How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog)

by Lee Alan Dugatkin

  Pushinka gave birth on April 6, a day that Tamara was filling in for Lyudmila at the house. Just before her water broke, Pushinka came over to Tamara, and as Tamara was petting her, she delivered her first pup, right there. She cleaned her newborn and took it to her den, where she gave birth to five more pups. Lyudmila rushed to the house when Tamara called her with the word, and to her astonishment, when she arrived, Pushinka carried one of her pups in her mouth over to her, placing it gently at Lyudmila’s feet. Normally fox mothers zealously guard their pups, and even the elite females were aggressive if the caretakers approached them right after birth. Lyudmila’s own maternal instincts kicked in and she chastised Pushinka, saying “Shame on you! Your pup’s going to get cold!” Pushinka picked the pup up and brought it back to the den. As Pushinka took her pup back to her nest, Lyudmila’s face lit up with a smile as she thought just how extraordinary it was for Pushinka to do such a thing with her newborn.

  The pups were all given names starting with a P, in honor of their mom: Prelest (Gorgeous), Pesna (Song), Plaksa (Crybaby), Palma (Palm Tree), Penka (Skin), and Pushok (the masculine version of fluff or “little fuzz,” because he looked so much like his mother). When the pups finally opened their eyes, they were notably solicitous of human attention. Little Penka in particular was immediately affectionate, “cheerful to see humans, wiggling her tail with great excitement” at the sound of her voice, as Lyudmila wrote in the journal. Within two more weeks, all the pups were equally responsive to her voice, and they would come running out of their den when she entered the room.

  With so much time to observe them closely, Lyudmila noted that the pups had distinctive behaviors. Prelest tended to dominate the others, being more aggressive in play with his siblings. Plaksa wasn’t as fond of being petted as the others, while Pesna was downright stoic and often made an odd mumbling-like growl sound, as if talking to herself. Palma liked to jump onto tables, and Penka was especially fond of playing ball and was deemed a “sleepyhead” in Lyudmila’s journal. Pushok craved interactions with Lyudmila more than all the others.

  Lyudmila was especially drawn to the little tail-wiggling, sleepy-headed Penka, who was the smallest of the pups and was often picked on by her siblings. She tended to stay by herself, away from her siblings, and she was anxious around people in a way the others weren’t, including with Lyudmila at the start, who wrote in the journal that Penka seemed to be contemplating whether “she should completely trust me.” But before long, Penka clearly decided she could and her demeanor totally changed. Some days Penka would fall asleep only if Lyudmila picked her up and rocked her softly in her arms.

  Lyudmila often played with Pushinka and the pups in the yard, throwing balls for them to tackle and push around. She would also run around so they could chase her. Penka would apply herself especially hard in this chasing game, jumping on Lyudmila’s back when she stooped down and holding on in a kind of fox hug. When Lyudmila sat on the couch, Penka would jump up next to her and sniff her hair and ears and very lightly nip at her nose, cheeks, lips, and ears, which the other pups didn’t do. Penka also made a sound unlike the vocalizations of the others, a sort of cooing noise that struck Lyudmila as a clear attempt to communicate with her. She often seemed to be wanting to tell Lyudmila something. “Penka is following me and talking all the time,” Lyudmila wrote in the journal.

  Penka appeared jealous of Lyudmila’s attention to the others and she would sometimes lash out at them when they approached her if she was with Lyudmila, which, being so small, she rarely did otherwise. She would also seek Lyudmila’s protection from the others. One day Penka found a cracker on the floor and was running around with it in her mouth, with her siblings in hot pursuit, and she jumped up on the couch next to Lyudmila and stashed the cracker behind Lyudmila’s back. Then she defended her position against her siblings.

