The New sporting magazine, Volume 3

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=14QEAAAAQAAJ

Coat Colour, Behaviour and Domestication

Second Nature: Domestication as Experiment and Metaphor in 20th Century American Psychobiology (2014)

"Before committing himself solely to the human subject, Keeler carried out another nearly decade-long study on mammals. Following his work on mink, he looked for an “animal of high intelligence possessing more ways of expressing behavior than in rats and mink.”

In his later reflections, Keeler portrayed this strategy as a stepwise approach toward the discovery of pigment gene pleiotropy in humans. He thought first of dogs, echoing Alan Gregg that these intensively selected and thoroughly inbred animals displayed marked differences in morphology and behavior. Dogs, though, were already domesticated and would not show the dramatic alteration of temperament associated with the appearance of a relative few single gene substitutions. Instead he chose farm foxes. These animals, like mink, had been brought into captivity only recently, displayed several mutations of the coat, and were raised in large numbers by fur breeders, who would absorb most of the costs of the study.

Keeler again arranged with a commercial breeder, Edward Fromm of Hamburg, Wisconsin, who had responded to Keeler’s inquiry that he was aware of behavioral differences in the various mutant variants on his farm. Shortly thereafter Keeler was invited to the farm to evaluate the animals. Fromm instructed Keeler to enter the open air priming range alone, still unknown to the foxes, and to approach their feeding trough.

Keeler later recounted:

When I arrived with my entourage of foxes at the feeding station I made myself small by getting down on one knee, and this seemed to relieve somewhat the tension of my hosts. I held my wrist to my mouth and made a series of mousy squeaks. At this an interested crowd began to close in on me from every direction. All the foxes near me were Ambers with an occasional Glacier. Farther away I could recognize a Pearl or a Silver and in the far distance a few Platinums. Red foxes never show themselves like this, although they sometimes find their way into the range.

Keeler was impressed by the arrangement of these foxes, a gradient of coat colors according to their aversion to him, a stranger. “This must be another case of behavior synthesis leading to tame behavior,” he wrote, “We must investigate it.” His cooperation with Fromm was similar to the relationship he maintained with Larry Moore during the mink project: Fromm provided the pelted carcasses of farm foxes, from which Keeler would remove the adrenal glands and pituitaries. Again adrenal weight relative to body weight was highest in the wild type animal, the red fox, which bore no coat color mutations. Relative adrenal weight declined progressively for Silver (non-agouti black with silver modifiers), Pearl (non-agouti black and blue), Amber (black, blue, and chocolate), and Glacier (black, blue, chocolate, and white) foxes, that is, in inverse relation to the number of mutations.

Relative pituitary weight declined in a similar pattern, though the effect was generally not statistically significant. These results agreed with those Keeler had found more than twenty years earlier in rats and a decade prior in mink. With Fromm’s foxes, though, Keeler was able to go further in his experimental manipulations than he had with either the rat or the mink, despite the fox’s relatively slow reproduction cycle and development. Thanks to Fromm’s willingness (and perhaps curiosity), Keeler was able to perform at least one crucial test cross, which mated a tame Amber to a wild red fox. The hybrid was then mated back to the Amber parent. This backcross yielded 8 color morphs as Keeler had predicted (4 were previously unknown) and allowed him to conduct behavioral tests on animals with known genetic constitutions, at least of the selected coat color genes.

He measured their “startle distance,” or the least distance allowed between a researcher and the fox before the animal fled, and “run distance” or the distance the fox covered after being startled before turning back to view the researcher. These distances were generally less in animals homozygous for recessive mutant alleles at two or more loci than for those with fewer homozygous recessive loci.

These results were similar but not perfectly congruent with Keeler’s earlier observations of the non-experimental farm foxes. He ascribed these differences to the fact that all of the foxes from this experimental backcross were at least heterozygously recessive at each coat color locus. Thus, the foxes homozygous at one locus or none might still have displayed the mitigating effects of recessive coat color mutations in simplex (i.e. incomplete dominance). Protein bound iodine in the blood also increased in a stepwise fashion for animals of 1, 2, and 3 coat color mutations, respectively. Keeler took this to mean that the thyroids of foxes with heavier mutation loads were less active or efficient in processing the protein bound iodine to thyroxin. Mutant foxes also carried higher loads of catecholamine derivatives in their urine, which Keeler explained as a tendency to metabolize and excrete the “fight-or-flight” hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine.

As Keeler transitioned from mink to foxes, he met with challenges from the administration of Georgia State College for Women, newly named in 1961, The Women’s College of Georgia. According to Keeler the College President, Robert E. Lee, had opposed faculty research since his election to office in 1956. The following year Keeler was denied a promotion to the Chair of the Biology Department. In 1961, after 13 years at the College, Keeler was offered a partial contract for three months, to teach chemistry rather than biology.

Following this insult, Keeler sought refuge at the nearby Central State Hospital where he was named Director of the Research Division. His new surroundings, at the nation’s largest mental health institution, suggested to him new ways of investigating pigment gene pleiotropy, including the use of psychomimetic drugs to mitigate the anxiety and “wildness” of red foxes. This turn in his research also suggests the facility with which Keeler analogized his experimental animals to his intended subject, humans. Keeler soon described the wild red fox as an ideal model for semi-specific human mental diseases, including schizophrenia and other psychoses.

Keeler and his associates successfully reduced the red fox’s excessive fear in proportion to the dosage of fear reducing drugs, like Oxazepam. This treatment brought the behavior of the red fox in line with that of its tame coat color derivatives, a parallel that Keeler emphasized to suggest the applicability of pigment gene pleiotropy to the field of mental health: “The gradational removal of fear by means of increased dosages of psychomimetic drugs is one of the triumphs of modern medicine, but a stepwise reduction in fear and anxiety response associated with the adding together of Mendelian genes has been little explored.”

By uncovering the principle at work in domesticated animals that made them less fearful in captivity, Keeler believed he also had a means for the permanent mitigation of the anxieties and other mental diseases afflicting modern humans"

https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/js956k33v

www.etymonline.com

FOX Meaning: "a fox," from Proto-Germanic *fuhsaz "fox" (cognates Old Saxon vohs, Middle Dutch and Dutch vos, Old… See definitions of fox.

blog.oup.com

Last week, I discussed the role of taboo in naming animals, a phenomenon that often makes a search for origins difficult or even impossible. Still another factor of the same type is the presence of migratory words. The people of one locality may have feared, hunted, or coexisted in peace with a certain animal for centuries. They, naturally, call it something.

books.google.co.uk

www.ebay.com

<p>1936 FOX HUNTING William Fawcett SPORTSMAN’S LIBRARY Hb Dj. Shipped with USPS Media Mail. See pics for condition and awesomeness!</p><br><p>M185</p>

www.newspapers.com

Saturday, September 12, 1936 PTEMBER 12, 1936 ILVER ING OX KM THE POLICY OF STACK'S FOX FARM is to supply only the very best cubs as breeding stock to established Farms and to the new entrant. Cubs can be ranched for one year to enable pupils to partake in all work such as preparing food, inoculating foxes, pilling, &amp;c, to . Edition of The Guardian

14th Century Foxes:

There is a dragon eating a fox in the last picture.

https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/animals/page/3/