Is there a connection between dog breed and personality?

© Bettmann/Getty

Leviathan Press:

We often make very general conclusions about the personality of a breed of dog. As the saying goes, "correlation" rather than "causation", the behavioral differences between different breeds of dogs are so obvious, is it definitely determined by the breed? This may also be the human "confirmation bias" at work. Of course, dogs of a certain breed do have similar genetic traits, but this is not enough to generalize that dogs of that breed must have the same personality.

After 40 years of training and studying dogs, Marjie Alonso has lost count of the number of pets she has seen come to her attention because their owners felt they were not behaving as they “should.” They range from “unfriendly” golden retrievers who “don’t get along well with kids” to German shepherds who are more timid than vigilant guard dogs.

A Newfoundland (who turned out not to be a Newfoundland) adopted to fulfill a devoted dog sitter’s Peter Pan fantasy was so aloof that his owner gave him medication, and a litter of Shih Tzus whose owner found that the puppies frequently escaped from her home and wreaked havoc in her neighbor’s yard, which “pissed her off,” Alonso told me.

Owners complained that this was nothing like what the American Kennel Club (AKC) advertised, which said the noble puppies' way of playing was to "sit on your lap and act cuddly while you try to watch TV."

Alonso, now executive director of the International Animal Behavior Consultants Foundation (IAABC Foundation), understands these owners’ expectations; she really does.

© Pinterest

Almost every interaction people have with dogs is tied to stereotypes about the “personality” of canine breeds: which dogs get adopted first, which dogs get sent to service jobs first, which dogs are allowed to live in apartment buildings, all of which are influenced by stereotypes.

One of the first questions people ask about a dog is its breed, and the answer to that question can, in some ways, guide their subsequent attitude toward the dog. And that’s the problem. “Any good dog trainer will tell you that these stereotypes are a disaster,” says Marc Bekoff, a canine behavior expert at the University of Colorado Boulder. “Breeds don’t have personalities. Individuals have personalities.”

The logic may seem obvious. Dog quirks, like human quirks, are certainly not simply the product of genetics or pedigree; individual experience certainly plays a role. The American Kennel Club details the personalities of different canine breeds on its homepage, but even the club’s Brandi Hunter Munden acknowledged to me in an email that “every dog ​​is different.”

Yet breed — a concept based on purity, sameness and predictability passed down from parent to puppy — is an undeniably powerful force in dogs. “I don’t think you can start from scratch [totally ignoring the influence of breed],” says Gita Gnanadesikan, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona.

Isain Zapata, who studies canine genetics and behavior at Rocky Vista University in Colorado, says dogs are, in part, "human creations — they didn't exist before us." We've shaped them over thousands of years, adapting them to a variety of functions and forms. Purebred dogs are the product of human preferences and prejudices; they have certain tendencies in their genes simply because humans have decided they should have those tendencies.

“Does breed matter? Does breed not matter?” asks Kathleen Morrill, a canine geneticist at the Broad Institute and UMass Chan Medical School. “Really, it’s both.”

© Dribbble

Experts agree that canine behavior is the product of a variety of factors, including genes, development, socialization, and environment; they disagree on what proportion these factors are, how to measure them, and how they intersect. The key ingredient in every recipe, however, is always us: the arbiters of what we think defines a dog as a dog. The influence of breed, even of personality, is not fiction—our own species has proven that. But its influence is not limited to dogs, and it is not as simple as we think.

There are many different versions of the dog's origin story (and probably more than one is true), but the general idea is this: tens of thousands of years ago, wolves and humans began spending more time together and began to co-evolve. It's unclear who made the first move—perhaps the canines were lured into human settlements by the smell of something; perhaps the two species somehow ended up in the same place and bonded over their shared love of meat.

Regardless, the coldest and friendliest wolves in the pack chose to keep returning to humans. What might have been a lopsided relationship at first soon became more mutually beneficial: People realized that dogs could enhance humans’ ability to feed and protect their families and, eventually, corral humans’ sheep and cattle; the animals traded these behaviors for calories, shelter, and perhaps well-deserved belly rubs.

(www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaf3161)

The first chapter of the human-dog relationship is about function. People noticed behaviors they liked and began to express preferences for those behaviors. “Maybe by giving them extra food, or by giving them the opportunity to breed,” says Kathryn Lord, an expert on canine behavior and evolution at the UMass Chan School of Medicine and the Broad Institute, who worked with Morrill. Slowly, the wolf-derived lineage shed some of its fear of humans, and some of its bad temper; it lost the sharp edge of wolf traits, and the advantages of a top predator.

