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.
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.
"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".