Explosive vocal activity for attracting human attention is related to domestication in silver fox.

Domestication affects behavioral and vocal responses, involved in communication with humans; in particular, those that attract human attention. In this study, we found that silver foxes of Tame strain, experimentally domesticated for a few tenses of generation, displayed bursts of vocal activity during the first minute after appearance of an unfamiliar human, that faded quickly during the remaining time of the test, when the experimenter stayed passively before the cage. Distinctively, foxes of Aggressive strain, artificially selected for tenses of generation for aggressive behavior toward humans, and the control group of Unselected for behavior silver foxes kept steady levels of vocal activity for the duration of the tests.

The gradual vocal responses to human-provoked discomfort in farmed silver foxes.

Vocal indicators of welfare have proven their use for many farmed and zoo animals and may be applied to farmed silver foxes as these animals display high vocal activity toward humans. Farmed silver foxes were selected mainly for fur, size, and litter sizes, but not for attitudes to people, so they are fearful of humans and have short-term welfare problems in their proximity. With a human approach test, we designed here the steady increase and decrease of fox-human distance and registered vocal responses of 25 farmed silver foxes.

Directional asymmetry in the limbs, skull and pelvis of the silver fox (V. vulpes).

Directional asymmetry (DA) is a characteristic of most vertebrates, most strikingly exhibited by the placement of various organs (heart, lungs, liver, etc.) but also noted in small differences in the metrics of skeletal structures such as the pelvis of certain fish or sauropsids. We have analyzed DA in the skeleton of the fox (V.

Kind granddaughters of angry grandmothers: the effect of domestication on vocalization in cross-bred silver foxes.

The genetic basis of the effects of domestication has previously been examined in relation to morphological, physiological and behavioural traits, but not for vocalizations. According to Belyaev [Belyaev, D.K.

Genetic regulation of canine skeletal traits: trade-offs between the hind limbs and forelimbs in the fox and dog.

Genetic variation in functionally integrated skeletal traits can be maintained over 10 million years despite bottlenecks and stringent selection. Here, we describe an analysis of the genetic architecture of the canid axial skeleton using populations of the Portuguese Water Dog Canis familiaris) and silver fox (Vulpes vulpes). Twenty-one skeletal metrics taken from radiographs of the forelimbs and hind limbs of the fox and dog were used to construct separate anatomical principal component (PC) matrices of the two species.