Lee Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut: Deep inside my soul,” says Lyudmila Trut, “is a pathological love for animals.” She inherited this from her mother, who was a great dog lover. Lyudmila had grown up with dogs as pets, and even during World War II, when food was horribly scarce, her mother would feed starving stray dogs, telling her, “If we don’t feed them, Lyudmila, how will they survive? They need people.” Following her mother’s example, Lyudmila always carries some kind of treat in a pocket in case she encounters a stray dog. And she’s never forgotten that domesticated animals need people. She knows that this is how we’ve designed them.

In 1958, Lyudmila was just finishing up her studies at Moscow State University, home of Leonid Krushinsky, a pioneering Russian researcher in animal behavior. Dmitri Belyaev was friends with Krushinsky and admired his work. Belyaev had recently accepted a position as vice director of a new research institute in a giant Soviet city of science called Akademgorodok, near Novosibirsk, Siberia. He was searching for someone to lead an experiment he would begin in earnest at Akademgorodok. Dmitri intended to run an experiment domesticating silver foxes, and so the person he sought needed the kind of sophisticated skills in animal behavior that Krushinksy taught.

Belyaev went to visit Krushinsky at his office at Moscow State’s Sparrow Hill campus for advice about who might work with him on this experiment. Ensconced in the grand setting of Krushinsky’s building, with its palatial ceilings, marble floors, ornate columns, and fine art statues, he described his plans for the experiment and explained that he was looking for talented graduates to assist with the work. Krushinsky put the word out, and when Lyudmila heard about the opportunity, she was immediately captivated. Her own undergraduate work had been on the behavior of crabs, and as fascinating as their complex behavior could be, the prospect of working with foxes, so closely related to her beloved dogs, and with such a well-respected scientist as Belyaev, was tantalizing.

In early 1958, Lyudmila went to meet with Belyaev at his office. She was immediately struck by how unusual he was for a male Soviet scientist, especially one of his rank. Many were quite high-handed, and condescending to women. Lyudmila, who has a genial, smiling manner and stands just five feet tall, with her wavy brown hair cropped quite short, looked young for her age, and she hadn’t even finished her undergraduate studies, but Dmitri spoke to her as an equal. She was riveted, she recalls, by his piercing blue eyes, which so strongly communicated his intelligence and drive, but also emanated an extraordinary empathy.

She felt privileged to be invited into the confidence of this extraordinary man, who shared with her so openly about the bold work he was proposing. She had never experienced such a distinctive combination of confidence and warmth in a person. Dmitri told Lyudmila what he had in mind. “He told me that he wanted to make a dog out of a fox,” she recalls. Probing how creative she would be about conducting the experiment, Belyaev asked her, “You are now located on a fox farm that has several hundred foxes, and you need to select the 20 calmest ones for the experiment. How will you do it?” She had no experience whatsoever with foxes, and had only a vague notion of what the fox farms might be like and what sort of welcome she might receive at them. But she was a confident young woman, and she did the best she could to suggest some reasonable possibilities. She would try different methods, she said, talk to people who had worked with foxes, read up on what was known in the literature. Dmitri sat back and listened, gauging how committed she would be to the work and to developing techniques for such a novel study. She must be not only rigorously scientific, but also quite inventive. Was she really ready to go to Novosibirsk, to move to Akademgorodok, he asked her? After all, moving to the heart of Siberia was a life change not to be taken lightly. [Continue reading…]