A friend shared this article with me recently, delving into a decades-long experiment trying to recreate the domestication of pets in foxes—and succeeding, faster than they had anticipated. I found it fascinating, especially because I’d just recently seen something about the discovery of a burial site that dates back to before pets were domesticated, and foxes were buried with all the care that a family member might be along with their owners. It makes me wonder why they gave up on domesticating foxes if they are capable of being domesticated. The article I read posited that foxes could only be domesticated up to a point, which would have explained why people turned to wolves.
Now I can’t find the original article to link, though. But here’s a Time article that covers the same thing.
March 2011 National Geographic?
Possibly. You know how it is when you run into a link through a link through a link.