science got wind of von Osten’s claims and decided to put Hans to the test in a controlled environment. Hans did give correct answers to the questions thrown at him, but only when someone in the room knew the right answer. If two people each gave Hans part of a question, but each was ignorant of what the other told Hans, Hans did no better than one would expect by pure chance. Hans was indeed clever, just not in the way people thought. He could pick up on very subtle body cues and facial cues that investigators in the room unconsciously emitted when they were giving Hans the correct and incorrect answers to choose from. Animal behaviorists made sure they would not make that mistake.
In the new wave of work, rigorous studies proved that many animals communicate in elaborate ways. Vervet monkeys, again, provide a nice example. Life in the Amboseli National Park in southern Kenya can be dangerous for vervets. Leopards lurk in the bushes; crowned eagles, who can swoop down and carry off a monkey in their talons, scour the landscape for them; and deadly snakes are also about. Fortunately for the vervets, they are able to communicate about such threats with one another. They do this in a remarkable fashion. Vervets send specific alarm calls to one another about different types of danger. If an eagle is spotted, vervets emit a call that sounds to us something like a cough. Vervets who hear this look into the air or hide in the bushes, where they are safe from threats from the sky. If a leopard is seen, but not otherwise, they make a sound more like a bark, and the monkeys respo
nd by climbing trees, where leopards have trouble following them. When a python or cobra is sighted hiding in the tall grass, vervets give off a “chutter” call, at which other vervets stand and scan the grass around them for snakes. For each specific signal a vervet gives there is a specific, adaptive, response by those who receive the signal.25
Animal communication wasn’t an area Lyudmila had any expertise in, though she found it very interesting. She and her team had long made note of a range of new vocalizations the foxes had begun making, starting with the whining and whimpering of the elite fox pups for human attention and including different bark-like sounds. There was also Coco’s chuckling “co, co, co” sound, and the strange “haaaaaw, haaaaaaw, haw, haw, haw”—ha ha—sound that reminded Lyudmila of laughter. No researchers at the Institute had any knowledge of how to study these vocalizations, so Lyudmila had never attempted a study. Then, in 2005, she got a call from someone who wanted to do so.
At the time, twenty-year-old undergraduate Svetlana Gogoleva, who goes by Sveta, was working in the lab of Ilya Volodin, a young professor who worked on animal communication at Lyudmila’s alma mater, Moscow State University.26 Sveta read about the fox experiment and thought it presented a unique opportunity to study how domestication affected the evolution of animal communication abilities. Volodin liked the idea and Sveta and he contacted Lyudmila proposing to record all of the foxes’ vocalizations so that she could compare those of the elites, the controls, and the aggressive foxes. As ever, Lyudmila was delighted to welcome Sveta to the fox team.
The first step, Lyudmila told her, should be to have a member of the fox team make a few preliminary recordings of the vocalizations of the elite, control, and aggressive foxes. She’d send the tapes to them at Moscow State and see what Sveta and her professor thought of them. When Sveta and Volodin listened to these tapes, they were fascinated. They had never heard sounds like those the tame foxes were making. “As soon as we analyzed the first recordings,” Sveta remembers, “we decided that I just have to go to the farm and begin the work with these unique animals.” She began her work at the fox farm in the summer of 2005. “I was a bit nervous,” she recalls. After all, she hadn’t even completed her undergraduate degree yet. But her anxiety immediately melted away when she met Lyudmila. “At the first sight,” she says, “Lyudmila made an impression of a very good and sympathetic person.” She invited Sveta to her office and poured them each a cup of tea, and then told Sveta all about Belyaev and the history of the experiment. “Lyudmila was very friendly and often smiled while talking with me,” says Sveta, “and because of her smile and soft tone, I soon felt at ease.”27
Though working with the aggressive foxes was stressful, Sveta loved working with the tame foxes, and she befriended one in particular, named Kefedra. She fondly recalls how when she first went to record Kefreda, the intensely affectionate fox “fell on her side while uttering a long mixed series of cackles and pants,” and how when Sveta petted her, Kefedra “tried to push her muzzle into my sleeve and she licked my fingers.”
Sveta started her research by cataloguing the different sounds made by the tame, aggressive, and control foxes.28 “Usually, I began working after the morning feeding of foxes, about 10:00–10:30,” she tells it. “I had the list of names and I could freely choose which to test.” Right from the start, it was clear that the aggressive foxes were generally louder than the other animals. But, she wasn’t especially interested in volume: she wanted to distinguish between the natures of the sounds, and determine whether there were differences among the fox groups. To find out, she tested twenty-five females from each of the tame, control, and aggressive groups.
