Study of pet dogs shows breed does not predict behaviour
nature.com
nature.com
They then go on to say that the variation is only around 9%, but it does seem to suggest the opposite than what the title claims. If you can estimate behavior of a stray based on assumed breed and be right more than wrong, it would seem that while breed does not predict entirely, it does correlate. It would be nice to see what the actual study was instead of a blurb.
Is there anyone here who would let their 6 year old child play, unsupervised, with a random pit bull? How about a random chihuahua?
Would you leave a 6 year old unsupervised with a hungry rat? No - what a stupid question. A chihuahua can cause the same degree of injury (life-altering).
Is there a significant difference in behaviour between a pitbull and a chihuahua? No - this study confirms what has been known for years.
Breed-specific legislation is utter bullshit. It clearly doesn't work, isn't workable anyway (breed is judged based on looks rather than genetics), never had any scientific basis, and has been proven to be detrimental to its own aims time & time again.
Talking about non-outliers as if they have better knowledge of what the safety hazards are is a fallacy.
Interestingly most people misunderstand what a “pit bull” is. There are a few very similar breeds:
- American Pit Bull Terrier
- Staffordshire Bull Terrier
- American Staffordshire Terrier
- American Bully
[1] https://forbes.com/advisor/homeowners-insurance/banned-dog-b...
Chihuahua: face still attached.
Pitbull: lack of face.
I fostered dozens of dogs. In my (admittedly small sample size) set of fosters, a Yellow Lab was the one with the most reactive response towards people and the “pit bull”/bully breed mixes were the most docile with little people in my family. The only “bites” in my family are from two different trained police GSDs.
I agree with other commenters that kids (and even adults who are not well versed in dog behaviors) should not be around strange dogs with unknown histories or behaviors.
I have seen two significant dog-attack-dog events. Neither showed obvious signs or gave noticeable warnings before the attack. Children should not be around dogs with unknown behaviors/ traumas/ conditioning and probably shouldn’t be around dogs when not supervised by a dog-savvy responsible adult. Obviously more time and exposure can lead to increased trust with an individual.
I agree with both the title (which is generally true but unspecific enough to the point of being useless). I also agree that some behavior phenotypes have significant correlation to breeds, while there are almost always counterexamples.
Neither - they shouldn't be unsupervised with "random" dogs.
Yes, a bigger, stronger dog has the potential for more damage if it becomes aggressive. Funny you use chihuahua as a counter example, because their reputation is for aggression. A chihuahua is less dangerous because it is smaller not because it is inherently less aggressive.
I believe that was the argument made: presupposing a lack of correlation between breed and behavior, a tiny dog is less dangerous than a large one.
Anecdotal, but I've had lots of dogs growing up. We have five right now. This does not reflect the reality I know.
Shiba inu act like cats and prefer to spend time away from their person. They frequently get kicked out of dog parks for not being friendly to other dogs. It's documented and well-studied. They're not at all like other dogs.
Corgis are protective, commandeering, and can be aggressive. They'll bully other dogs away from food. But they're incredibly loving, needy, and prone to feeling lonely. Again, it's a breed characteristic.
Australian shepherds are outgoing, cheerful, and tend to be neurotic. A corgi might be needy, but they won't ever express it like an Australian shepherd. A corgi will nudge you. An Aussie will dance on top of you and sometimes freak out.
Look at which dog breeds are most likely to attack humans. There are histograms for all this data. It correlates strongly with breed!
Even the queens corgis, who I'm sure got the best training money can buy, were still exactly as you describe. FTA below "For while the Queen adores them, others fear being a victim of their dark side."
https://www.macleans.ca/royalty/as-queen-elizabeth-iis-last-...
A lot like cats.
Hugely stubborn.
Incredibly independent.
Exactly as described when I was doing my research originally and deciding to get one.
I haven't done a single thing to make him that way, either.
