No wonder people love animals. There’s plenty of evidence suggesting our adorable critters give us comfort, reduce stress, encourage exercise, and help us forget our everyday troubles. Not to mention that sharing our lives with such great companions makes us feel far less lonely and works miracles for our mental wellbeing. 

Today, there are very few things people share in common as much as the love of our four-legged friends. According to a poll by YouGov, 69 percent of American adults have at least one pet in their home, and it seems that dogs, cats, and fish are the most common choice of pets. 

Moreover, these animals are extremely cherished by their owners. The vast majority, 88 percent to be exact, see them as members of their family. More than a half of the respondents allow them to sleep in their own beds, plan to buy them holiday presents, and 50 percent revealed letting their pets lick their faces. 

When it comes to the main reasons Americans decide to get a furry house friend in the first place, having company, providing a nice home, and hoping they would improve their mental health were some of the top ones. Plus, more than a third mentioned they got a pet because their partner or family member simply wanted one. 

While we appreciate the joy animals bring into our lives, we catch ourselves wondering: how did we get the pets we have? Although pets have adjusted to us, our behaviors, and our emotions, it was not always like that. 

To find out how the domestication of animals works, we reached out to Lee Dugatkin, Ph.D., an evolutionary biologist and a historian of science at the University of Louisville. "Ever wonder how our ancestors turned wild animals into the pets that play such an important part in our everyday life? An experiment in Russia, now in its 62nd year, is helping us understand," he told Bored Panda. 

"In the late 1950s, Dmitry Belyaev, a brilliant Russian geneticist, came up with an idea for how to replay the evolutionary process that led to the domestication of dogs from wolves, but sped up and using foxes instead of wolves," he explained. The experiment that began in 1960 took place in Novosibirsk, the largest city in Siberia.

Dugatkin noted that this groundbreaking project continues to this day "under the watchful guidance of Belyaev’s student, Lyudmila Trut," who recently celebrated her 88th birthday. "Each year, she and her team test hundreds of foxes, selecting only the tamest —the most prosocial toward humans—to parent the next generation."

Dugatkin and Trut tell the whole story of this experiment in their book How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog): Visionary Scientists and a Siberian Tale of Jump-Started Evolution, which is full of science, political intrigue, and tales of love. "In a nutshell, what the Russian team has done is create domesticated foxes that will lick your ears and melt your hearts with their devotion and love," he explained.  

It's hard to imagine that somewhere in the beautiful yet harsh Siberia, you would be able to find furry foxes that are as friendly as our beloved canines. "Incredibly, even though Lyudmila and her colleagues select the parents of each generation strictly on how behaviorally tame foxes are, their domesticated foxes look eerily like dogs," Dugatkin added. "Within a decade (ten fox generations), some of the foxes had floppy ears and curly tails." 

"By the end of the second decade, they had mottled fur patterns and dog-like faces and bodies. And these foxes are as good as dogs at following human gaze," the evolutionary biologist said. What makes this experiment particularly fascinating is that domestication of certain animal species took thousands of years, and this experiment managed to have surprising results in just a few decades. 

Dugatkin continued: "If all of that were not enough to make us humans fall head-over-heels for these remarkable creatures, they also laugh. Indeed, a number of the vocalizations the domesticated foxes make are more similar to human laughs than the sounds produced by any other species," he told Bored Panda. 

He concluded by saying that all of these incredible changes toward a pet-like animal "occurred in mere sixty-plus years. Who knows what changes lay in store as the experiment steams into its seventh decade?"