Dogs’ Personalities Aren’t Determined by Their Breed

People have preconceived notions about dog breeds. Pit bulls can be seen as hostile and aggressive, and golden retrievers are seen as playful and affectionate. Dogs are described as friendly and friendly.

There are behavioral stereotypes that are ingrained in how many people view a breed. Kathleen Morrill is a dog geneticist at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School.

In a new study published in Science, Morrill and her colleagues show that a show that a dog's breed is not a good predictor of behavior. Most behavioral trends in dog types predate modern breeding.

Morrill and her co-authors surveyed the owners of 18,385 dogs on Darwin's Ark, a community science initiative where people can report their pet's behaviors. The researchers asked the owners more than 100 questions about everything from a dog's size and color to its sociability and lifestyle.

The data set mirrored the fact that a majority of the world's domestic canines are mutts. Half of the owners had mixed-breed dogs, which represented a complex assortment of different breeds and potential behaviors.

The researchers collected saliva and blood samples from 2,155 dogs in the survey in order to put these canine composites in genetic context with their brethren. The genetics allowed us to piece apart the puzzle of the different dogs.

Morrill and her co-authors identified 11 genetic regions associated with dog behavior, such as howling Frequency and Sociability, after running the survey data through a battery of statistical analyses. None of the behavioral regions were specific to any of the 78 breeds examined. Even the behavioral traits that seemed to be breed-specific, such as biddability, how readily a dog responded to commands, were found to vary significantly among individual animals within the same breed.

9 percent of behavioral variation among different dogs is explained by breed. The remnants of ancestral breeding that focused on serving functions such as hunting or herding and happened over a much longer time frame are the ones that seem to be connected to breed.

The researchers were unable to identify a single behavior in all dogs. 8 percent of owners reported that their Labrador retriever had a propensity for howling, even though most of the retrievers rarely howled. 90 percent of the greyhounds did not bury their toys. Multiple owners identified their greyhound as a toy burier.

A dog's sex and age can be used as a better indicator of its behavior, though not all of them.

Modern breeds are relatively new on the evolutionary scene and the amount of behavioral overlap makes sense. Most of the breeds we are familiar with came about during the Victorian era, when it was in fashion to breed dogs to create certain looks and adhere to pure lineages. Dogs evolved from prehistoric wolves 10,000 years ago, so modern breeds are a blip.

While a breed's relationship to a dog appears to be small, it has an outsize influence on how different dogs are expected to behave. Pit bulls are one of the breeds that have breed specific legislation in the U.S. Higher insurance rates can be a result of owning a dog with a negative reputation.

According to Lisa Gunter, a researcher in Arizona State University's Canine Science Collaboratory, these behavioral stereotypes have a profound impact in animal shelters. According to her research, pit bull type dogs stay in the shelter three times longer than similar looking dogs. The negative perception of these breeds makes them more likely to be euthanized.

Understanding that dogs aren't programmed to behave in certain ways may help improve the PR of some of them.