Far fewer people probably know about the development of fox farming on Prince Edward Island, Canada’s smallest province. This history is buried in plain sight, you might say, since you can learn about it easily if you visit International Fox Museum and Hall of Fame on the island. Dr. Coppinger was her mentor at Hampshire College. There have been academic reports as well, suggesting that the Russian foxes hailed from Prince Edward Island, Dr. Lord said: “Different pieces of the story were all over, but nobody had put it together.”As it turned out, genetic tests showed that Dr. Belyaev’s foxes did have roots in eastern Canada, which almost certainly meant Prince Edward Island. So the question bothering Dr. Coppinger and Dr. Lord was this: How much domestication had gone on before the famous fox experiment began?

Source: New York Times December 03, 2019 15:03 UTC