I find that most people assume the entire population of dogs grew up in a house and have been reasonably well looked after. In practice, I have seen lots of dogs that have that kind of history and lots of dogs that have had traumas that cause them to resource guard or be reactive to people and/or other animals (these behaviors are not bred, but are specific to individuals / life experience).
I totally agree that some behaviors that have been selected for have very high correlation with the breed, but lots of other behaviors are far less correlated. My Aussie will nudge me with his nose, more like the Corgis you mentioned and less like the Aussies you mentioned. Breed implies correlation of some phenotypes, not causation.
In the end, language matters. The title of the Nature article is a Rorschach. In practice, headlines are usually written by someone other than the author and almost always lose significant detail because they are short.
Definitions are really important here. I love herding breeds, but they were bred to nip at ankles and butts of livestock. Is that considered an “attack”? Does the person defining what behaviors are an “attack” have an incentive to exclude those small harm incidents? Chihuahuas are notorious for being aggressive and giving nips, but they present as small, quick incidents, whereas large breeds are more likely to bite down and/or swing the neck like a shark does. Does that difference bias the stats reporting/legislation choices?
Also, “Pit Bull” isn’t a breed. It is a vague intuition of some of the “bully breeds”. I always have to wonder if people pointing at attack frequency lists which show that inaccurate term are accurate. Did those lists gather data that actually investigated pedigrees or did they eyeball/guess breed based on assumptions?
Came to these comments just for this breed.
Mine is identical to what you describe except he is pretty friendly to other dogs, but my SO and I had to do a ton or work socializing him when he was young.
On that topic, I realize it's controversial but think pitbulls should be banned outright - they are responsible for the majority of fatal dog-related attacks and there is a wealth of evidence indicating that they are not a desirable breed.
The most obvious to me are the breeds that were bred for herding, and where you see that behaviour in mixes of that breed as well - even if it's muted some.
And I tend towards agreeing with you re: pitbulls. I've seen perfectly friendly and generally very gentle pitbulls snap - there's no reason for this amongst the general population.
My Golden Retriever on the other hand won't even chase a squirrel. He has finally learnt to guard my rabbits from the foxes, but it took a lot of training.
Imagine a dog owner saying "Strongly agree" to something like "Dog has a tendency to attack (or attempt to attack) other dogs", or "Dog behaves aggressively towards children." (I believe these were questions in the surveys given to the dog owners).
> No no, not my precious Bulldozer, he's a sweety, just gets excited sometimes. I'll only put "neither agree nor disagree", because he only tries to attack dogs who are smaller than him.
I mean, I get it, nobody wants to think ill of their beloved pet, but that's the point. A study like this needs objective measures.
Anecdotally, so far I have only seen bite injuries in the ER from Pit-bulls and German Shepherds (n < 5).
That being said, whether or not breed specific legislation works to minimize dog bites is a separate scientific question.
Even if some users comment that the dog is dangerous based on how it looks, that doesn't refute the trove of evidence that pitbulls can be an inherently unsafe breed compared to non-fighting breeds.
Haha, I'm sorry but this is hilariously false. All other working-dog breeds have genetically ingrained behaviours that no one teachers them - retrievers retrieve without anyone teaching them, border collies corral ducks and children without anyone teaching them, pointers point without anyone teaching them.
However pitbulls are always the odd one out in the apologists' eyes - somehow them being purposefully bred for fighting bulls, rats and dogs and having behaviour and features that would make them successful in these pursuits is nothing to do with genetics and everything to do with their owners. Despite there being many cases of pits being adopted by very kind and caring owners and the dog still mauling them.
Non-pointers point. Some pointer don't.
Non-retreivers retrieve. Some retreivers don't.
Non-herding dogs herd. Some herders don't.
Most dogs play-fight. "Fighting dogs" have to be trained to fight to kill.
Breeding is clearly a fantastic determinant of physical characteristics which pair well with the desired behaviour, and does contribute a little bit towards behavioural instinct, but (as per the *peer-reviewed long term study* in question) isn't on its own a good predictor of behaviour.
