If you're looking for a dog with a specific personality, its breed will tell you less than the environment in which it is raised, a new study suggests.
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When we think about dog breeds, our minds may bounce to stereotypes: Golden retrievers are friendly, pit bulls are aggressive and border collies are hyperactive.
But it turns out that most of these assumptions are probably false. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard Universities and the Darwin's Ark Foundation have found that dog breed isn't a general indication of a dog's personality.
Most of what we know about dog behavior is based on anecdotal evidence and stereotypes. But the study explored dog genetics, sequencing the DNA of 2,155 dogs and surveying the owners of 18,385 dogs.
"What the dog looks like is not really going to tell you what a dog acts like," said Marjie Alonso, one of the study's authors.
Origins of the domesticated dog
Before dogs were dogs, as we know them today, they were wolves. Wolves morphed into dogs over millennia and only started being bred by people, as golden retrievers or pugs, for instance, in past few hundred years.
Kathryn Lord, who also worked on the study, says dogs are descended from wolves that survived in the early years of human civilization by feeding on garbage created by people.
As the wolves/dogs started to live closer to and with humans, Lord says they probably adopted us, rather than the other way around.
And soon people realized that dogs could be very useful. They could be used to bark at predators or herd sheep, for instance.
"People may have started some kind of selection process, but it wasn't what we think of as breeding today," said Lord. "It was more like, 'This dog is doing a great job, so I will give it more food.'"
That dog was then more likely to survive, reproduce and pass on its traits to a new generation.
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Heritability: Genes do play a role
Modern breeding tends to focus on the appearance of a breed, write the researchers. A dog's behavior, meanwhile, comes from thousands of years of dogs adapting to their environments and the people around them.
Some character traits like "biddability" — a dog's ability to respond to commands or its propensity to howl — can be linked to breed, but it's hard to accurately link traits like aggression to breed.
The researchers say aggression has more to do with the environment in which a dog is raised than its genes.
So, while you're unlikely to ever find a Great Dane the size of a Chihuahua or a Chihuahua as big as a Great Dane, you might find Chihuahuas that behave like Great Danes and vice versa, said Elinor Karlsson, a co-lead author on the study.
Banning breeds by law
There are laws banning people from owning certain breeds of dogs and other laws that mean owners of stereotypically dangerous dogs pay higher insurance premiums.
The US has a number of city and state-wide laws banning people from owning certain breeds and Germany bans four breeds of terrier from entering the country altogether: The bull terrier, pit bull terrier, American Staffordshire terrier and Staffordshire bull terrier.
Based on their research, Karlsson says breed-specific legislation "doesn't make sense." But there may be other reasons to legislate on breeding.
"It's essentially inbreeding," said Karlsson. "It's reducing the amount of diversity in your population in order to get something that you want out of it. And that's not a healthy thing for the most part. The less diversity you have in the population, the more inbred the animals are and the more likely they are to suffer from genetic diseases."
It seems that diseases can be "captured" in a breed the same way as behaviors.
"If you start a breed using eight dogs and one of those dogs inherited something from its parents that puts it at a very high risk of developing cancer, that's one out of eight dogs," Karlsson said. "When your breed grows to 100,000 dogs, it may still be one out of eight dogs and then you've got a cancer problem in your breed."
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
10 dog breeds that originated in Germany
Could you name 10 off the top of your head? DW walks you through some breeds whose origins are very much German, even if their names might suggest otherwise. They've since become famous around the world.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/T. Nearmy
Great Dane
No, not Danish. These gentle giants are actually German. They're the result of German royals breeding ever-larger hunting companions in the 17th century. Great Danes are the world's largest dog breed — pictured above is the world's tallest dog from 2013. Germans today call them "Deutsche Dogge," a linguistic reference to the canine's British ancestors from the 16th century.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/K. S. Ramos/Guinness World Records
American Eskimo
This dog suddenly became "American" after World War I, when the US dropped all references to its German origin. A territorial yapper, it became famous as a comic sidekick in US circus acts. Though the American Kennel Club calls this dog a unique breed, the Federation Cynologique Internationale (FCI) in Belgium disagrees. They say it remains what it has always been: a German Spitz.
Image: picture-alliance/Zuma Press/D. Fentiman
Boxer
In the 1800s, three men in Munich bred a bulldog with a breed of unknown origin, and continued that experiment for a few more generations. The result is a dog with one of the most instantly recognizable faces in the canine world, one still defined by German guidelines written in 1902. The origin of the name "boxer" remains a mystery, though.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/RIA Novosti/M. Blinov
Dachshund
"Dachs" means badger, while dachshund dogs were bred to hunt. Even today, these canines, often called wiener dogs in English, still enjoy burrowing — but also biting. A 2008 study showed 20 percent of domesticated dachshunds have bitten strangers. German Emperor Wilhelm II owned one, and when he visited Austria's Archduke Franz Ferdinand, it attacked and killed the archduke's golden pheasant.
Image: picture-alliance/PAP/J. Bednarczyk
Munsterlander (small and large)
Small Munsterlanders (pictured) owe their revival in 1902 to a German named Edmund Löns, who saw in the neglected breed a fine-tuned hunting ability and a beautiful coat. They're the smallest of the German pointer/setter dogs, but, confusingly, are not at all related to large Munsterlanders. Small Munsterlanders are hard to come by, as high breeding standards keep them relatively scarce.
Image: picture-alliance/blickwinkel/A. Niehues
Weimaraner
With their silver coats, piercing eyes and biological need for human affection, what's not to love about Weimaraners? They were first bred in Weimar, the city of thinkers and poets, as a gun dog that was also family-friendly — a rarity. So beloved was the breed that, prior to shipping them abroad, they were sterilized in the hope that they'd remain exclusive to the German empire. But they didn't.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/J. Nukari
Doberman pinscher
A half-day's walk from Weimar, in the town of Apolda, a court clerk named Karl Friedrich Louis Dobermann had a problem. It was the late 1800s, and as a tax collector and officer, he needed protection during his night duties. Fortunately, he also ran the local pound. Through the crossbreeding of Weimaraners, pinschers and pointer dogs, he created the guard dog we now call the Doberman pinscher.
Image: Eva-Maria Krämer
Schnauzer
Schnauzers are so closely related to pinschers that the two are considered a single group by the international dog authority, the FCI. In southern Germany, schnauzers served primarily as stall dogs, catching rats and mice. Since rodents have sharp teeth, the dogs' ears and tails were trimmed to protect them from bites. Today, "cropping" and "docking" are illegal in much of the EU and in Australia.
Image: picture-alliance/NurPhoto/O. Rupeta
Rottweiler
They protected cattle and wagons carrying meat, scared away thieves and wild animals — rottweilers were a medieval trader's fiercely loyal companion. And they were fierce. They were bred in Rottweil, Germany, a former trade center, to protect goods at all cost. Their jaws are the strongest of any dog, with 328 pounds of bite pressure (149 kilograms).
Image: picture-alliance/PIXSELL/D. Urukalovic
German shepherd
A dog named "Horand von Grafrath" is the pretentious first entry in the Breed Registry of the Club of German Shepherds in 1899. After World War I, the English rechristened them Alsatians, the US dropped the word German altogether, and for decades Australia banned them on fears they'd breed with dingoes. Their use by the Nazis further darkened their reputation: Over his lifetime, Hitler owned six.