Jun 10, 2013

[Curiosity Research] Pet Fox

During this weeked, I stumbled into this video showing a pet fox.

I was like.. "Really? You can have a pet fox?". So I called my brother, Google, and did some reasearch. And yeah it's possible while it's quite restrictive.  This PopSci article, posted in Oct 2012, explains it very well.

Popular Science Article: Can I Have A Pet Fox?

Short Summary:
  • There's distinction between tamed and domesticated animals
  • You can tame animals by training them since they were young. So if you tame an wild fox, she won't bite you, but she won't play with you.  In other words, no ball chasing.. no belly rubbing... no wiggling. Most importantly, the offsprings of tamed animals need to be tamed again.
  • Domesticated animals are the result from very selective breeding of "human-friendly" wild foxes. They act more like dogs. It's in their DNA, so their children will love you too :)
  • The only way you can buy domesticated foxes are from Russia. They've been doing this selective breeding since 1950s, so after tens of generations those foxes are really dog-like.
  • The price is about $6,000
  • One interesting thing though: those domesticated foxes are showing some physical difference from pure wild counterparts.

so that is today's dose of my curiosity... :P