I remember years ago reading about a study done on foxes that were tamed or domesticated from wild foxes for the fur market but as generations went by in domestication their ears, coat, tail carriage, and disposition changed since the folks wanted and chose "calmer" foxes they somewhat lost the necessity for the wild attributes controlled by these adrenal gland hormones.
This is waaay too deep and really stretching my pea brain and minimal education and I'm not smart enough to be able to apply it in any reasonable amount of time for it to be of any use to me other than maybe have a tiny bit of understanding as to how it works and came about.
the foxes you are talking about changed very quickly...the researchers thought it should take many generations before these drastic changes could occur...they were wrong, as many they have been in many other cases...nothing new about that...
one theory on what caused this is when they were selectiong the foxes to breed, they were looking for the traits that were people friendly and also for not being shy towards people...when selecting for these traits there were other traits that were tied to those traits such as the tricolor and droopy ears...
I also believe as I have posted before...folks say to pick pups for intelligence...many do not or cannot explain what that means...
Just like the foxes...when we pick for winding, drifting and ranging...we are looking for those traits...but when we are looking for those traits, we must realize that those traits are tied in directly to intelligence...so selecting for those traits as natural ability we are also indirectly selecting for natural intelligence with most not knowing that this is actually happening...this is a personal theory, but I would bet money on it to be right...
Pertaining to your last paragraph, intelligence has different meaning for different folks, I was once asked by my aunt who is a Labrador retriever fanatic, what I meant when I kept referring to intelligence, and in the same sentence she's trying to show me how smart and "intelligent" her adorable newspaper shredder was by showing me her tricks she could do that she had taught her while also trying to downplay my "hunting dogs", later that evening I already knew about a dumbfounding moment I had seen her lab do time and again, you could open her kennel while she was distracted by something else and she run right past the the wide open door about to go frantic bc she couldn't get out, you would have to leash her and pull her through the gate, every time all her life, but hey she could sit, stay, shake , and rollover, so I asked aunt may if her dear old Maggie was so smart then why in the he!! Was she barking about to go into a fit bc she was being let out of her kennel, same as everyday, but couldn't for the life of her slow down and long enough to figure out where the gate was time and again after having to lead through it every time, over time I finally got her to understand that me definition of intelligence in my dogs in a short summary was that they were problem solvers, and figured everyday task around the house out quick and remembered them as little pups, I just started keeping the ones that could figure things out that I never intended to show or expose them to, several generations later and I'm now getting dogs off one particular branch of the family tree that are scary smart, to the point that some of the things that they do just has sitting there puzzled at how did they figure that out, that's also seeming to correlate to the woods as the ones who learn the ways and routes of different game after only few runs, and are smart track running, off topic as I usually am but this time it ain't my, one of the guys above me started it, I swear....
