From ethologicalethics....
It's a Dog's Life, but What, Exactly, Is That About?
August 19, 2003
By MARK DERR
The demands on dogs have never been greater.
Dogs now sniff out bombs, sarin, land mines, illegal drugs
and other contraband, as well as money, firearms, traces of
gasoline used in arson, underground gas and water leaks and
termites. They serve people with disabilities and sometimes
help improve the physical or mental health of their owners.
Canine athletes chase Frisbees, catch fly balls, run
agility courses and engage in more traditional work -
hunting, herding, pulling sleds and competing in field
trials that measure their talents in those areas. Some
hunting dogs track endangered species, like Florida
panthers, for researchers rather than hunters. And a
majority of the nation's 64 million dogs are still expected
to provide companionship and security for their human
families, under varied and often stressful circumstances.
It is hardly surprising, then, that scientists are trying
to understand the behavioral and physical traits of top
performers and companions to improve selection, training
and breeding programs.
"Most of us would love to have a reliable predictive test
of behavioral traits," said Dr. James Serpell, an associate
professor of animal welfare at the University of
Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine.
Yet efforts to establish profiles of particular breeds have
commonly failed. Many have relied on the judgment of people
who "never get past their own assumptions" to look at what
the dog is actually doing, Dr. Serpell said.
Others have run up against the central paradox, identified
by John Paul Scott and John L. Fuller in their 1965 book,
"Genetics and the Social Behavior of the Dog," that there
is more variation in behavior and abilities among dogs
within a breed than there is between breeds.
Selective breeding has increased the odds that dogs of a
particular breed will be predisposed toward certain complex
behaviors, like herding or pointing, and personality
traits, like aggressiveness, playfulness and fear.
But other factors - the health of the mother during
pregnancy, conditions at birth, the mother's temperament,
the puppy's environment, diet, health, treatment,
socialization and hormones - also help to shape the dog's
personality, brain and behavior, said Dr. Karen Overall, an
expert in dog behavior at the University of Pennsylvania.
That is why temperament tests designed to predict what kind
of dog a puppy will become are unreliable, Dr. Overall
said. The tests gain validity only after the dog has
reached social maturity, generally around 18 months to 2
years, she added.
Using questionnaires and statistical analysis, Dr. Serpell
has identified eight general behavioral traits in guide
dogs for the blind that, he said, account for 63.3 percent
of the variation between dogs and that "are stable across
breeds and sexes." Among those traits are sociability,
trainability, aggression, fear and anxiety, and
excitability.
Using different terminology, researchers from Sweden and
Denmark reported last fall on what is thought to be the
largest survey of dog personality traits to date. An
analysis of standardized behavioral tests given to 15,329
dogs representing 164 breeds by the Swedish Working Dogs
Association from 1997 to 2000 enabled two experts to
identify five basic personality traits common to all dogs:
playfulness, curiosity/fearlessness, chase-proneness
(defined as an interest in pursuing a preylike object),
sociability and aggressiveness.
Combined, those traits, except aggressiveness, form a broad
personality dimension that the researchers call a
"shyness-boldness continuum." Dr. Kenth Svartberg, an
ethologist at Stockholm University, and Dr. Bjorn Forkman,
an ethologist at the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural
University in Frederiksberg, Denmark, reported their
findings in the October 2002 issue of The Journal of
Applied Behavioral Science.
A bold dog is highly active, interested in other dogs and
people, curious and fearless when faced with novel objects
and situations, and highly trainable, Dr. Svartberg wrote
in an e-mail message. A shy dog tends to be uninterested in
play, timid, cautious and evasive in unfamiliar situations.
The shyness-boldness continuum is also found in wolves, the
direct ancestors of dogs, indicating that it has remained
"evolutionarily stable" despite the pressure of
domestication and thousands of years of breeding for
specific traits, the researchers said.
Dr. Svartberg calculated scores for each dog for each of
the five main personality traits and established rankings
for 31 breeds, based on a sample of 40 dogs or more.
As expected, he found significant differences and
considerable overlap in the scores for each trait and on
the shyness-boldness continuum among breeds, genders and
individual dogs within breeds.
The Belgian Malinois, commonly used as police or detection
dogs, ranked third in boldness behind the Labrador
retriever and the flat-coated retriever. The flat-coated
retriever is relatively rare in the United States, but
Labradors are the most popular dog registered by the
American Kennel Club and a favorite for detection and guide
dog work.
Playfulness and sociability are so strongly associated in
retrievers that they effectively form one personality
trait, Dr. Svartberg said. The shyest breeds were the
pinscher, the smooth-coated collie and the Rhodesian
ridgeback.
In a companion paper, Dr. Svartberg demonstrated that a
dog's boldness ranking could predict its performance on a
military and police test for tracking, searching, carrying
messages and protecting its handler.
He focused on German shepherds and Belgian Tervurens, like
the Malinois a type of Belgian shepherd but with a longer
coat, and found that the German shepherds were on the whole
bolder, and that males were bolder than females. But the
dogs scoring highest were the boldest, regardless of gender
or breed, Dr. Svartberg found. Bold dogs, he surmised, are
easier to train as working dogs, regardless of the task.
Calling Dr. Svartberg's work "the best published stuff in
modern times on personality traits in dogs," Dr. Overall
said it should help people identify traits and refine
breeding programs. But she said the study was limited
because it relied on terms borrowed from human behavior
that probably failed to reflect what the dog was actually
doing.
Behavioral tests, like the one Dr. Svartberg used, reward
dogs for quick decisions on such questions as whether to
approach a stranger, and do not measure hesitation when a
dog responds to a new situation or noise or how quickly it
recovers from excitement. But that lag time, Dr. Overall
noted, allows a dog - for example, guide dogs who pause or
ignore commands if they suspect danger - to assess a
situation.
Most people will not find a bold working dog a suitable
pet, said Dr. Katharine Houpt, director of the Animal
Behavior Clinic at the Cornell University College of
Veterinary Medicine. But dogs that are highly active and
have great stamina, a strong desire to play with an object,
boldness and fearlessness in new situations make the best
detector dogs, said Carl Newcombe, canine program manager
for the Department of Homeland Security. Five or six years
ago, the Customs Service, now part of Homeland Security,
began a program to breed Labrador retrievers for use as
detection dogs.
"Understanding the genetics of behavior in dogs is the holy
grail," said Dr. Gregory Acland, a geneticist with the
James A. Baker Institute for Animal Health at Cornell and a
contributor to the Dog Genome Project. As part of that
project, researchers at the Whitehead Institute for
Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass., are sequencing the
genome of a female boxer, chosen because she was highly
inbred. Scheduled for completion next year, the sequencing
is expected to bring that quest closer to success.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/19/science/19DOG.html?ex=1062256558&ei=1&en=405912f38433533b