The ~.001%, by the way, is termed idiopathic aggression (sometimes called cocker rage, but again is NOT actually well-correlated with cocker spaniels). Idiopathic means of unknown cause.
This is not a silver bullet, even for recently published Nature/Science papers. You need to convince 3-4 people to get your paper published in the end. For many controversial papers, there is a lot of back and forth about the validity of the results (e.g., "Matters Arising" in Nature).
The biggest flaw of this study is relying on subjective reports by the owners. Almost all dog owners I know are used to playing down the severity of their dog's aggressiveness.
If you have to argue that:
- you actually need a PhD in dog psychology(or whatever "understanding dog behaviour" means) to have this specific breed
- that pretty much "yes breed determines traits and behaviours but also doesn't!"
- conflating play fighting with very pit bull specific action of biting down and shaking(a technique bred into them for bloodsports) to prove that no, pit bulls are actually not so dangerous and just like any other breed
...to prove that pitbulls aren't potentially inherently dangerous then I can't take your argument seriously.
Just the fact that pitbulls being a minority of the dog population in the US and UK and still causing the majority of maulings and dog attack fatalities should be evidence enough that something's fishy.
Well, the severity of their attacks is essentially a results of their genetics. As for the type of owner, it the same logic used against gun control, saying that they pose no danger if the owner is responsible.
Whatever the combination of factors, the end result on a large scale point to pitbulls as the most dangerous breed of dog to humans and banning them should be a no-brainer.
Shelter is about at capacity here and most of these kind of dogs are put down which I didn't want to see. This dog was young (maybe 3) and friendly. My old border collie was bored and lonely and was very happy to have another dog. They get along great. Old border collie is the brains of the operation and Pit goes along.
So... now I'm a proud pitbull owner. Well, not proud, but an owner at least. It's maybe not as embarrassing as having a toy poodle, but going out for walks with a mean looking ghetto dog isn't something I aspired to and it's not what I would have chosen.
I took him to dog training because I was nervous about the breed. It's taught by a former police officer who specializes in handling dogs and is really great and I've learned a lot. We are now in the second advanced class and he's been doing well. I spend an hour a week in class with him and every week or so a "Pack Walk" on Saturday led by the instructor with a bunch of other dogs and people.
I know the breed is responsible for a lot of attacks (and deaths) so I don't disagree with your assessment and I felt exactly the same way but now I feel differently. According to the instructor the breed is not inherently dangerous if raised correctly but I feel extra precaution is warranted.
I live way outside town, very rural and have no neighbors so am in somewhat of a unique position to have a dog like this, I'm not sure I would have kept him if I lived close to other people. But so far no issues. He's very happy to have a home, gets along fantastic with my other dog and is pretty well trained at this point and he loves me more then my mom I think. Knock on wood he stays that way and honestly I don't mind a scary powerful dog watching the house but I am keeping a close eye on him for signs of aggression or violence. Which he has yet to exhibit so far.
The instructor says often: "We don't have a dog problem, we have a people problem".
Although pits were bred to be a fighting dog I wonder how much bad behavior can be attributed to the breed, and how much to the type of people that usually own and raise that breed.
"Number of different breeds with similar risk rates for dog bite-related fatalities (DBRFs) including: Malamutes, Chow Chows, Saint Bernards, Huskies, Great Danes, Rottweilers, Doberman Pinschers, Mastiffs, Pitbull-Type dogs, Akitas, German Shepherds, and Bulldogs."
For hundreds of years folks breed dogs for various traits. Labs are friendly (and not great guard dogs). Greyhounds can run fast and like to chase. Pitbulls can use their strong bite and a shake behavior to devastating effect. And the list goes on.
Now we have nature coming out with a study that shows breed does NOT predict behavior?
What's interesting is I'm not sure some breeds can even mechanically behave in certain ways. Can miniature poodles even hamstring you if they wanted to?
