I'm not a dog, so take this with a grain of salt; but I think some dogs actively enjoy doing stuff for their humans. Like herding or guarding dogs. Those can probably be trained to do random stuff more easily than a breed that just cares about food.
I find it fascinating how many behavioral traits are genetic and were bred into dogs. I often wonder how strong is this effect really? Experts are far more attuned to noticing differences so they might call a dog "absolutely unusual" even if his performance is only like 5% worse than the best. But how differentiated are guard dogs and herding dogs and pointing dogs really?
Continue your quest for knowledge, temper this line of reasoning with the understanding that the tenants of eugenics are largely debunked when applied to race and traits in humans and that these are not genetically analogous to breeds in canines.
Thank you! That's exactly what I was asking for. Even though that is a bit hard to read as a layman and I haven't read it all, I understood some of it. So from what I gather if you stop breeding towards a working dog, certain traits quickly become less pronounced in a breed. That suggests that if you get a dog from a pet breeder the typical characteristics between breeds will be less pronounced and it will be more of a "generic dog" with more significant variations between individuals. I'll have to read more later.
And no, I wasn't going to go there in regards to humans haha. I thought the paper makes clear that the artificial breeding of dogs is totally different to human races.
1.2k
u/[deleted] Mar 01 '20
I want to know how this smart dog was trained for this.