[QUOTE=yorkietalkjilly;4728634]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.... .........
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.......
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Went to bed, slept, woke hungry, had a snack and thought about how in the world a farmer or rancher could successfully introduce tamed wolf genes into nearby wolf packs without getting the tamed wolf or his pups killed. Apparently, it's practically undoable, if that's even a word. A wolf pack would likely readily kill any 'tame' wolf trying to enter the pack, let alone attempting to breed with any of its females, so breeding would have to be done using human management or artificial insemination and still the alpha wolf would likely kill those pups, as they aren't his own offspring. Normally, only the alpha male and female pair in wolf packs breed and no tame wolf is ever going to ascend to the role of alpha, so it would take a great deal of human intervention to try to 'tame' a wolf pack using tame wolves.
And a tamed wolf pack probably won't retain hunting, killing skills so the breeding stock would have to be fed, socialized, etc. by humans. I imagine only generations of selective breeding for tameness, confinement/shelter and providing food for the breeding stock, human socialization from birth and not simply environment changes alone would be required until a prototype, genetic tameness mutation occurred but if that's possible, why hasn't that already happened when socialized wolves are line bred in confinement for a few generations as with the Russian foxes?
In arctic climates where dogsledding is essential to survival, wolves have been kept and bred in confinement in hopes of domesticating them for sledpulling(wolves run for many miles daily in nature), naturally any sane wolf-keeper/breeder would selectively breed for tameness, if nothing else for his and the safety of other confined wolves, his family, workhands, dogs and stock. But obviously none of them the world over ever succeeded in creating a domesticated wolf. Each wolf still had to be socialized and tamed early in life to keep it from fearing its handler and before sled-training work without apparent widespread success.
https://www.animationsource.org/boar...ka-t36348.html https://answers.yahoo.com/question/i...1194337AAMHoQa https://www.google.com/search?q=alph...ed+sled+wolves