Even the tightly coordinated sequence of hunting movements—search, stalk, chase, grab, kill—has become fragmented into groups of dogs that specialize in tracking and charging (sheepdogs), chasing and catching (retrievers), all of the above (terriers), or none of the above (livestock guard dogs). Under pressure to find jobs, dogs have diversified.

(link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13420-017-0283-0)

Then, in the 19th century, dog breeding underwent a seismic shift. “The Victorians changed the way we think about dogs,” says Michael Worboys, a science historian at the University of Manchester in England and author of The Invention of The Modern Dog: Breed and Blood in Victorian Britain. It was during this period—a time of “appreciating everything,” as Lord puts it—that the modern concept of “breed” was born.

(www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5492993/)

Picture of the Crystal Palace Dog Show in London, England, 1872. From left to right: Sussex Spaniel, Newfoundland, Greyhound, Hound, Italian Greyhound and Maltese Terrier. © K9 Magazine

Suddenly, people valued dogs more for how they looked than for what they could do. Manipulating dog breeds became highly purposeful and fashionable; the idea of ​​a “breed” became so valuable that it required strict standards and formal clubs to police it. As the goal shifted to pure bloodlines and exemplary physical appearance, canine evolution quickly took a different path. “Once you start selecting for appearance—coat color, size,” Lord told me, “it’s a much stronger effect than selecting for behavior.” The number of well-defined breeds increased dramatically, and dogs within the same breed became increasingly similar to one another.

Today, this uniformity seems like a scientific dream: the genomes of purebred dogs have been stripped of much of the “noise of diversity,” making patterns within the population easier to spot; as dog genomes are sequenced, it should be easy to peer into them and figure out how human intervention has fixed physical and behavioral tendencies into the DNA at different points.

But behavior is extremely complex, sometimes involving many genes, each of which may have only a small influence, and canine behavior is constantly distorted by humans' ever-changing definition of a good dog.

(www.nature.com/articles/nature04338)

To unravel the gene-behavior mess, researchers first need lots and lots of dogs—thousands, tens of thousands, the more the better—to express enough behavioral and genetic diversity to tease out the connections. Morrill, Lord, and their colleagues recently completed just such a massive study, one of the most extensive and in-depth to date.

(www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk0639)

They gave behavioral questionnaires to about 20,000 canine companions, asking questions similar to those psychologists use to judge human personality, but with a canine focus: Does your dog show fear of strangers? Does it cower in a storm? Does it ignore commands? Does it aggressively pester other dogs? They then sequenced the whole genome of the saliva of about 2,000 of the dogs, looking for genetic signatures in the DNA that might help explain the owners' answers. Unlike other studies of its kind, Morrill's team also intentionally recruited many mixed-breed dogs—those whose appearance and personality had undergone "natural reorganization," she says.

© Yolunda Hickman

The team's findings confirm that some aspects of canine behavior appear to be heritable, and sometimes even echo what the Kennel Club says. It turns out that work is a pretty good motivator, and some of the traits that are genetically linked are likely the ones that got many early dogs into work.

For example, many herding dogs—such as the border collie—still retain many of the traits associated with herding livestock. Border collie puppies are still more likely than other puppies, on average, to follow human commands, be curious about their surroundings, and enthusiastically scramble for toys. Retrieving also seems to be written into the genes of retrievers; it’s “the most heritable behavior we found in our study,” Morrill said.

Some other behavioral patterns might be explained by the same scientific logic: Great Pyrenees were originally livestock guard dogs, so they are calmer than other dogs and less easily angered or nervous. Beagles, whose history was to pursue prey, are generally headstrong. Centuries of occupational focus have apparently left a legacy in canine genes. In at least some ways, some dog breeds are still what humans bred them to be.

Yet the further behaviors drift away from the professional realm, the trickier they are to assess, and the harder it is to pin down their genetic roots. Dog owners might be able to reliably describe how their dog chases a ball, but they might not be able to judge so objectively whether their dog is particularly calm or excitable, aloof or clingy, confident or agreeable — all traits that can be distorted by the vagaries of human perception.

To be more objective, scientists sometimes try lab experiments: If someone wants to measure a dog’s fearfulness, for example, one might place a dog with an unfamiliar object (like a weird plush robot cat) and observe how it frets. But not all dogs or their behavioral quirks lend themselves to testing in a strange building full of strangers, where an animal could easily lose its cool completely. And few researchers would be willing to repeat such observations thousands of times for a large genetic study that’s already burdened by time and cost. None of these factors render behavioral data useless—it just makes them harder to understand and, therefore, harder to interpret directly.

