Creating pets?

While waiting for one of this town’s ever-present trains to clear the tracks this week, Doc-wife and I were talking about the Russian silver fox domestication study. In the study, Russians at a fur farm decided to see if they could breed friendly, more dog-like foxes. The long and short of it was that in 30-35 generations, the Russians had a pack of tail-wagging, playful, dog-like foxes cavorting about their feet.

The selective breeding for “friendly” traits also resulted in a decline in the animal’s lustrous coat, most growing white “piebald” patches and a shortening of its nose. Some also developed floppy ears and rolled tails.

An excerpt:

Now, 40 years and 45,000 foxes after Belyaev began, our experiment has achieved an array of concrete results. The most obvious of them is a unique population of 100 foxes (at latest count), each of them the product of between 30 and 35 generations of selection. They are unusual animals, docile, eager to please and unmistakably domesticated. When tested in groups in an enclosure, pups compete for attention, snarling fiercely at one another as they seek the favor of their human handler. Over the years several of our domesticated foxes have escaped from the fur farm for days. All of them eventually returned. Probably they would have been unable to survive in the wild.

Doc-wife then postulated our own nanny-staters have been trying to turn the downtrodden among us into their “pets.” Nanny-staters provide food and housing, fuss over them occasionally and like knowing the downtrodden will occasionally come when called to support nanny-state candidates at the polls.

For several generations now, a segment of the population has depended largely on government handouts for food, clothing and shelter. And children born into this cycle of poverty often fall into the pattern of governmental dependence followed by their forebears. There have been recent efforts to break the cycle of dependence through curtailing of government benefits and emphasis on skills training to make able-bodied citizens largely self-sufficient, productive members of the workforce.

There’s been a great hue and cry as we try to introduce these “pets” back into the world of foraging for themselves. “It’s tough love, baby,” the conservative talk shows opine. Most advocate emergency and temporary aid to ease life’s unexpected pitfalls, but draw the line at continued no-strings assistance for the able-bodied.

They’re not pets, to have their material needs automatically and condescendingly satisfied through dignity-robbing handouts. They’re human beings, with dreams and aspirations and they must be released back into the wild to reach their potential. There’s a fine line between providing assistance and becoming the all-inclusive benefactor for successive generations of “Pets.”

We must not work to create a human subspecies delineated by their inability to fend for themselves.