In each trial, in a well-rehearsed, precise, methodical manner, and armed with a Marantz PM-222 tape recorder, Sveta approached a fox in its home pen. She would stand two to three feet in front of the pen, and if the fox started making sounds, she recorded them for about five minutes. Across the seventy-five females she tested she recorded 12,964 calls, and all of them fell into one of eight categories. Four types of sounds were made by foxes in all groups—tame, control, and aggressive—but of the other four sounds, two were made only by the elite foxes, and two only by either the aggressive or control foxes.
The two sounds made only by the aggressive foxes and some of the control foxes were vocalizations that sounded (to humans) like a snort and a cough. The vocalizations made only by the elite foxes were the cackles and pants she had heard Kefedra make, which were combined in a rapid-fire rhythm of cackle, pant, cackle, pant that produced the strange haaaaw, haaaaaw, haw, haw, haw sound that Lyudmila knew well.
To dig further into her findings, Sveta conducted a detailed analysis of the nature of the cackles and pants—the “ha ha” sound. Analyzing the acoustic microdynamics of the sounds, factoring in things like duration, amplitude, and frequency, she found that, indeed, the combination of the sounds mimicked the sound of human laughter very closely. Closer than any other nonhuman vocalization. When she placed a spectrogram—a visual representation of sound—of the cackles and pants up against a spectrogram of human laughs, she was hard pressed to tell the difference. Lyudmila had been exactly right. The similarity was astonishing. Almost eerie.
The spectrogram analysis led Sveta and Lyudmila to the radically fascinating hypothesis that the tame foxes make the “ha ha” sound in order to attract human attention and prolong interaction with people. Somehow, they propose, the tame foxes have become adept at pleasing us by the sound of our own laughter.29 How, they don’t know, but a more pleasant way for one species to bond with another is hard to imagine.
10
The Commotion in the Genes
For Lyudmila and Dmitri, the fox experiment was, at its heart, about discovering how the genetics of domestication worked. The experiment branched out to encompass many other areas of research, but this had been the core goal from the start. With Anna Kukekova—she who had rushed to the fox farm and collected blood samples in a frenzy of Lyudmila-induced fox domestication science—on board, Lyudmila was finally able to begin probing into the details of the foxes’ genome and hoped that analysis would provide further insight into the process of domestication.
The first thing Anna and Lyudmila had to do was to map the fox genome, which was painstaking work. To construct a complete gene sequence would be quite expensive and time consuming, and Anna decided to explore a faster method for creating a somewhat less detailed genomic map. Work on creating a complete sequence of the dog genome was well underway, and Anna wanted to see whether she could make use of the tools developed for analyzing the dog genome, tools called genetic markers,1 which are stretches of DNA that help to locate, identify, and analyze genes. Because dogs and foxes are evolutionarily close relatives, Anna thought the genomes of the fox and dog might be similar enough that the dog genetic markers would work, but this was by no means a sure thing, given that the ancestors of dogs and those of foxes had separated on the order of 10 million years ago. The genetic makeup of the two had also been found to differ significantly in the number of chromosomes in their genomes. Most breeds of dog have 39 pairs of chromosomes while the silver fox has 17 pairs. Thankfully, in the tedious process of testing 700 genetic markers that had been used in the study of the dog genome, Anna discovered that about 400 of them worked with the fox chromosomes. That was enough firepower to start mapping the fox genome.2
When Lyudmila got this news in the fall of 2003, she had recently celebrated her 70th birthday, and the confirmation that the genomic analysis of her foxes could proceed meant a great deal to her. What a long way they all had come, Dmitri, she, and the foxes. When she had first traveled to Novosibirsk to work with Dmitri, they were operating under the shadow of Lysenko, hiding the true nature of their work. Forty-five years later, here she was, hiding nothing. Not only that, but she was collaborating with a Russian—not a Soviet—scientist, who was free to take a job at one of the premier research centers in the US, the Soviet Union’s nemesis in the Cold War. And they w
ere making use of tools so sophisticated that researchers could now not only discern the fine line between individual genes, but they could even clone them. If only Dmitri were alive to share in this leg of the journey, she thought.
Using bits of DNA from 286 animals at the fox farm, Anna, Lyudmila and their colleagues meticulously constructed a genomic map of the foxes, which though not comprehensive, covered sections of all sixteen non-sex chromosomes and parts of the female X chromosome, too. Until they had more markers, they wouldn’t be able to fill in the rest. They mapped out the relative location of 320 genes in total.3 While this is a tiny chunk of a typical mammalian genome it was a big step. Now they could begin with the difficult job of identifying which of the genes they had mapped might be linked to the changes involved in domestication, and ultimately begin understanding how on earth it was possible that bits of DNA that once coded for a wild animal could be tweaked to produce a human-loving, domesticated creature. This work would take a good deal more time, and money.4 Fortunately, their initial results in simply mapping part of the fox genome were promising enough that they were able to secure funds from the National Institutes of Health, who could see some medical implications in understanding the genetic basis of calm, prosocial behavior, as well as that of aggressive, antisocial behavior in the aggressive line of foxes.5
How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog) Page 20