(link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-020-01443-7)

© Treehugger

But other experts told me that Morrill and her colleagues included an extremely large number of dogs in their study, and that eventually some reliable links seemed to emerge. And, Morrill said, the genetic trends they failed to find were as important, if not more important, than any they did find. Finally, they could not find any behavioral trait that was absent from all the breeds they investigated, or that was present in every dog ​​of a given breed.

It’s true that, in general, greyhounds are less interested in toys than other dogs, while German shepherds seem to have it in their genes that toys are awesome. Most Chihuahuas are shivering little things, many Brittany spaniels eat their own feces, and, on the whole, Shiba Inus are not likely to actively jump into your arms. However, all of this is a tendency, not a necessity. There are border collies who don’t want to herd, and there are pugs who do; there are high-strung Great Pyrenees, and there are beagles who are happy to follow any command. Breeds may draw loose boundaries for dog behavior. But these "boundaries" are distant and rarely patrolled—and individuals can easily slip outside if the conditions are right.

© royalsocietypublishing.org

According to Morrill's team, breed explains only a tiny fraction of the incredible behavioral variation in dogs, less than 10 percent. That means the bulk of the behavioral differences and diversity can be attributed to other factors. To some, that seems too small; other, earlier studies, which analyzed their data slightly differently, have come up with higher estimates.

(royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2019.0716#RSPB20190716F1)

Unsurprisingly, the American Kennel Club isn’t entirely sold on the new study’s findings. In a statement, the organization reiterated that “the breed and type of a dog does provide insights into its general and instinctive behavior,” and said it believes dog owners should consider those behavioral tendencies when making decisions. Elinor Karlsson, the computational biologist who led the study, isn’t entirely sold on that idea. “You might be able to pick a random dog off the street and make predictions about it based on its breed, and you’d probably be more correct than random guessing,” she told me. “But it’s not going to be particularly effective.”

None of this means that intelligence about dog breeds is worthless. A rich pedigree, a long history, a wealth of information about a dog’s anatomy and how it responds to its environment—it’s still “encoded” into the breed. Purebred dogs still tend to look a certain way, on average. They’re even more likely to behave a certain way. Those tendencies just have to contend with the real world, not just once but over and over again.

This conflict fascinates Flavio Ayrosa of the University of São Paulo, who has studied the size of dogs’ height, weight, and nose, and the influence that factors like genes and socialization may have on their temperaments. A small dog experiences the world differently than a large dog; a long nose fragments a dog’s field of vision, while a short nose does not. It all matters. “These morphological factors have an impact on how the animal interacts with its environment,” he told me.

(www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0376635722000237)

© Nylabone

Breed information can also help people estimate what specific dogs need to stay happy and healthy, as well as what their bodies are capable of. Dogs are flexible, but not without limits. “You can’t have a Chihuahua race with a greyhound, and you can’t have a Chihuahua be a sled dog,” says Carlos Alvarez, a geneticist at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Ohio. Also worth considering is the legacy of specializations left by humans throughout the canine spectrum. Even accounting for individual personality, if someone wants a dog that’s happy to stay in a studio apartment all day, getting a dog whose ancestors were sprinters and chasers might be a gamble.

The point, then, is not to downplay the impact of breed on dogs, but to rethink its impact on us. People who seek a particular breed may use the excuse that their new pet will behave in a certain way. They then treat them as such, emphasizing and exaggerating the behaviors they originally hoped to see and the dog actually exhibits, while discouraging other behaviors.

They teach “smart” dogs more tricks because they assume that smart dogs can learn tricks; they give “aloof” dogs more space because they assume their pets need to be alone. Stereotypes become “self-fulfilling prophecies,” Bekoff, of the University of Colorado Boulder, told me. Dogs’ behavior is a result of the way we breed them, but it’s also a result of our expectations. “To what extent is a breed’s behavior determined by how we treat that breed?” said Alonso, of the International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants. “That’s an important but difficult question.”

In fact, at least for some dogs, the answer may be: quite a bit. In the UMass-Broad study, purebred golden and Labrador retrievers “tended to score unusually high” for friendliness, Carlson told me—as the breed profiles on the American Kennel Club’s website put it. But those effects disappeared when her team looked at mixed-breed dogs with retriever ancestry, which are harder to identify and stereotype based on appearance alone. (Most people, by the way, aren’t actually very good at correctly guessing a dog’s ancestry.) Even after the researchers accounted for the mixed ancestry of the mixed-breed dogs, they still found that the half-retrievers were no more likely to be friendly than the average dog.

