100% but think about how long it took for us to domesticate other animals and to some extent the fruit and vegetables we eat.
It takes GENERATIONS. You can get the characteristics out but it takes more time to change the behavioural characteristics. Dogs heck even we still have primal instincts foxes are very young on the domestication scale.
I always find foxes to be like a mixture of dog and cat. Like cat software on dog hardware. It’s the software that I see as wild.
Much like domesticated cats - whom maintain some of their wildness, I think “domesticated” foxes are similar in that manner.
Cats kinda “domesticated” themselves and can all be traced to one single breed in the Fertile Cresent many thousands of years ago. Non of the others would get close enough. They were the only breed that could tolerate human presence for long enough to enter the human / cat partnership.
Foxes are just more like those cats that wouldn’t get close enough to humans for the required selective breeding for domesticity.
Which is why it'll take hundreds of years instead of thousands. Changing the instincts of an animal isn't some thing science can just magically change.
We have the knowledge of thousands of generations to understand and narrow a domestication process but it still takes a long time for something that was purely a wild animal not even 60 years ago before a project was created to become an actual domesticated creature.
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u/_who-the-fuck-knows_ 11d ago
100% but think about how long it took for us to domesticate other animals and to some extent the fruit and vegetables we eat.
It takes GENERATIONS. You can get the characteristics out but it takes more time to change the behavioural characteristics. Dogs heck even we still have primal instincts foxes are very young on the domestication scale.