How far can domestication take away from the wild form?

[Techno-Druid]

Russian domesticated red fox are a domesticated form of the red fox (Vulpus vulpes), first domesticated in Siberia as an experiment conducted to see how domestication effects the physical morphology of animals.

But I've sort of wondered if these foxes would be a subspecies of red fox like dogs and cats are subspecies of gray wolves and wildcats respectively or whether they are simply a strand, a race or a breed of red fox. What do you think?

[Deleted]

Oh this again >.>

[Techno-Druid]

Oh this again >.>

Domestication? Or the foxes? I've talked about the foxes once before asking if someone would buy one, but I'm only using them as an example as they are more ambitious in terms of taxonomy. I could've used the domesticated mink as another example ig...

[May90]

I think it is a purely terminological question. I will leave it up to biologists to determine it.

[Independent voter]

[Techno-Druid]

Yep and to think we bred a wolf into a Chihuahua in only a few thousand years.

Think of what we can do now with advanced knowledge and CRISPR

[May90]

Wolves are so beautiful... If there was some kind of domesticated wolves easy to obtain, I would seriously consider getting a couple of puppies!

[Techno-Druid]

Wolves are so beautiful... If there was some kind of domesticated wolves easy to obtain, I would seriously consider getting a couple of puppies!

Dogs. But seriously you can get a wolfdog

They don't have the protective nature of dogs, but have diverse coat colors because of the domestic blood mixed in.

[Reeve]

Russian domesticated red fox are a domesticated form of the red fox (Vulpus vulpes), first domesticated in Siberia as an experiment conducted to see how domestication effects the physical morphology of animals.

But I've sort of wondered if these foxes would be a subspecies of red fox like dogs and cats are subspecies of gray wolves and wildcats respectively or whether they are simply a strand, a race or a breed of red fox. What do you think?

Yeah, I'd suggest subspecies is the right terminology for it.

What amazes me is how quickly the change occurred in that experiment.

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Here's another example of domestication altering the wild form.

This:


Becomes all of these:









Those are all the same species, domesticated in different ways.

[GennGreymane]

a lot. That is the answer

people through domestication can pick and choose traits among animals and plants that they prefer and grow them, thus creating more variations of what is essentially the same species.

Carrots are originally not orange, but had a gene that could make them orange. Farmers picked to grow out the orange ones. over time, the orange gene was a dominate factor as the orange gene was the artificially chosen gene.

[Techno-Druid]

If we're on the topics of domesticated plants, corn was originally a barely edible grass and over thousands of years of selective breeding it developed into it's domesticated form. Potatoes and sweet potatoes are just domesticated tubers grown by Incans.