(www.akc.org/dog-breeds/golden-retriever/)

(journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0202633)

© Purina Pro Club

While people love friendly dogs, the pendulum swings the other way when it comes to aggressive dogs. Some behaviorists dislike the vague label of "aggression," yet it is often inappropriately applied to dogs, leading to them being banned from neighborhoods, abandoned in shelters, or even euthanized simply because of their breed.

Dogs classified as pit bulls are a well-known and controversial example of a tough personality: Bred to fight other animals, the dogs have a reputation for violence and unpredictability, a stigma that scholars say was exacerbated by racial discrimination against African-American and Latino communities in American cities because of their cultural associations with those groups in the mid-20th century. Some experts say that given their historical ties, it makes sense to be wary of pit bulls; people who see photos of pit bulls tend to give them lower scores.

(journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0146857)

Yet research by Alvarez, Zapata, and others has found that pit bulls don’t seem to be more aggressive or erratic than other dogs. Alvarez told me that if any dogs are more likely to react when provoked, it’s probably the smaller ones—Chihuahuas, dachshunds, and so on—perhaps because they have smaller brains and are therefore less able to control their impulsive behavior . . . or simply because they’re smaller and therefore constantly being lofted, picked up, and accidentally kicked.

(www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/09/pit-bulls-are-chiller-than-chihuahuas/500558/)

(pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34455497/)

Many of the personality descriptors used in the canine world seem a lot kinder than “aggressive.” They’re almost a natural astrology—hip but vague and catch-all: Shetland sheepdog is smart, Boston terrier is funny, Yorkshire terrier is tomboyish; toy poodle is confident, Clumber spaniel is gentlemanly, Chow Chow is serious.

Hunter Munden of the American Kennel Club defended the organization's descriptors, explaining that they are usually drawn directly from breed standards — detailed standards that describe the characteristics of the "ideal" typical of a breed, including temperament and behavior that are "inherent to the breed."

But according to experts like Ádám Miklósi, a canine cognition researcher at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, terms like these are ridiculously anthropomorphic, so vague as to be meaningless, and serve more to market dogs than accurately describe them. And when the expectations they set can’t be met, they border on being harmful.

Boston Terrier. © Tenor

Stereotypes are hard to shake. Even though Alonso began studying canines in the late 1970s, she still hasn’t completely broken “decades of attributing certain behavioral traits to breeds,” she told me. She never picks on individual dogs for breaking stereotypes. She’s just a little surprised when she encounters dogs that are “in a league of their own”: an overprotective Akita or a cattle dog that won’t stop chasing after children. “I know it’s wrong,” she told me. “I’m still struggling with it.”

Maybe it’s just human nature. We believe in heritable traits because it validates the idea that we made dogs what they are, that we made wolves into workers, guides, companions, teammates, with personalities as clear and forthright as dating app profiles. There’s a comfort in the idea that dogs are predictable and categorizable, easily categorized into the boxes we’ve created for them, that their behavior reflects motivations and emotions that we humans can relate to, Mr. Worboys of the University of Manchester told me.

Many of the descriptive traits we most attach to in dogs—loyal, friendly, affectionate—reflect “traits we want to associate ourselves with,” Zapata told me. Yet dogs are their own kind, as separate and unique as we are. Dogs, like humans, are able to resist inherited tendencies. Dogs, like humans, can change over their lifetimes, replacing bad habits with good ones. From conception to death, dogs, like humans, are “constantly changing, always evolving systems,” Alosa of the University of São Paulo told me. And dogs, like humans, can change the trajectory of other species just as we change them.

Alonso’s beagle, Nellie, scored pretty much as the stereotypical beagle would in the UMass-Broad survey. But she refused to be limited by a single data point. Alonso told me that he and she had met six years ago, when Nellie was a “separation-anxious, clingy, biting, anxious dog” who had been adopted and abandoned by multiple owners because of her unacceptable behavior. Today, Nellie is fine being left alone at home for hours at a time. She no longer bites. She’s friendly with people and other dogs. She’s even willing to share her food, unless it’s French fries. Nellie eased Alonso’s pain after his two sons left for college and Nellie’s two previous dogs died. The couple shaped each other, as couples should.

By Katherine J. Wu

Translated by Kushan

Proofreading/Rabbit's Light Footsteps

Original article/www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/04/dog-breed-personality-characteristics/629707/

This article is based on the Creative Commons License (BY-NC) and is published by Kushan on Leviathan

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