Your dog is basically a super social wolf, and scientists may have found the gene that makes him want to cuddle with you. Science & Medicine Scientists find key ‘friendliness’ genes that distinguish dogs from wolves (The chow chow is “dignified, bright, serious-minded” the Chihuahua is “charming, graceful, sassy.”) The American Kennel Club maintains the biggest registry of purebred dogs in the United States, along with detailed descriptions for each breed standard, including personality traits. Breeding took this barking rainbow and broke it down into isolated, clearly defined units. Initially, there were a few broad types of dogs with a lot of overlap between them. In “The Invention of the Modern Dog: Breed and Blood in Victorian Britain,” authors Michael Worboys, Julie-Marie Strange and Neil Pemberton likened the difference in dogs pre- and post-breeding to colors in a rainbow versus in a book of paint chips.
One now-extinct type known as a “turnspit,” or kitchen dog, was raised to run on a sort of dog-sized hamster wheel that turned roasting spits over flames, said Katherine Grier, a retired University of Delaware history professor and author of the book “Pets in America: A History.” Some pups were good at herding, others hunting or guarding. In the millennia before the Victorian obsession with dog breeding began, humans differentiated dogs primarily by the jobs they did best. If breed were a strong predictor of behavior, it stands to reason those breeds’ traits would have shown up to some extent among the mutts with those breeds’ / Instagram) But owners of mutts with a Labrador retriever in their bloodlines weren’t any more likely to call their dogs social around humans than were owners of mutts without that heritage. Likewise, Labrador retriever owners tended to say their pets were social around humans, in line with the stereotype that the breed is friendly and outgoing. However, owners of mutts with some golden retriever ancestry were no more likely to describe their pets as unafraid of strangers than owners of mutts with no golden retriever DNA. Researchers found that owners of golden retrievers tended to say their pets weren’t scared of strangers, a description that fits the breed’s outgoing reputation. They served as a control group, of sorts.
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That raised the possibility that owners’ assessments were influenced - consciously or not - by the reputation of their dog’s breed.įortunately, the rest of the dogs in the study were mutts whose ambiguous ancestry left their owners comparatively free of any preconceived notions about their background or behavior. The owners of purebred dogs tended to describe their pets’ behavior in ways that matched the stereotypes of the breed, the authors wrote. Almost half (49.2%) of the participants described their dogs as purebred, with the proportion of breeds represented corresponding roughly to U.S. The result was a dataset that nicely mirrored the U.S. (Mammal species typically evolve over hundreds of thousands of years.) They split from wolves roughly 10,000 years ago, which hasn’t been long enough for them to accumulate that much genetic diversity. The findings were published Thursday in the journal Science.Įach of the roughly 1 billion dogs currently pawing around the planet belongs to the same species - Canis familiaris. A dog’s age and sex were often far better predictors of its behavior, and for some traits - most notably aggression - breed made no difference at all. Indeed, breed explained no more than 9% of the variation in behavior among the dogs in the study, said study coauthor Elinor Karlsson, a geneticist at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School. But associations such as these were neither strong nor consistent. And yes, dogs from hunting breeds were more likely to score higher on “biddability,” or the ease with which they respond to human commands. Yes, owners of Labrador and golden retrievers were slightly more likely to rate their pups in the top 25% for “human sociability” than the owner of a randomly selected dog.
Yet a detailed new study of dog behavior and genetics suggests that breed is actually of little value in anticipating the behavior or demeanor of any individual animal.Īfter gathering extensive data from the owners of more than 18,000 dogs and sequencing the DNA of more than 2,100 of those pets, researchers found strikingly few links between breed and most behavioral traits. The idea that certain breeds reliably exhibit distinct behaviors is baked into dog shows, obedience training and canine DNA tests, not to mention laws targeting breeds deemed prone to aggression. The American Kennel Club website describes the ideal form and temperament of 204 dog breeds, from the affenpinscher (“loyal, curious and famously amusing”) to the Yorkshire terrier (“feisty, brave and sometimes bossy”).
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