Which dog?
Do dog breeds indicate dog personality?
Image: wionews.com
Thinking of getting a dog to join your family? You could zero in on the breed you want – which will give you a clue about size (and the bill for dog food), and – you might think – a clue about the personality you could expect from a dog of that breed.
Do you want a pooch who will get along well with the family? Or do great service patrolling your perimeter? Or will know which way to run when you play fetch?
The American Kennel Guide has three-word summaries of the temperament you can expect from different breeds. For example border collies – are “affectionate, smart, energetic,” and beagles are “friendly, curious, merry.” Sorted? According to research by Kathleen Morrill and colleagues published last month in Science, not quite. Dogs vary in terms of temperament. And knowing the dog’s breed does not provide a great guide to what its temperament will be. Within the dogs of a breed, you will find a whole range of personalities.
Dogs adopted us thousands of years ago and joined us for jobs such as hunting, guarding, and herding. If you have ever pitched up at a village in Papua New Guinea you will notice that, unlike in western countries, the pigs are fat and the dogs skinny. Dogs skulk around and fossick in the rubbish. If you arrived later in the day, you would be welcomed with a cacophony of barking – sometimes not very friendly-sounding. Not a deliberate strategy by the village, but the dogs provide an early warning service. Occasionally useful, tolerated rather than appreciated, dogs ingratiated their way into human villages and lives.
The Victorians changed that in the 1800s. They invented dog breeds and the idea of breeding from a ‘pure’ breed. That produced the consistent size, shape and ‘look’ of the breeds we recognize today. Such selective breeding only operates on a small range of genes defining the aesthetics or style of the dog. What is under the hood, what gives rise to the variety of dog personalities is more complex. This behavioural potential is the result of thousands of years of domestication, of hanging around and making themselves useful.
Morrill and her researchers, working with information (provided by owners) on over 18,000 dogs, identified 8 ‘aspects’ of pooch personality. Breed mattered – but only on one of these aspects. Some breeds are more ‘biddable’ (responsive to direction). The most biddable – Belgian Malinois, vizsla and border collie (and the most ‘independent’ – not so biddable – basset hound, Alaskan malamute, Shiba inu, and five others, including the beagle).
Putting that in statistical terms – knowing the breed explains, over all the nuances of dog personality, about 9% of the behaviour of the dogs of that breed. More than 90% of what you'll see (or hear) from a dog is the product of a multitude of dog genes that don’t line up with the ‘cosmetic’ aspects of what makes a dog representative of a unique breed.
You can see a data visualization of this – https://darwinsark.org/muttonomics
If dogs do not necessarily behave in ways typical of their breed – how do we account for stereotypes about breed behaviour? Possibly we see (and then encourage) the traits we expect to see in dogs like these. We expect particular behaviour from our assertive Alsation, our darling dachshund, our corpulent corgies. Dogs are well tuned in to human signals and the food humans dispense. As result, we may be inclined to shape up the behaviours that we want.
The researchers had a clever approach to this confound. They took a big pack of mutts (or bitsers) who did not belong to a particular breed. They genotyped these mutts and then contrasted their genotypes with the whole genomes of ‘purebred’ dogs from 128 breeds. Now they could work out the family tree of those of mixed parentage and compare the observed behaviours to see if any personality themes came through despite human attempts to encourage ‘breed-specific’ behaviour.
For example owners of Golden retrievers disagree that their dogs are fearful of unfamiliar people (fitting the ‘friendly to strangers' breed stereotype). Looking at the reports of owners who were effectively blind to the bit of golden retriever in their mongrel – the ‘friendly to strangers’ effect disappeared.
Some stereotypes did come through in these ‘blind to breed’ conditions. Dogs with a border collie background were more ‘biddable’, those with labrador retriever genes tend not to avoid getting wet.
The stereotype of border collies' playfulness did not show when looking at the dogs with a border collie in their ancestry.
Another breed-related tendency for dogs with some Chesapeake Bay retriever background – their propensity to damage doors and escape from enclosures.
A little over 150 years ago the Victorians invented dog breeds. The power of breeding is shown in the clear differences we see between breeds. However these differences do not extend to most of the behaviours we might see as part of the package of different breeds. The behavioural differences are more complex, subtle, and have a much longer history.
In the same era, the Victorians gave a strong nudge to the idea of human ‘races.’ This was not just the physically obvious differences between people from different parts of the world, but also included supposed racial differences in ability and temperament. In a very human way, the Victorians gave themselves the traits of thrift, responsibility, self-reliance and entrepreneurship, among others. As they travelled and met different people, the further those people were from the ideal of white skin and blue eyes, the further down these people were ranked on these Victorian traits.
The research is clear that you can’t judge a dog by its looks or breed. We also need to be careful we are not labelling people we don’t know based on lazy stereotypes.
Stewart Forsyth is an organisational psychologist and executive coach and also the author of 21 Remarkable People – available from Amazon or Apple or other eBook sources.