Science has taken a lot of hits recently with some of the covid stuff. This type of scientific conclusion is going to risk some more damage to folks faith in science (or at least in the accuracy of reporting on science).
admitting of genetic differences between breads -> genetic differences between races -> providing scientific proof that some races are better than others -> therefor some races should be treated better/worse than others.
I personally find this line of argument flawed. Putting aside any discussion of the idea of race, it simply does not follow that a) one group being better at certain things means they are inherently better overall. Or that b) being better at certain things, or even overall, means that others must be treated worse.
Good luck with getting people to accept that. It is obvious to any statistician, but I have had arguments with experienced researches who cannot grasp this simple fact
If I hear that someone is 12 years old and I know nothing else about them, then assuming their height is the mode for that age group is as good of a prediction as you can make.
The editors at Nature are brilliant in publishing a study like this, no matter how flawed it is, because it's such a sensitive topic for dog owners and people who see patterns in dogs mauling people. It's guaranteed clicks, reposts, retweets, and angry discussion along the lines of "see, science SAYS!" and "the study is flawed."
Pits can bite and shake because they have ridiculous jaws and a powerful build. If a miniature poodle tried, it wouldn't have much effect.
The reporting on this is also sketchier than the science; the honest headline "Study of pet dogs shows breed is imperfectly predictive of behavior", which could be confirmed by anyone with multiple dogs of a certain breed.
The study gives 9% predictive, which (if interpreted as the chance that a dog of $breed has $(breed-specific behavior)) doesn't seem too far off base (netted over a wide range of breed-specific behaviors).
They got that way because humans designed them that way intentionally with selective breeding. It's not so much "they do X because Y" than it is "they do X because they were designed to do X, and Y is the result of that design."
Literally nobody here is saying there's no physical difference between breeds of dog.
https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...
I hope folks who actually have dogs pay a LOT more attention to what their dogs breed is and what it needs. Some dogs, based on their breed, need a ton of outside time. Some do not handle being on their own very well and need to be with people or other dogs. Some become very protective and can become dangerous in various ways.
PLEASE do not believe this can be ignored.
Did they even talk to anyone working with dogs?
My understanding is they use genomic traits across mutts to try and validate if its inheritable.
No idea how they got into Nature, I thought it was supposed to be a respectable journal?
Prominent journal is a better way to describe it. They have a well known sensationalism bias (as does Science. This is the reason both journals are so widely recognized.)
Beginning in 1952 wild silver foxes have been bred in Siberia selecting solely for friendliness. Notable changes were found after 6 generations. By the 30th generation, 70-80% of the selected population were "domesticated elite", which "are eager to establish human contact, whimpering to attract attention and sniffing and licking experimenters like dogs." Similar experiments were performed in the opposite direction, selecting for aggression. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox
Are you saying there aren’t enough differences in human genetics to allow us to group them in a meaningful way?
The San diverged from the rest of humanity ~200,000 years ago. Australian Aboriginals ~40,000 years ago. Amerindians ~12,000 years ago.
No one’s been breeding humans but there’s been plenty of reproductive isolation. Enough that differences in selection pressures could easily lead to differences in traits. For a visible example 5,000 years ago there were no populations that looked like Swedes. Humans that pale did not exist apart from albinos.
If the specific claims I made about the length of reproductive isolation are false you will find it easy to provide sources to that effect.
Your reliance on stereotype is not only racist but it's factually wrong.
This is well studied, and if you are actually curious, there are many, many sources of information about this topic you can find yourself.
Race does not exist, genetically. Period.
There’s no canonical Swede or Arab? You don’t say. As I mentioned no one who looks like a Swede existed 5,000 years ago. That there is overlap between population characteristics does not mean they are identical. Some populations don’t overlap though. Healthy Pygmy and Maasai adult men do not overlap in height distribution. If you restrict your sample of Swedes to those with all ancestors born in Sweden in 1800 and do a similar restriction for Congolese there will be no overlap in skin color.
