Can I Have A Pet Fox?
Freddy the Fox Wikimedia CommonsHow a furry-convention-attending, Midwestern-accented fox owner teamed up with a bizarre Floridian exotic animal importer and a Soviet geneticist to bring pet foxes to your living room. Do a YouTube search for pretty much any smallish animal you can think of and there'll be several videos of a "tame" or "pet" version. Any feline, any canid, any mustelid (weasel), any procyonid (raccoon), any non-bonkers primate (baboons, which are completely terrifying, are exempt). Look at my pet kinkajou, my pet genet, my pet fennec fox, my pet ocelot. And then on the videos of cute furry animals in the wild, you'll see the comments: "omg i want it." When the internet sees a video of a red panda, the internet wants a red panda. Even though a red panda is endangered and a wild animal. In 1959, a Soviet geneticist named Dmitry K. Belyaev began somewhat secretively experimenting...