  As one who had lived with dogs growing up, Lyudmila had seen this sort of behavior many times. But it was new in the foxes. As someone who understood animal behavior, she was acutely aware that she had to be careful when it came to attributing emotions and feelings to the foxes. Whether Penka was feeling anything like human jealousy would be impossible to say for sure. Dog experts know this conundrum about interpreting animal behavior well. In For the Love of a Dog, Patricia McConnell tells this story about one of her dogs, Tulip, who had discovered that a sheep that she had long played with had died: “[Tulip] sniffed Harriet’s body, circling, sniffing and repeatedly nudging her. After a few minutes, she lay down beside the body. She placed her big, white muzzle on her paws, sighed once—a long, slow exhalation of what we’d call resignation in a human—and then refused to move . . . I don’t remember how long Tulip lay beside Harriet, but she wouldn’t leave her voluntarily . . . Tulip looked for all the world as if she knew that Harriet had died . . . There’s only one catch. She behaves in similar ways to pigeons she’s killed herself, and last week, to an ear of corn I’d given her to chew . . . There’s a danger in attributing any emotion to a dog’s behavior, because we are so often wrong about it. That doesn’t mean they don’t have emotions, it just means that we need to get better at reading their expressions.”1

  Along these lines, Alexandra Horowitz devised an ingenious experiment to study the “guilty looks” dogs proffer when being caught in the act: looks that Darwin described as eyes “turned askant,” and others have portrayed as “plead[ing] forgiveness by frantically offering his paw,” “slink[ing] back in a submissive way” or performing a “Tai Chi slink,” often with “tail between her legs.”2

  Horowitz placed a scrumptious treat in a room and then had a dog’s owner tell their pet that it was either ok to eat it or it wasn’t (no!). The owner then left the room and the dog was left alone with the treat. The catch was that when the owner returned and the treat was gone, sometimes the dog was the culprit, but in other cases, unknown to owners, Horowitz had removed the treat. When owners castigated their dogs for the missing treat, they got a “guilty look” in return regardless of whether the dog was a treat stealer or not. It wasn’t “guilt” at breaking the rules, dogs just don’t like being scolded.3

  So whether Penka was feeling jealousy for Lyudmila’s attention, she couldn’t know for sure. But what she could know was that this little pup was forming a special bond with her. It kept growing stronger as the pups matured, and Lyudmila felt the strength of the bond too. In time, Penka would need her special human friend to intervene and save her from increasingly rough treatment by her siblings as Pushinka allowed the pups to take full charge of adjudicating their own quarrels.

  Pushinka was a good mother, and she played quite a bit with her pups, watching out for them in the early days. She loved to play pursuit games with them. Pushinka and the pups would chase after Lyudmila in the yard, pulling at her clothing and nipping at her legs and feet. But as attentive as Pushinka was, when the pups’ play got rougher as they matured, they had to fend for themselves, and little Penka often needed Lyudmila’s protection. Pushok was particularly aggressive toward Penka, often tossing his sister “militant looks,” as Lyudmila recorded, and following that up with an attack. Lyudmila couldn’t always be there to protect Penka, and one time she was attacked so viciously that bits of her neck hair were ripped out. Lyudmila called the vet, and he took Penka to the clinic for care.

  During her convalescence, which took place at the main part of the farm, where she could receive proper care, Lyudmila visited often, and Penka would perk up markedly when she arrived. When she left and Penka would whimper, Lyudmila was deeply moved, and she wrote about how hard it was for her in the journal. “I visited Penka at 6 pm,” Lyudmila wrote, “. . . she came in when I called her. She greeted me quietly, without complaints . . . she immediately climbed on hands.” Day after day this happened: “Penka was sitting sad and got happier,” Lyudmila noted in her journal, only at her approach. Once she was with Penka, her little fox friend “would not leave [her] side . . . she ran to my feet, like a small puppy. Allowed me to do
anything, then fell on her side when I started to pet her.” How could Lyudmila not be moved?

  As much as she loved Penka, Lyudmila had feelings for all the pups, and they, apparently, for her, and for her daughter, Marina, as well. “The pups are really crowding around me and Marina,” Lyudmila wrote in her journal. “They climb on our lap 3–4 of them at a time . . . ‘singing’ something.” It was hard for her to say more about this vocalization. It sure sounded like a sound that might indicate contentment, but vocalizations weren’t her specialty, and again she paused to remember how difficult it was to assess emotions in animals; and so for the time being, she’d write it down in the journal and make a mental note to come back to these vocalizations one day in the future.