There absolutely were ancient people who shared genetic traits (and therefore some expressed characteristics) with modern Swedish people. There literally must have been, that's how genetics work, and 5,000 years is barely a blink, genetically.
What you are conflating (among many, many things) are environmental impacts on human maturation with genetics, and in exactly the same way that the eugenicists of the early 1900s were attempting to do.
Every single thing you've said so far has been thoroughly debunked in the ensuing 100 years. You are spouting old, racist tropes, and I assume don't even know it.
But maybe you do know it, and maybe that's the point.
That’s kind of my point. 5,000 years ago there were no people who looked like Swedes. Now there are because of selection pressures. A new genotype came into existence by working on standing variation and some de novo mutations. If we agree that selection pressures can radically change the appearance of a people then there’s not much to disagree on. Evolution can work on many things apart from physical appears.
Different places have different selection pressures, with the obvious consequences.
100% false. You need to realize that. 5,000 years is not enough time to do anything significant, genetically.
And none of this has anything whatsoever to do with the cultural concept of race. There are people who are not "Tibetans" who have this genetic adaptation, and there are "Tibetans" who do not have this genetic adaptation.
Further, the pairing of this genetic trait with other genetic traits does not exist. Having this genetic trait does not make you more likely to have a set of other genetic traits, and none of the genetic traits add up to a specific "Tibetan" set of features or traits, all of which you would need to have to be called "Tibetan".
There is no such thing as "genetic race".
There is no evidence that anyone you're replying to is writing in bad faith. They may be wrong, although you've failed to show that in any way that satisfies intellectual curiosity, but that doesn't justify personal attacks and slimy rhetoric[1].
You are a user, same as me. I'd even argue attempting to enforce the rules as a user is a violation of those very same rules.
I believe the people I'm talking to right now are supporting racist ideas and policies, and that makes those people, definitionally, racists. Including you! I apply no moral judgement to that term here; if you do not want to be called a racist, do not support ideas and policies that are racist.
Quite true. Race is a useless and imprecise term and it’s a pity you felt the need to start talking about it. The clustering of traits among human ancestry population groups and the reasons for that don’t need that baggage.
See the sickle cell trait for instance.
I feel you're unable to discuss productively on this matter because you seem to think that believing in the concept of phenotypes means support for eugenics... which no one here is advocating for.
Most dog breeds were created in less than 150 years. Call it 150 generations. 5,000 years is 200 generations at 25 years per generation. Enough time to change quite dramatically.
And no, humans were not bred like dogs, so your math is both offensive and completely useless.
At this point I'm beginning to think you're being intentionally hateful.
That the selection pressures on dogs were due to humans performing artificial selection and those on humans due to the environment does not mean that they weren’t both selection pressures. Thus brown ancestors to the very pale Swedes.
Please stop spouting racist ideas, these were debunked thoroughly in the 1910s by Franz Boas and then over and over again by his students.
You are speaking about sensitive matters you know very little.
People were never "bred", arranged marriages were never genetically consistent across even one generation, let alone many, and your continued ignorant speculation aligns disturbingly well with how eugenicists described human evolution through the early 20th century.
We’re only confident agriculture has existed for ~5,000 years. Hunter gatherers don’t have the kinds of complex societies that can do organized coercion in a sustained way over generations. Even if you restrict yourself to post agriculture arranged marriage is far from universal and there’s no evidence I’m aware of of a sustained breeding programme selecting for some trait among humans.
Not random and selectively bred work at very different speeds.
Extrapolating from the few extant hunter gatherer tribes that never achieved complex civilization to the tribes that invented agriculture is obviously wildly erroneous.
And yet ancestry.com can comfortably tell anyone which continental scale human population or populations they are descended from and that happens to map pretty neatly to the US Census Bureau's notion of race.
