Don’t judge a book by its cover. Do not judge a dog by its breed.
After researching owners on 18,385 dogs and sequencing the genomes of 2,155 dogs, a group of researchers reported various findings in the journal Science on Thursday, including that the breed was essentially useless in predicting the behavior of some dogs. for most not very good. For example, one of the clearest findings in the massive, multifaceted study is that the breed has no noticeable effect on the dog’s reactions to something it finds new or strange.
This behavior is related to what non-scientists may call aggression and seems to call into question stereotypes about the breed for aggressive dogs, such as pit bulls. One thing that pit bulls did well was human sociability, not surprising to anyone who has seen videos of pit bulls on the Internet who love lap. The origins of the Labrador Retriever, on the other hand, seem to have little to do with human sociability.
This does not mean that there are no differences between breeds or that the breed cannot predict certain things. If you adopt a border collie, said Eleanor Carlson of the Broad Institute and the Chan School of Medicine at the University of Massachusetts, an expert on dog genomics and author of the report, it is likely to be easier to learn and interested in toys. be higher than if you adopt the Great Pyrenees.
But for any dog you just don’t know – on average, the breed represents only about 9 percent of the variations in each dog’s behavior. And no behavior is limited to any breed, even howling, although the study found that the behavior is more associated with breeds like Siberian Huskies than with other dogs.
However, in what may seem paradoxical at first glance, the researchers also found that patterns of behavior are highly inherited. The behavior they studied has 25% heredity, a complex measure that shows the influence of genes, but depends on the group of animals studied. But with enough dogs, heredity is a good measure of what is inherited. When comparing whole genomes, they found several genes that clearly influence behavior, including one on how friendly dogs are.
What the study means is that dog behavior is highly inherited, but that the genes that determine whether your dog is friendly, aggressive, or outspoken date far back to the 19th century, when most modern breeds, such as recognized by the American Kennel Club. . Since then, reproduction has been mainly about physical characteristics.
Catherine Lord, an evolutionary biologist at the Broad Institute and the Chan School of Medicine at the University of Massachusetts, and another author of the paper, said: howl. “
But the buyer or adoptive dog is careful. “I know Labradors who howled, and Papillons who pointed, and greyhounds who pulled, and retrievers who didn’t,” said Dr. Lord.
The findings are unlikely to surprise people who work closely with dogs, such as Dr. Cynthia Otto, director of the Penn Vet Working Dog Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr Otto, who was not involved in the report, said the study “makes perfect sense to me. I think there are some common behaviors that are more common in some breeds than in others, but individual variations are so great within a breed. “
For example, she said, breeders preferred border control cars, which are easier to train, which may explain why their training is easier. But she added that “certainly within the border cars – there are still large individual variations.”
Research for the new study began about eight years ago, Dr. Carlson said, and the original goal was to compare the genomes of mutters with dog breeds in a so-called genome-wide association study to look for areas of DNA or genes related with certain behaviors.
Kathleen Morrell, also the author of the article at the Broad Institute and Chan Medical School, said that the large number of mixed-breed dogs in the study, or what the authors and you may call mutters, is a major force.
“The mutts were actually the perfect kind of dog to link to breed and behavior,” she said, because their DNA is so mixed up that it’s easier to separate appearance from behavior.
Evan McLean, director of the Center for Dog Knowledge in Arizona at the University of Arizona, who was not involved in the study, said: “This is one of the first documents to really do an impressive job on dog genomics using mixed breed dogs.” . These dogs are so diverse that it makes genetic comparisons more powerful, he said, but they have been excluded from much earlier studies. “And this document just shows how valuable these populations can be,” he added.
The researchers found 11 specific DNA regions associated with the behavior. This finding may help in the study of human genomics, although researchers are simply scratching the surface of the relationship between the genomes of the two species. A region that has affected the likelihood of a dog howling, for example, is associated with people with language development. And a region associated with the pleasure of being around people is also present in human DNA, where it is associated with long-term memory.
Unlike most research, any dog owner can help with this project.
The researchers obtained their wealth of information from the Darwin Ark, a project that Dr. Carlson and her colleagues created by asking owners of each breed or mutt to present DNA tampons to their dogs and answer questionnaires. They are still looking for more dogs.
“Anyone from anywhere in the world can register,” said Dr. Carlson.
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