People once kept foxes as pets, new discovery suggests

A woman walking a fox – Scott Bairstow / Alamy Stock Photo

People once kept foxes as domestic pets, an Oxford study has found.

An extinct species of fox, a Dusicyon avus, was kept by humans 1,500 years ago in Patagonia, according to the scientists, who studied a grave site which had been accidentally unearthed by miners.

While the researchers pointed out they were not necessarily “pets”, the historical evidence suggests a “close relationship” between animal and man.

Analysis of the bones revealed a fox was buried alongside a person and it had a similar diet to the humans, which scientists say is indicative of “close relationship between the two species”.

The fox species Dusicyon avus went extinct around 500 years ago but lived in South America for thousands of years beforehand. The continent has a rich diversity of canids, with 11 species currently alive.

It is thought the species, which weighs up to 15kg, likely went extinct due to climate change and also the introduction of domestic dogs into the area.

The site, which is in modern-day Argentina, contained 21 human individuals (18 adults, 2 adolescents, 1 child) as well as the fox.

“This is a very rare and unusual find,” study author Dr Ophelie Lebrasseur from the University of Oxford, who led the study alongside Dr Cinthia Abbona from CONICET, the main government agency for science and technology in Argentina, told The Telegraph.

“Here, the presence of a near-complete skeleton suggests an intentional burial of the individual which we believe suggests a close relationship with the hunter-gatherer society.

“Its diet resembled that of the humans buried on the site rather than the diet of wild canids and this similarity in diets suggests it was either fed by the hunter-gatherers or it fed on the kitchen refuse.

“Finally, none of the animal bones present any traces of cut marks, which suggests the individual was not eaten.”

It was previously thought the Dusicyon avus species went extinct because breeding between the species and domestic dogs led to infertile offspring and the demise of the fox.

Fertile, not sterile

But the study rebukes this because genetic analysis of the skull bones of the pet fox reveal it could likely breed with dogs as their genomes are just 3.4 per cent different and therefore the hybrid offspring were likely fertile, and not sterile as previously thought.

Radiocarbon dating of the bones and teeth found at the Cañada Seca burial site revealed them to be around 1,505 years old. The species had not been seen this far west or north before, the scientists say, with this study expanding the range of the extinct fox by hundreds of kilometres.

The scientists were unable to see exactly how the fox and the humans were buried as much of the context had been lost following accidental damage caused by the clay mining operation discovering the site in the middle of the Atuel River valley.

“Nevertheless, it is possible that the fox was intentionally inhumated in this burial context, becoming the first record of a complete skeleton of this fox species buried alongside humans,” the scientists write in the study, published in Royal Society Open Science.

“Our study does not imply that hunter gatherers had domesticated foxes to keep them as pets,” Dr Lebrasseur added.

“Rather, we’ve identified this one specimen at this one site, and found it very unique in the fact that its burial and its diet would suggest it could well have played a companion role to the hunter gatherer society.

“So it was a wild individual, but most likely tamed, though not domesticated.”

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