Being aware that major geographic features of the Earth such as the Atlantic Ocean, the Himalayas, and the Sahara Desert were more or less impermeable barriers to gene flow between continental human populations until about five centuries ago isn't racist and you should stop calling people names.
And the this Barrier Theory was proposed by eugenicists in the 20s and thoroughly debunked by the 30s.
But that's just clustering and it would work on any random groups you chose. In particular, it would still work if they picked a group where none of the members were related to each other (and indeed that's how it works now). As long as you're related to one of them it'd still be able to show you're a member of it.
Thus, it's observably true that the position that there are no human subspecies isn't a scientific one, but rather a moral one. Personally I'm comfortable with that, because being Catholic I account all human beings to be created in the image of God and equal in worth in His eyes. Whether or not there are genetically determined differences in mean behavior between different ancestry groups in Homo Sapiens doesn't change that one bit. Neither for that matter does how scientists choose to classify them.
What does religion have to do with this? I didn't say to to rely on faith, rely on the scientific institution that already came to a concensus a long time ago. The studies are out there, if you want to see proof. Just because I don't have them on hand doesn't mean they don't exist and need to be taken on faith
Selective pressure makes change. Different selective pressure makes difference. Reproductive isolation makes large differences possible. Humans have lived in very different environments and been reproductively isolated. There is no a priori reason to believe human populations are the same on every trait. And they’re not. Similar on most things but not on everything.
More importantly this knowledge would be useless if you found it, because the only reason to know things is to make predictions, and this doesn't let you predict anything about the next generation. We're in modernity now and they can just move somewhere else.
[0] which funny enough isn't considered a subspecies and doesn't have a Latin name because the scientist who discovered them thinks Latin names are pretentious.
Mating isn’t random. People are more likely to mate with those who live near them. So Southern Chinese are more like each other than Northern Chinese. Geography matters. Distance matters. If there’s reproductive isolation difference can emerge and persist. If there isn’t it won’t.
Geography isn’t the only way populations stay distinct. Religion, language, means of sustenance can do it too but interbreeding can reduce difference very, very quickly as you note.
Some people would use this as a moment to question what they know about dog breeds, but you choose to double down on your beliefs. Very human of you! [0][1][2][3]
[0] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-pathways-experie...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_perseverance
[2] http://aphilosopher.drmcl.com/2015/12/11/doubling-down/
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/10/0...
They derived 8 behavioural factors from the survey questions, and there are a few which are very relevant to dog-human aggression.
#1: Human sociability #2: Arousal level #4: Biddability #5: Agonistic threshold (agonistic is the behavioural term encompassing aggression)
Those are probably the most relevant. There is an important consideration which does seem to be missing from the study, but only reinforces its conclusion:
Most, if not all of these factors can be altered with behaviour modification (training).
You can raise a dogs agonistic threshold with classical conditioning. You can increase its biddability with operant conditioning. You can lower its arousal level with both.
Does training rewrite DNA? Obviously not.
> Most, if not all of these factors can be altered with behaviour modification (training).
What percentage of dog owners know how to train a dog properly, or hire someone who can? It just seems like you're not thinking about how dogs exist in the real world.
"Study of pet dogs shows breed does not predict behaviour"
While the paper states:
"Breed is not a reliable predictor of individual behavior"
If it needs to be spelt out: The former implies no correlation between breed and behavior, while the latter explicitly says that breed does not reliably predict an individual's behavior, it could be a pronounced bell curve but you still have outliers.
So yes, the article title is obviously wrong and any sane person should trust their gut over it. And what is actually stated in the paper (not mentioning the conclusion because it doesn't have jack to do with the article title) in relation to this article's point is an obvious observation: It doesn't hurt to have data on, but is pretty much pointless for anything except producing bullshit, misleading, clickbaity pop science articles.
Even the article itself recognizes that there's a significant correlation between breed and certain behaviors, but merely dismisses it as "smaller than expected".
If Nature put out a paper saying the sky is red, it would be entirely rational of me to question what on Earth is going on at Nature, rather than my years of experience of blue skies.
