Eli5: How does domestication tend to change the wild animal undergoing domestication?
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Domestication doesn’t change the animal.
Evolution changes the animal, and the domesticator places a a strong survival pressure on the traits they care about. When a wild animal misbehaves, it gets killed, so those genes aren’t going to get passed on to future generations. When it behaves as the domesticator desires, it gets better living conditions, access to better food, and a much safer environment in which to raise its offspring. This increases survival, for the obedient ones, and zeros out survival chances for the rest.
Look up the Russian fox domestication project.
It’s been a while since I read about it, but IIRC they were selecting breeding pairs solely on the foxes’ comfort/friendliness toward humans but supposedly other traits started changing as well. Again IIRC, but I think the ears were becoming floppier, they were getting more variation in coat colors, and something different about their tails.
That was for those foxes though; I don’t know about other animals as I think the idea was that whatever was controlling for domestication also controlled those things in foxes, but that may not (probably doesn’t) hold true for other species.
This all assumes that the project was done correctly and the people running it weren’t purposely or accidentally selecting for those traits as well.
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