  When the pups were in a more rambunctious mood, they would purposely run into Lyudmila and “wiggle their tails, and lay on the floor, panting.” They were leading the carefree life. Lyudmila would write of walking into one of the rooms of the house and seeing all the pups, and “they were very funny sleeping, with no worries and with no fear.”

  A deep bond also developed between Pushinka and Lyudmila. As Pushinka’s pups grew and she had to spend less time watching out for them, she turned her attention more toward Lyudmila again, constantly seeking her company. If Lyudmila was over at the other side of the back yard, Pushinka would come and stand by her, prompting her to play with her and pet her, lying at her feet and looking for her to scratch her neck. When Lyudmila had gone out to do some work at the Institute or for some time with her family, Pushinka would greet her at the door excitedly when she got back, wagging her tail.

  Another dog-like behavior she developed was treating different strangers who came to the house as individuals, not just generic humans. She was quite friendly towards people in general, but just as dogs will sometimes bark hostilely towards certain people and be immediately affectionate towards others they’ve just met, Pushinka became more wary of some visitors than others. She had continued to hide special food Lyudmila gave her, like chicken legs, around the house, and one day when the cleaning lady came to the house, Pushinka rushed out of her den and went hurriedly around from corner to corner of the rooms gobbling up her goodies. She seemed to be leery of this woman who might take her precious treats. When one of the male researchers at the Institute, Anatoly, came to the house, she moved the pups out of the room, as though to protect them from him. When Pavel Borodin of the wild rat domestication experiment came over, as he did often, sometimes spending the night if Lyudmila had something pressing to attend to, Pushinka laid on her back in front of him looking for him to rub her belly. She seemed to have developed an understanding that those who actually lived in the house with her and the pups—not only Lyudmila, but the other researchers who spent days and nights there—were in a special category.

  But it was with Lyudmila that she developed the strongest bond, like that between a dog and its master. She became increasingly protective of Lyudmila, and also acted jealous of her attention. When one day Lyudmila brought a new tame female fox named Rada to the house for a visit, Pushinka attacked her, pushing her out of the house and into the backyard. Pushinka also acted angry with Lyudmila: “I felt like Pushinka did not trust me anymore,” Lyudmila noted. “She won’t even let me pet her.” But things got better fast. “Our interactions returned back to normal,” Lyudmila wrote, “once I got Rada out of the house.”

  The intensity of the bond was clear, but even so, Lyudmila was shocked at the way Pushinka demonstrated her loyalty one night.

  It was July 15th (1974), and Lyudmila was sitting on a bench outside the small house to relax for a while, with Pushinka resting at her feet, as she often did. The sound of footsteps approaching the nearby fence that surrounded the house roused Pushinka. Lyudmila assumed it was the farm’s night guard on patrol and didn’t give it a second thought. But Pushinka had other ideas. Lyudmila had never seen her react aggressively toward a human. But now she apparently sensed danger. She bolted off in the twilight toward the perceived intruder, and what Lyudmila heard then stunned her. Pushinka let out a series of barks. Aggressive foxes sometimes made short, menacing sounds at people who approached their cages. This was different. Pushinka hadn’t been approached, she had gone in pursuit to bark at someone. She sounded just like a guard dog. Lyudmila immediately thought, dogs bark to protect their humans, foxes do not.

  Lyudmila hurried over to the fence and saw that it was in fact the regular night guard who had spooked Pushinka, and as soon as Lyudmila started talking to the woman, Pushinka sensed all was well, and stopped barking.

  To this day, Lyudmila has difficulty finding the right words to express the flood of emotions that overcame her when she heard her friend barking that July evening. She was overwhelmed with a sense of pride. As for Pushinka, she seemed plenty proud herself.

  Lyudmila had been curious to discover whether living with a human, or a group of humans, would elicit a loyalty to particular people in the elite foxes akin to that shown by dogs, and with Pushinka, there was no question that a depth of connection with and protective behavior toward Lyudmila had developed.