They didn't put out a paper saying the sky is red, they put out a paper saying the magnitude of impact from breed on dog behavior is substantially less pronounced than previously thought.
It is not rational for you to double down on this belief.
The headline does not say "substantially less pronounced than previously thought". The headline says "breed does not predict behaviour (nature.com)". Any fool who works with dogs will tell you that yes, it ruddy well does.
And no, the "headline" (called a "Title") of the paper published in Nature says, "Ancestry-inclusive dog genomics challenges popular breed stereotypes".
Not really bold, just sensible and rational when there is a large amount of evidence the paper is wrong. After all, many papers are found to be wrong. I believe there was even a study that measured the ability of people to predict which papers would turn out to be not replicable... I'll try to find a link to that and post it here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_dog_attacks_in_t...
Funny how you never hear about a golden retriever mauling anybody...
This headline, to a superficial reading, says "breed has NO predictive power with regards to behavior". What the study found was that breed is a weak predictor of behavior, not that it has no impact at all.
Ban pitbulls and those people will teach some other breed to attack.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_dog_attacks_in_t...
Bad owners are the problem, not bad dogs.
Followed (not too closely) by Shih Tzu and Chihuahua which are...a little less life threatening. This is just raw data and obviously not controlling for population.
One study even found clear differences between races but then wrote a conclusion saying the opposite! They justified that by discovering another variable they'd forgotten to control for that they guessed might have been responsible for the difference instead of race.
Unless it is sexuality, then it is 100% nature.
You can literally see these things with your own eyes. Science means looking at the evidence. The evidence is all around us.
Sometimes science shows us bias and misconception. This time I beg to differ.
So I guess kids who want a specific dog type should just go by weight? Hey Timmy how much dog biomass you want for your birthday?
This Website: “NO! THE SCIENCE IS WRONG BECAUSE IT DISAGREES WITH MY ANECDOTAL EXPERIENCE”
Even within a single litter, you can obviously track different personalities. The bigger dominant ones to the submissive runt. The more dominant or adventurous ones will come up to you while others remain a bit back and the runt remains all the way back.
> Particularly low was the connection between breed and how likely a dog was to display aggressive behaviour, which could have implications for how society treats “dangerous” dog breeds
Even within a litter, there will be more aggressive and less aggressive. And it isn't just "aggressiveness" that determines how society treats "dangerous" dog breeds, it's the size and ability to cause damage. Every pitbull owner will shout from the rooftops that a chihuahua is more aggressive than a pitbull and more people are bitten by chihuahuas than pitbulls. Of course they completely ignore the fact that a pitbull's bite will cause far more damage than a chihuahuas.
> Breeds as we think of them today — distinctive canines such as beagles, pugs and Labradors — are a by-product of more recent evolutionary meddling. Starting around 200 years ago, dog enthusiasts in Victorian England began inventing breeds by actively selecting for canine traits that they found aesthetically pleasing.
But dog breeds go back far thousands of years. Are they limiting dog breeds to just the last 200 years? Even so, certainly you can predict some behavioral differences between a labrador and a beagle. Of course being dogs they will share a lot of common behaviors like wagging the tail, sniffing each other, barking, etc, but certainly there are differences.
> But, on average, breed explained only around 9% of the variation in how a dog behaved, a number “much smaller than most people, including me, would have expected,” says Karlsson.
What did she expect? Dog breeds to behave 100% differently from each other?
> “We talk about breeds like they’re categorically different,” he says. “But in reality, that’s not the case.”
They are categorically different. Also why does the article talk about behavior then switch to personality then to temperament as if they all mean the same thing.
We have too many eaters in academia, media, etc. Nothing of value in the article. This study and article is a fine example of "publish or perish". People who have nothing to say or contribute but forced to say something and waste everyone's time because they need to justify their paychecks. This is why I support UBI. Cut down on the useless and wasteful white collar busy work.