I've always been fascinated by domestication.  Roger Caras's wonderful book, A Perfect Harmony: The Intertwining Lives of Animals and Humans Throughout History is one of my old friends from the bookshelf; on the dog side of things, I've devoured just about anything written about how the wolf became dog.  It was on this latter track that introduced me to The Farm Fox experiment.

 

Back in the early 1960s, Russian geneticist Dmitri Belyaev began to riddle out why domesticated farm animals are so different from their wild counterparts.  His subjects - wild Russian silver foxes.  Belyaev wanted to create a domesticated fox in laboratory conditions through intensive, selective breeding.  His sole criteria for breeding stock was to identify the fox kits in each litter most friendly towards people.  Over the course of the experiment, Belyaev hoped to determine how long it took for significant behavioral changes to become the norm, i.e. for wild to become tame, and to determine if a wild canid would undergo siginificant physiological changes as it became domesticated.

 

The answers - not as long as you might think, and yes, most definitely yes.  Belyaev's foxes, now under the supervision of Dr. Lyudmila Trut, have become positively doglike.  They bark, they crave human contact, they follow humans about.  They also have developed, through no intentional selection for such traits, curled tails, white-patched fur, and floppy ears.  Wow.

 

And so to rats.

 

I've always loved rats, and had four beloved rats as classroom pets not so long ago.  When they passed away, due to the needs of rats as pets (they need a great deal of living space, daily "free-range" time, and are incredibly social, pining for human contact if not taken out and played with daily) and the arrival of my first son, I decided to take a break from the species.  With two dogs, two cats, and fish already in residence, a high-maintenance emotionally-dependent pet that needs to live in large cages with one or two companions didn't seem wise.

 

I did think about gerbils then, but had never been really impressed with the little furries... they seemed rather like the rodent equivalent of goldfish.  Pretty to look at, nice to hold, but essentially without personality.  Two things converged to change my mind, and to found Autumnglory Gerbils.

 

First of all, I began talking to people who actually bred gerbils.  My experience had been limited to the pet store variety, and I was not surprised to learn that gerbils hand-raised from pups grow into very different creatures than store-raised pups... much more amenable to holding, even social, in a small-and-detatched way.  Then I met Donna Anastasi, and learned that, as with rats, gerbils have distinct personality variations... some are less human-centered, some are extroverted.  I liked what I saw, and decided to try out breeding with a pair of Donna's gerbils.

 

Around that time, I read a New York Times article about the Farm Fox Experiment... a sideline to it, actually.  Apparently, Dr. Trut determined that canids breed too slowly - so she set up a breeding experiment with rats, to see if she could enhance their domestication as well.  As with the foxes, it worked extremely well.  And that got me to thinking...

 

If a wolf can be domesticated over hundreds of years... if a fox can be domesticated over a few decades... if a rat can become more social and people-oriented through genetic selection in mere generations (years), then why not try the same with gerbils?

 

I spoke to Donna about my theories, and she was interested enough to sell me Mask, a very promising extrovert male, and lend me Promise, her super-friendly extreme mottled agouti female.  Autumnglory Gerbils was born, and had a goal - to select only the most extroverted, people-oriented pups from extroverted, people-oriented parents with the aim of creating a line of gerbils as friendly as your average rat... which is to say, almost as friendly as a dog.

 

And that's where we are today.  I do what I do because I love small animals, and believe that a line of highly-social gerbils will attract owners who will invest more time and emotion in their care... something which will, eventually, benefit the species as a whole.  It will take time - many years - but it will be worth it.

 

It's a goal.

 

To read the New York Times Science Times article which has had a major impact on our breeding goals, however, click on the title below.

 

Nice Rats, Nasty Rats: Maybe It's All in the Genes  New York Times 7/25/06