So when we hear the word domesticated, what do you think that that means? What do you think people think that that means? And what do you think it means?

All right, so that is actually a pretty fun question because we are in the field of domestication.

You would think that defining domestication or domesticated animals is easy and it turns out we're still arguing about it.

Because it's really, we all have like an intuitive feeling of what a domesticated animal is, but when you try to define it, it becomes a little bit fuzzy.

So domesticated animals are usually animals that have been in close contact with humans over many, many generations.

Now, the interesting thing here is, though, that these animals that we have that are domesticated, like dogs and cats, can hybridize with wild animals, so with wild cat species or dogs with wolves.

that creates a scenario where a clearly domesticated animal can have an impact, a genetic impact on wild populations.

tell us a little bit more about that.

Um, what question did your team want to answer?

So, in a scientific context, what we wanted to answer was does urbanization or an urban environment potentially kickstart a domestication event in raccoons? And really, that was gonna be that first look at is there any potential, any more potential in that question? Is it worth to invest more time and funding and money into looking into this in more detail? And on the more......

class and, and personal level.

We also wanted to address that just from our own sense of curiosity.

And I had basically created this framework from the start so they knew that we were going to work on the domestication syndrome and urbanization.

And then I introduced them to the whole, like, scientific context, the theoretical background, um, and that's really where we then started working on the actual research question, data collection, data analysis and all that.

Mm.

So we might see a snout reduction in dogs but that might not be present in cats.