They’re All Good Dogs, and It Has Nothing to Do With Their Breed

Don't judge a book by its cover. Don't judge a dog by its breed.

A group of researchers reported on their findings in the journal Science on Thursday, including that for predicting some dog behaviors, breed is useless and not very good. One of the clearest findings in the study is that breed has no effect on a dog's reaction to something.

This behavior is related to what the nonscientist might call aggression and would seem to cast doubt on breed stereotypes of aggressive dogs, like pit bulls. Pit bulls scored high on human sociability, no surprise to anyone who has seen internet videos of lap-loving pit bulls. The correlation between human sociability and Labrador retriever ancestry was not significant.

This is not to say that there are no differences between breeds. If you adopt a Border collie, the likelihood that it will be easier to train and interested in toys is going to be higher, said Elinor Karlsson of the Broad Institute and the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, an expert in dog genetics and an author of the report.

Breed accounts for only 9 percent of the variations in any given dog's behavior. The study found that the behavior was more strongly associated with the breed of dog it was associated with.

The researchers found that behavior patterns are strongly inherited. The behaviors they studied had a 25 percent heritability, a complex measure which indicates the influence of genes, but depends on the group of animals studied. Heritability is a good measure of what you inherit. They found several genes that influence behavior, including one for how friendly dogs are.

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The study shows that the genes that shape your dog's behavior are from long before the 19th century when most modern breeds were created. Since then, it has been mostly for physical characteristics.

German shorthaired pointers were slightly more likely to point or golden retrievers were slightly more likely to retrieve, according to an evolutionary biologist from the Broad Institute and the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School.

I've known Labradors who howled and Papillons who pointed and greyhounds who retrieved, so beware the buyer.

Cynthia Otto is the director of the Penn Vet Working Dog Center at the University of Pennsylvania. The study makes sense to Dr. Otto, who was not involved in the report. There are some big picture behavioral traits more common in some breeds than others, but the individual variation is so high within a breed.

She said that Border collies who are easier to train may explain why training them is easier. There is still great individual variation within the Border collies.

The original goal was to compare the genomes of mutts and breed dogs in a study to look for genes associated with certain behaviors.

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The study's high number of mixed breed dogs, or what the authors and you may call mutts, was a major strength according to Kathleen Morrill, an author of the paper.

She said that mutts were the perfect kind of dog for looking at the connections between breed and behavior because their genes were shuffled so that it was easier to separate looks from behavior.

This is one of the first papers to really do impressive dog genomics work using mixed breed dogs.

There are 11 specific DNA regions associated with behavior. The researchers are just scratching the surface of the relationship between the two species, but this finding could assist in the study of human genetics. Humans with language development are associated with a region that affects the likelihood of a dog howling. Humans have a region in their genes associated with long-term memory.

Any dog owner can help out with this project.

The researchers got a lot of information from Darwin's Ark, a project that asked owners of any breed or mutt to submit DNA samples and answer questionnaires. They are still looking for more dogs.

Anyone from anywhere in the world can sign up.