Comparative ethology of dog breeds

Comparative ethology of dog breeds – everyone’s favorite, but is there a ’best practice’ how to do it?

Every researcher knows the feeling when on a conference, after presenting the newest results on dog behavior, among the first questions from the audience, comes this one „And the dog breeds didn’t have an effect?” This is just one example, showing how strong is the interest towards breed-related comparisons, to know whether there are behavioral differences among the dog breeds beyond their tremendous morphological variability. But… wait – everybody knows the answer! Dog breeds have to differ in their behavior, because they were selected for sometimes vastly different tasks, right?

In the last 30 years many researchers ran experiments that directly or indirectly targeted breed-related behavioral differences. These investigations posed significant relevance for the scientists and for the professionals of various applied areas. We should not forget the eager interest of dog-fanciers’ either. It was time to summarize the so far available dog breed-related literature, with specific focus on the methodological questions that could help ethologists to plan for optimal investigations in the future. 

Researchers from the Department of Ethology at ELTE, Péter Pongrácz and Petra Dobos delved into this challenge with their freshly published paper in Biological Reviews. They assessed almost a hundred, dog breed-related publications and based on these, they managed to outline three main research strategies. These chiefly differed in their methods, how did the researchers select the dog breeds for the study. Papers that utilized ‘convenience sampling’, were based on the most popular and abundantly available dogs at a given place and time. When the authors performed ancestry-based sampling, they expected to find behavioral differences, which could be connected to the genetic relatedness of the compared breeds. Finally, function-based sampling is a method where researchers group dog breeds according to their work-related selection in the past. 

In their review article, the Hungarian scientists concluded that each research strategy can have its advantages and weaknesses. From the aspect of ethology, it is of crucial importance that we should strive for asking biologically meaningful questions with regard to breed-related comparisons. For this, we should have an a priori theory about the expected behavior of particular breeds or breed-groups. Even more importantly, we should be able to formulate hypotheses about why particular responses would be adaptive for the dogs in a given context. Summarizing their findings, Péter Pongrácz and Petra Dobos emphasized that for best practice, it is recommended to conduct ancestry-based and function-based breed sampling, because these approaches more likely enable scientists to formulate biologically relevant hypotheses. Another take home message of the review paper is that researchers cannot be too careful when they assemble their subject sample: the most comprehensive results can be expected when they test a wide selection of breeds, where none of them is over-represented in the sample. 

Pongrácz P, Dobos P. (2024). Behavioural differences and similarities between dog breeds: proposing an ecologically valid approach for canine behavioural research. Biological Reviews, doi.10.1111/brv.13128

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/brv.13128