Your dog is a good
boy, but that's not necessarily because of its breed
https://www.npr.org/2022/04/28/1095390872/dog-breeds-behavior-study
Labrador retrievers
fetch, border collies herd, huskies howl: It's conventional wisdom that many
dog breeds act in certain ways because they've been bred to do so over the
course of many generations.
But a new study to
be published Friday in the journal Science finds
that though some dog behaviors are indeed associated with particular breeds,
breed plays less of a role overall than that conventional wisdom holds.
"We found things
like German shorthaired pointers were slightly more likely to point, or golden
retrievers were slightly more likely to retrieve, or huskies more likely to
howl, than the general dog population," says Kathryn Lord, a researcher at
the UMass Chan Medical School and an author of the study.
Researchers surveyed
the owners of more than 18,000 dogs and analyzed the DNA of about 2,100 animals
to see if physical traits and behaviors can be correlated with dog breeds.
Overall, the study found that about 9% of the variation in an individual dog's behavior can be explained by its breed.
And they all love long walks (or would, if their lazy humans would take them).
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