What explains a dog’s personality or behavior? If you said its breed, keep listening
Lesson summary
Hi there everyone, I’m Jeff and this is Plain English, where we help you upgrade your English with current events and trending topics. This is lesson number 469, so that means JR has uploaded the full lesson to PlainEnglish.com/469.
Coming up today: a new study in the journal Science examined 2,000 dogs and 200,000 survey questions to learn more about dogs and their behavior. The surprising result is that a dog’s breed might not influence its behavior quite as much as you might have thought. But if you know the history of dog breeding, that won’t come as a surprise.
That’s our main topic today. In every Plain English lesson, we also talk about one English expression, and today is no different. The expression we’ll talk about is “bring back.” On every Thursday lesson, JR, our trusty producer, selects a song of the week. So you have that to look forward to as well. Let’s get started.
Dog breeds are more about looks than behavior, study finds
They say a dog is man’s best friend. If that’s true, it has been a long friendship. Archaeologists believe that humans first domesticated dogs about 30,000 years ago. At that time, the humans walking Eurasia were anatomically and cognitively similar to humans today.
The first dogs came from wolves. Humans provided wolves with food scraps and shelter; wolves helped humans with hunting. Soon , humans started breeding wolves, matching one with another to produce a new generation based on the traits of the parents. What we consider “dogs” today evolved over thousands of years from that process.
For most of history, dogs were bred to do a specific task. They were also named after the task they were designed to do. A sheepdog herded sheep; a guard dog provided protection; a retriever brought back wild game that had been killed from a distance. The dogs that were good at a particular task were used to breed the next generation. Dog owners weren’t fussy about appearance: they needed a hard worker.
That changed in the 1800s, the industrial revolution in Great Britain. With more modern equipment and technology, Victorian-era people didn’t need dogs to perform quite as many tasks. And with higher incomes, they had more leisure time, and they had a desire to show off their status.
That’s when the modern idea of a dog “breed” emerged. Starting in the mid-1800s, specific dog breeds were named and standardized. Dogs became status symbols and indoor companions. They gave wealthy Victorians something to show off at dog shows, a relatively new leisure-time activity.
Many dogs were still bred for function, but the practice of dog breeding was shifting away from working dogs and toward pets and dog show competitions. And with that evolution, the standards of a “breed” also shifted away from ability and toward appearance.
Let me give you an example. I grew up with golden retrievers in my house. In the late 1800s, hunters in the Scottish Highlands needed a dog that could retrieve wild game both on land and in the water. They started with a yellow retriever, mixed it with a water spaniel, made some modifications, and produced what we know today as the golden retriever. This is a simplified history, but you get the idea.
The golden retriever became a registered breed with the Kennel Club in the early 1900s. The official breed standard today for the golden retriever defines sixteen physical characteristics, including the nose, the teeth, the coat, tail, feet, and so on . It includes a brief mention of the dog’s temperament; they should not be unnecessarily quarrelsome or hostile toward other dogs.
But there is one trait conspicuously absent from the breed standard for the golden retriever: there is no requirement that this dog retrieve. There’s nothing about the dog’s ability at a task written into the breed standard.
That brings us to a new study published in the journal Science. The authors of the study found that a dog’s breed is not a good predictor of its temperament. In other words , we often imagine that dogs of the same breed share personality traits: we assume pit bulls and rottweilers will be aggressive and angry, while Labrador retrievers will be friendly, and poodles playful. Sometimes, this stereotype is written into law: Britain has banned pit bull terriers, for example.
The study, however, finds these stereotypes are a vast oversimplification; they are just not true most of the time. Genetics do play a role in a dog’s personality, but there’s a lot more to genetics than what we call a “breed.”
For example, the study finds that a dog’s breed doesn’t determine how affectionate a dog would be and it doesn’t determine how quickly a dog gets angry. The study finds that a breed can explain only nine percent of the variation in dogs’ behavior, but breed can explain much more about the variation in appearance.
Some characteristics are often shared within a breed. Beagles tend to howl, while Labrador retrievers usually don’t. But there are always exceptions: eight percent of Labs do howl. So what makes a Labrador retriever a Labrador retriever is his appearance, not his personality.
This makes sense, right? If modern breed standards prize appearance, purebred dogs in a specific breed all share the same appearance. The standards don’t say very much about behavior or temperament, and so it makes sense that there’s wide variation in temperament even within breeds.
Every one is unique
The golden retrievers I’ve known have all had different personalities, I can say that. Some won’t touch a tennis ball; others will chase one until your arm falls off. The study’s authors said that dogs lead rich emotional lives, and their emotions are demonstrated through their behavior. The authors said the study could help our understanding of dogs’ genetics and their emotions…and it could even be used to further research on genes and emotions in humans.
Learn English the way it’s really spoken
