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Originally Posted by whiteyorkie  |
Gotta disagree with you about only foxes being researched. It's such an interesting pursuit, maybe you could do some more research if you are certain that over the centuries no wolf domestication efforts have been made by many, many others and failed. Read a few books about the dog and wolf genetics and what differences seem to stymie wolf domestication. Wolf domestication research, if for no other reason than the high cost of wolf depredation on the dairy, farm and ranching industries, has and continues to be researched. Geneticists, animal behaviorists and animal husbandry researchers didn't simply decide to only domesticate the smaller, far less lethal fox and completely forego the larger, more deadly wolves, so dangerous to society they kill everything from domesticated pets to poultry, lambs, horses, cows and steers, etc., costing pet owners in heartbreak but many food/dairy and textile industries dearly, not just in food products but hides, fur, goose down, etc.
Wolves killed off so many wildlife in Yellowstone National Park and poultry and hoofed herds of every kind from the farms and ranches nearby, they were completely eradicated from Yellowstone for years. Wolves are so expensively predatory, killing of so many ranch and farm stock, those industry leaders tried and paid for research into everything they could to be better able to control wolves as a species, certainly including species domestication.
Though undoubtedly controversial and anathema to many animal lovers, many no doubt think it would be more palatable to domesticate those certain wolf packs with territory near all types of foul/animal-raising farms and ranches rather than killing them, just wiping them out. So the efforts to see if domestication were possible, be it controversial or even unethical for the wolf species itself, have long been tried, as yet, unsuccessfully.
For the last century and one-half at least every type of behaviorist/genetics researcher, animal husbandrymen, anthropologists and plain old citizens of the world have long tried every every method of domestication and yet wolves still remain wild as a species. The dairy and meat industries would doubtless pay millions for fully domesticated male wolves that could introduced into the wolf packs with territory near food-producing farms and ranches the world over. But wolf domestication has long been tried and studied not just for food supply and economics but just because many people felt challenged to domesticate the wolf if for no other reason than the canine mostly evolved from wolves. Nobody has truly domesticated one yet and apparently cannot until and if the wolf is genetically altered as canines did as they evolved.
Read
How The Wolfe Became The Dog by John Zeaman and Jon Franklin's
The Wolf In The Parlor. There are two more I just can't recall the name of I've read that cover attempts at wolf domestication. Just about any book that talks about canine evolution, dog genetics mentions wolf domestication failures and why they worked with the dog but not the wolf. If you or anyone out there could find a way to fully domesticate a wolf, where so many have failed, I'm certain the world will beat a path to your door.
Here's just a quick, single 15 minutes Google search reference of only a tiny fraction of references to research done on wolf brains, genetics and why domestication fails:
Wolf Depredation | International Wolf Center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolves...orking_animals Wolves versus dogs: Why a wolf will never be man's best friend. Scientists find out why dogs become domesticated | Daily Mail Online https://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/art...s-can-be-tamed https://www.researchgate.net/profile...d/publications https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kathryn_Lord https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialization_of_animals deadspin-quote-carrot-aligned-w-bgr-2 https://scholar.google.com/citations...AewAAAAJ&hl=en