Science

Wow that’s interesting!

The study lays out the case that the domestication process is often wrongly thought of as initiated by humans—with people capturing and selectively breeding wild animals. But the study authors claim that the process begins much earlier, when animals become habituated to human environments.

“One thing about us humans is that, wherever we go, we produce a lot of trash,” says the study’s co-author and University of Arkansas at Little Rock biologist Raffaela Lesch. Piles of human scraps offer a bottomless buffet to wildlife, and to access that bounty, animals need to be bold enough to rummage through human rubbish but not so bold as to become a threat to people.

This has absolutely blown my mind. I don’t think I’ve ever considered that, obviously.

City-dwelling raccoons seem to be evolving a shorter snout—a telltale feature of our pets and other domesticated animals

I wonder if it's softer food.

I'm surprised the article doesn't mention the six decade long silver fox domestication experiment:

https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-018-0090-x

They bred the tamest foxes from each generation and started seeing shortened snouts and floppy ears. Although there is some dispute about the initial population from a study in 2019. To my understanding the researchers with the dispute question the existence of domestication syndrome though, so the experiment would still align with the article. And I think there is some dispute over the neural crest cell explanation mentioned in the article too.

For the new study, she and 16 graduate and undergraduate students gathered nearly 20,000 photographs of raccoons across the contiguous U.S. from the community science platform iNaturalist. The team found that raccoons in urban environments had a snout that was 3.5 percent shorter than that of their rural cousins.

Or maybe people in cities take more photos of “cuter” animals?

My across the street neighbor feeds the racoons cat food. They rip up my garden and antagonize my dogs all night. I tried to scare one away just last night by yelling and waving my arms, but they just stared at me like "yeah ok dude" and went back to their racoon business. They are not afraid of people in the slightest and you could probably pet one if you were so inclined. It sucks 😅

If you're cold, they're cold. Let the trash panda inside your house.