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What is interesting is it is happening with urban racoons too. I'm not sure what the selective pressure might be for smaller snouts. I don't think racoons are being killed like a dangerous bear might. I'd assume if any are being actively fed for looking cute it is very few of them, and those doing the feeding wouldn't be selective about it.

My best guess is that the short snout trait is in linkage with something else that is actually what is being selected upon. At least for racoons.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/raccoons-are-show...

What portion of lab mice are from genetically stable inbred lines? I assumed most of them were from those lines due to their predictable characteristics. C57BL/6 being predictably kind of bitey for example

same with russian fox fur breeders. i don't remember the numbers, but after a surprisingly small number of generations the foxes turned into cat-like pets.

Do lab mice breed after selection for experiments?

that'd be a nice monthly food bill, a black bear can eat 20x as much as a dog

The coon's too: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/raccoons-are-show...

Coyotes are on their way too

or worse, till we breed softer claws, speaking with their hands

For what it’s worth, I think even the worst outcomes wouldn’t necessarily force us to extinction. Would be a bit of a reset though.

Catastrophic collapse will come because people believe in Darwin's theory, and the collapse will be well deserved

I’m all for analysis of, and challenges to, research studies. If we don’t have that we can’t do science. But I don’t like sneering, knee jerk statements like ourmandave’s Yeah, this seems related to the "raccoons becoming domesticated" bullsht.*

I watched the video ourmandave pointed us to where NessieExplains points out what she says are flaws in the study suggesting raccoons are becoming domesticated:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12983-025-00583-1

The data set and the code used to analyze the data are at https://osf.io/56xcg/overview.

Her criticisms and conclusions may well be correct, but her video is really just her saying her conclusions are correct. She downloaded the data and did her own analysis and points to results in her spreadsheets. It all flies by quite quickly. We have to take her word for it. She also made a snarky comment about this line in the R code:

  # 57% Let’s see what we can do to change that!

  # what if we remove those pictures that we had issues measuring?
  # that would be gbifIDs: 4855527033, 4096474261, 2311326414, 4528316516
  # Vector of IDs to exclude - the image quality was too bad after all
  ids_to_exclude <- c(4855527033, 4096474261, 4528316516, 2311326414)

She says in the video that she’s an actual raccoon biologist. According to her web site she is pursuing a master’s in biology (nessieexplains.com/about-nessie-explains/) although there is no date on the page, so she may have completed the degree already.

As I say, she may well be correct, but I have no way of knowing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synanthrope

https://nhmu.utah.edu/articles/animals-who-have-adapted-live...