So my friend is thinking about breeding the friendliest coyotes together to make a domesticated breed. How many generations should this take? He saw that some group in Russia did something similar with foxes in only 60 years. He is using urban Coyotes that are already somewhat use to people. Is there a market for domestic coyotes?
It will happen very quickly if you min max it. You have to understand that ancient people had fewer option and less knowledge. You can streamline it to a couple gens.
From what I remember they found out that it takes around 20 generations so it will take around 20 years for you. Animals were kept with minimal human contact so the only factor influencing their docility would be genetic, not learned. So basically you will need lots of coyotes who will be raised in individual cages with minimal human contact. After a certain time you test how they react to a human approaching, might need to repeat the test a couple of times to be sure it wasn’t a fluke. The ones less afraid/more docile are selected for breeding. The rest is culled. Repeat this for 20 generations, it should take around 20 years. Now you have a domesticated coyote.
How I would do it: make coyote/dog hybrids, breed those with coyotes, select for both docility and looking like a fucking coyote. I think it should produce a better result in half of the time since I would be flooding the bloodline with high domestication genes then just removing the dog traits.
Personally I would repeat the Russian experiment and domesticate foxes except I would try to contact people who managed to get some from them and clone those so I have a head start. I think there is a bigger market for domesticated foxes than coyotes and I like how they look more. If genetic engineering is on the menu I would add genes from arctic and corsarv foxes to make cuter and smaller foxes, this way I can have a greater variety of sizes and looks for generating different breeds. Small foxes probably will be more popular but there might be some who would want big foxes as well. Reduced scent glands and marking behavior should be selected as well, remove those entirely from their genes if possible.
Keeping native wild fauna as pets is generally illegal in the US.
The more I think about it the more I'm against pets and domestication. I think what I'd want in a "pet" was an animal I just built trust with and could feed sometimes but comes and goes as it wishes...
Pets live much longer and happier lives than wild animals
If they did not like the certainty of civilization, they would not have chosen domestication. Animals that don't prefer it simply don't stay in the domestication program, because that's kind of the point.
>I think what I'd want in a "pet" was an animal I just built trust with and could feed sometimes but comes and goes as it wishes...
Go to mexico. That's how all the dogs are.
>Go to mexico. That's how all the dogs are.
This is how all dogs in most temperate countries were until like WWII and stray dog culling started to become much more common.
i think related to cars too, it gets messy if you mix street dogs and cars
Why do they constantly try to go outside then? Animals were not meant to only experience this artificial world we built.
Mating instinct, prey drive. Spay, neuter, and keep occupied.
Asian and russian spitzes aren’t even domesticated so 40,000 years for some really ugly ones to be tolerable for the average 95 IQ wagie.
40,000? Dame nigga, can't get the process going a little quicker? I'm sure we could science a way to make Coyotes domesticated quicker.
just crossbreed with dogs a bit
Is that possible? The offspring would probably be fucked up.
sometimes there are neurological issues but it mostly works fine. dogs and coyotes are pretty close.
urban coyotes already have a non-trivial amount of dog blood in them, that how they're able to deal with being urban in the first place
dogs and coyotes produce fertile offspring but that's kind of cheating. there are already people that get coydogs or wolfdogs when they want a wild animal that's like 10% nicer (and expect one that's like 90% nicer lol)
but your friend will never ever do this it's just an idle fancy so i wouldnt worry about it
Hundreds to thousands of years for true domestication
zero, they are already friendly
But they arnt domesticated. My friend was going to breed only the calmest coyotes with each other to get a similar result to the Russian foxes.