On Tuesday, December 20, staff and students at Willard Intermediate South school were injured when two dogs identified as a pit bull mix breed made their way into the playground.
That's not a fucking pitbull then IS IT?!
The dogs were euthanized in order to be tested for rabies. The tests will be completed today, and we expect to have results within the next couple of days. During the investigation, it was determined that one of the dogs was not vaccinated and no proof could be provided that the other was up to date on its vaccinations.
So it could've been rabies but you go straight to the bullshit bioessentialism and insinuation that genetics can predispose one to violence.
Obligatory link to my effort post on this phenomenon (reddit link because the OG here is in archive limbo)
The earlier generations here, also raised in captivity and being noted as being less domesticated, should work as a control group here or am I missing something?
I think the biggest question is how much of this behavior is taught (be it by humans or through their parents). E.G. it's already been demonstrated that crows can pass on information about potentially dangerous human individuals.
This study https://www.npr.org/2019/09/13/760666490/crows-are-they-scary-or-just-scary-smart
I'd argue even the tamest foxes from a 1950s estonian fur farm don't exactly have a great trackord towards humans
Hmm, at first glance training/teaching seems possible. After all, the foxes were apparently kept in cages in a barracks like structure - so they should be able to see each other and how other foxes react to humans.
However, this seems like it can’t account for much of it, just given the length of the study and amount of generations. It seems there were behavioral changes between the foxes - generation to generation - and this went on for 40 generations.
How many generations can foxes get the benefit of learning from other generations before we’d expect significantly diminishing returns? 1? 2? Maybe 3?
Meanwhile they have significant changes in their hormones (stress hormone halving every 10 generations, higher levels of serotonin, significantly changed reproductive behavior, significant changes to hormone producing organs) that correlate strongly with the behavioral changes.
It seems a bit silly to me to think that, given this background, a significant amount of the behavior is attributable to inter generational learning.
The page also mentions follow-on studies. Apparently the domesticated foxes had 40 different gene expressions compared to farm raised foxes. Additionally, it seems there was a different experiment ran with rats, in which, starting from the same rat group, they were able to breed hyper aggressive and hyper docile rats in short order, which apparently resulted in genetic differences between the two groups.