The danger of dogs is not determined by your race. This axiom, defended for years by most biologists, ethologists, veterinarians and animalists in generalhas now been confirmed by a genetic study published by the American scientific journal ‘Science‘, a publication that divulges the information of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science). The analysis extracted from these data determines that race, by itself, does not help at all to predict dog behavior.
Laws and prohibitions
Today, most modern dog breeds are credited with characteristic temperaments associated with its ancestral function. As such, it is assumed that the racial ancestry of dogs predicts the individual temperament and behavior of each specimen. This deduction has led, among other results, to a variety of breed-specific laws, which may include insurance restrictions or the total ban on owning some breeds of dogs.
However, the scientist Kathleen Morrill and his team have used genome-wide association studies to search for common genetic variations that could predict specific behavioral traits in a total of 2,155 purebred and mixed-breed dogs. And they have crossed that data with the nearly 200,000 answers that their owners have given in 18,385 surveys of Darwin’s Arka database of canine traits and behaviors.
None breed specific
The behavioral data has been analyzed according to the breeds, the information provided by the owners of the dogs and the genetic ancestors of the dogs according to the breed to which they belong.
The results of these tests, which included data from 78 breeds, identified 11 genetic loci – the places where specific genes are located on a chromosome. strongly associated with behavioralthough none of them were breed-specific.
Like father Like Son
“It’s obvious,” says the doctor Gaspar García, veterinarian of Mundo Animal, “the danger depends on the dog itself, although it is true that each breed has its characteristics,” he adds. As it is also true that “of parents [perrunos] aggressive dogs can come out aggressive”, he clarifies. That is to say, “in part, aggressiveness is transmitted by genes. But in no case because of race ‘per se,'” she explains.
It should be noted that among the behaviors most strongly predicted by genetics was dog docility and its ability to respond to human commands.
in the same way think Cristina Gonzalezveterinarian of Clinical Ethology Service of the Clinical Veterinary Hospital of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), which explains that aggressiveness is a “multifactorial characteristic, which is determined by different reasons” and it can have an important component derived from genetics: “Mothers who suffer from anxiety during pregnancy can transmit that anxiety and fear to the fetus and that they are born with a certain predisposition to be aggressive,” he says.
fear and trauma
González clarifies that one of the factors that cause a dog to behave aggressively “is the fear caused, in turn, by traumatic events, ‘normalized’ situations that dogs suffer on a daily basis, such as not respecting their rest or their exposure to aggressive urban stimuli, such as traffic noise on a terrace,” he says.
The research published in ‘Science’ supports the opinions of García and González, and determines that the breed only explains 9% of the behavioral variation in each individual dog. And even more: for certain behavioral traitsthe age or sex of the dog have been more decisive when it comes to predicting its behavior than the breed.
hereditary traits
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Researchers have not, therefore, been able to find behaviors that are exclusive to a specific breed. “Most of the behaviors that we consider to be characteristic of specific modern dog breeds were probably due to thousands of years of evolution from the wolf to the wild canine, to the domesticated dog, and eventually to modern breeds,” says the author. Elinor Karlson in a related article. “These inherited traits predate our concept of modern dog breeds by thousands of years,” she concludes.
In short: the findings of the scientific study challenge current theses about the link between idiosyncrasy of dogs and breed to which they belong, concepts misused to explain why some races are more aggressive, obedient, docile, or affectionate than others.