  LYUDMILA AND ALL THOSE AT THE FARM STARTED referring to the house at the edge of the farm as “Pushinka’s house.” The days Lyudmila spent there were never boring. Pushinka’s pups were becoming increasingly rambunctious and they began avidly playing games with Lyudmila. “If one of them jumps on my lap,” she wrote, “the second one is pulling the first one away, a third one is pulling away the second one and so on.” The pups would clamber up next to her if she sat on the couch, sniffing her head and licking her ears. They also loved a game of hunting that Lyudmila made up for them. She’d put a cloth or bathrobe down on the floor and move her hand under it like a mouse and they would rear up and energetically pounce.

  The pups also began to engage in sibling rivalries, and Lyudmila, as a second mom, sometimes had to settle everyone down. “Pushok was chasing Penka in the shed,” she wrote “[and] by the time I got there, Penka seemed like she was fed up with that, and she let me pick her up, very happy when I took her back in the house.”

  By age nine months, Pushinka’s bunch were no longer pups, they were getting close to mating age, and Lyudmila and the team had to make some decisions. They couldn’t possibly keep Pushinka, and all her kids and grandkids, in the tiny experimental house. They decided that they had to select only a few pups born each year to Pushinka or her children for living in the house and the others would live with the rest of the elite foxes on the farm. They continued to give each new pup selected a “P” name, in honor of Pushinka, and so in short time the brood included Proshka, Pamir, Pashka, Piva, Pusya, Prokhor, Polyus, Purga, Polkan, and Pion. As they grew up, each displayed some distinctive qualities. Proshka especially liked to sniff Lyudmila’s hair. Polkan spent her days following Lyudmila wherever she went. Proshka’s “favorite job,” as noted in the journal, was to chew on Lyudmila’s shoes. Pamir was especially “talkative,” making a chatting sound to himself, and Pirat showed more independence than the others.

  Much as she enjoyed her time at the house with all of them, Lyudmila also decided that she would no longer sleep over at the house most nights, and she started heading home to spend time in the evenings with her family. The foxes hated to see her go and would follow her to the door, and she felt guilty leaving them at first. On the positive side, as she approached the house each morning, the foxes would be eagerly peering out the windows and they would greet her at the door with a great burst of excitement.

  By the start of 1977, Pushinka’s house had fallen into sore disrepair, so Dmitri secured funds to build a new home in order to keep that part of the experiment alive. He and Lyudmila decided to use the occasion to make a key change in how she would conduct the house study. Lyudmila needed more time to work on analyzing all of the voluminous data the experiment on the farm was producing about the changes in the foxes, so they decided that she would observe Pushinka and her clan for fewer hours each day. The new house would b
e divided into a section for the foxes and another part for Lyudmila to work in, which would be closed off from them so that she could work peacefully. She would spend at least a couple of hours each day with the foxes in their part of the house and out in the yard.

  When Pushinka and two of her daughters, along with two of her grandchildren, were moved into the new house, they were not happy with this arrangement. They seemed to miss unimpeded access to Lyudmila, and Lyudmila also found herself missing their company. Pushinka took the long daily separation from Lyudmila especially hard, and she regularly tried to sneak into Lyudmila’s part of the house when Lyudmila came to see the foxes. Sometimes she was successful, wriggling by Lyudmila, and when Lyudmila made her go back to the fox side of the house, Pushinka would loudly vocalize her displeasure. Lyudmila noted that Pushinka seemed to remember the old life in the prior house, writing, “When Pushinka was in the yard, she used to look at the old house, where she happily lived side by side with people.”

  Seeing Pushinka unhappy was difficult for Lyudmila, and sometimes she bent the rules. “Pushinka was unusually sad and affectionate [today],” she wrote in a journal entry. “She put her head on my feet and lay there for a long time, looking up into my eyes with sadness and devotion.” That day Lyudmila allowed Pushinka to spend some time with her, investigating the human quarters. No one wants to see their friend that down.

  Perhaps because they had less time with Lyudmila and the assistants who helped her in the study, the foxes became more defensive about the time they did have with their humans. They would rush towards anyone who came over to their side of the house and compete for attention. Normally, they played with one another perfectly well and generally they enjoyed one another’s company. But when Lyudmila or Tamara, the assistant who spent the most time at the house, would sit down to relax, if they petted or paid special attention of any kind to one of the foxes, and another tried to join the party, the invading party would be warned off by an aggressive growl.