I read about those before. As I remember, they managed to breed the aggression out of them pretty quickly, but it's much harder to make them want the company of people, the way dogs do.
The article quotes someone speaking about the foxes:
Foxes in Class I are friendly toward experimenters, wagging their tails and whining. In the sixth generation bred for tameness we had to add an even higher-scoring category. Members of Class IE, the "domesticated elite," are eager to establish human contact, whimpering to attract attention and sniffing and licking experimenters like dogs. They start displaying this kind of behavior before they are one month old.
It took them a long time to get them to mostly reproduce with those traits (the modern ones only reach 80%), but the traits appeared in 6 generations.
Foxes in Class I are friendly toward experimenters, wagging their tails and whining. In the sixth generation bred for tameness we had to add an even higher-scoring category. Members of Class IE, the "domesticated elite," are eager to establish human contact, whimpering to attract attention and sniffing and licking experimenters like dogs. They start displaying this kind of behavior before they are one month old.
It took them a long time to get them to mostly reproduce with those traits (the modern ones only reach 80%), but the traits appeared in 6 generations.