{"id":173014,"date":"2023-09-29T00:24:01","date_gmt":"2023-09-29T05:24:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/09\/meet-dogxim-the-worlds-first-known-dog-fox-hybrid-and-a-genetic-oddity"},"modified":"2023-09-29T00:24:01","modified_gmt":"2023-09-29T05:24:01","slug":"meet-dogxim-the-worlds-first-known-dog-fox-hybrid-and-a-genetic-oddity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/09\/meet-dogxim-the-worlds-first-known-dog-fox-hybrid-and-a-genetic-oddity","title":{"rendered":"Meet \u2018Dogxim,\u2019 the world\u2019s first known dog-fox hybrid\u2014and a genetic oddity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/meet-dogxim-the-worlds-first-known-dog-fox-hybrid-and-a-genetic-oddity2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The animal looked and barked like a dog\u2014albeit one with long, pointed, foxlike ears\u2014but it also climbed bushes, a behavior more typical of the local Pampas fox, and it refused common dog food, preferring to eat rats.<\/p>\n<p>Caretakers began to wonder if it might be a hybrid\u2014a mixture of domestic dog and some local wild canid. They contacted geneticists Thales Renato Ochotorena de Freitas from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul and Rafael Kretschmer from the Universidade Federal de Pelotas who, last month, published a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/2076-2615\/13\/15\/2505\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">study<\/a> confirming the animal was the world\u2019s first documented fox-dog. The finding excited and intrigued experts in animal genetics.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhat a strange hybrid beast!\u201d wrote Roland Kays, a biologist with North Carolina State University and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, on X (formerly Twitter), alongside a photo of the creature and link to the study.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The animal looked and barked like a dog\u2014albeit one with long, pointed, foxlike ears\u2014but it also climbed bushes, a behavior more typical of the local Pampas fox, and it refused common dog food, preferring to eat rats. Caretakers began to wonder if it might be a hybrid\u2014a mixture of domestic dog and some local wild [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,1506,412],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-173014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-food","category-genetics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=173014"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173014\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=173014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=173014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=173014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}