Born to detour?
2025.08.27.
How do you tell dog breeds apart? Obviously, their look will probably be the first thing we mention – no one would hesitate to distinguish between a Puli and a Boxer! But what about their behavior? Although most dog breeds have been selected to perform a somewhat specialized task, when we talk about the behavioral characteristics of dog breeds, it is a more promising approach if we try to form groups of breeds with more similar behavior. In the past few years, it has been shown that the two main functional breed types (cooperative and independent working dogs) perform very differently in such tasks, when they must pay attention to humans, for example, when they need to learn how to detour an obstacle. However, there are other ways to cluster dog breeds as well, for example, based on their genetic relatedness. Now, in their new study, which has been published in Evolutionary Applications, researchers from the Department of Ethology (ELTE) showed that there are groups of closely related dogs that seem to excel in the detour task and in learning from a human demonstrator.
In their study, Péter Pongrácz and Petra Dobos analyzed the performance of 174 dogs from 48 breeds, who were tested in the well-known detour task around a V-shaped fence. According to their genetic relationships, the dog breeds have been clustered into 8 complex ancestry groups. According to the results, the two groups that we could call ‘Natural Born Detourers” were the groups with the German Shepherd Dog and Hovawart, and with the Belgian Sheepdogs and Briard, respectively. Interestingly, these ancestry groups, where the dogs made the fastest detours around the obstacle, provide many of today’s most popular utility breeds. The group with the Belgian Sheepdogs and Briard also excelled in paying attention to the demonstrator’s behavior.
As for social learning, Pongrácz and Dobos found that the two ancestry groups with herding dogs (Hungarian herding breeds, British herding breeds and Sighthounds) improved the most by observing the demonstrator, alongside the other top-performing group with the German Shepherd Dogs and Hovawarts.
This is the first study that showed that breeds within ancestry groups can show similar social learning performance, independently of their work function. For example, one of the top-performing groups contains both cooperative (British herding dogs) and independent working dogs (Sighthounds). Another group, which showed moderate efficiency in this task, is also comprised of both working dog types (the independent Scenthounds and the cooperative Gundogs). While in general the more primitive dog breeds showed a poorer performance in the social learning task, thus signifying an ancestry effect, the higher success and better social learning of those groups that provided today’s favorite utility dogs, also warrants that the effect of more recent functional selection cannot be ignored in dog behavioral studies.
Pongrácz, P., and P. Dobos. 2025. Natural Born Detourers Modern Utility Dog Breeds Show Ancestry-Based Superiority in Social Learning Capacity in a Detour Task. Evolutionary Applications 18, no. 8: e70151. https://doi.org/10.
