EMILY KWONG,BYLINE: You're listening to SHORT WAVE from NPR.
REGINA BARBER,HOST:
Hey, SHORTWAVErs. Regina Barber here, and today we're entering the world of our favoritesquirrel-seeking friends.
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BARBER: Beforethere was Lassie, before Toto, before Scooby Doo, there were ancient wolves andancient humans. And they kind of became pals.
KATIE WU: Thecircumstances are kind of unclear. But at some point, both species realized,you know, this is not a terrible partnership to form.
BARBER: This isKatie Wu. She's a staff writer at The Atlantic. And recently, she dug into whydogs act the way they do and how dogs became man's best friend.
WU: They cameinto contact with each other maybe because, you know, the wolves were attractedto, like, garbage dumps in human encampments or, you know, because they justgot really friendly while they were hunting in the same spaces. If I'm a wolf,I can get a consistent source of food. You know, this nice, tall, bald apething likes to pet me, and I feel a lot safer. And the humans are thinking,wow, this is an apex predator. It can help me hunt, can guard my family andit's just pretty cool to play around with. And the two species started tocoevolve.
BARBER:Suddenly, there was this really friendly wolfish lineage that kept on comingback, helping out the humans and getting belly rubs in return and eventuallysettling into these specific doggie jobs.
WU: It wasalmost a dog Industrial Revolution where they super specialized into thesecareers and, you know, started acquiring some physical traits to match.
BARBER: Takeborder collies. They've evolved to herd animals like sheep. But herding isn'tthe only doggie profession out there.
WU: Anotherclass is the broad class of hunting dogs - retrievers and hounds - dogs thatperform guarding functions that are just patient and calm but make a lot ofnoise when something goes awry, and I also enjoy some of the little verminhunters.
BARBER: Dog-wolfvermin hunters that, thousands of years later, would become little terriers.
WU: They are,ironically, some of the most wolfish because they just sit around. And whenthey see something they want to catch, they will go after it, totally take itdown and sometimes just eat it whole.
BARBER: Verycatlike.
WU: For sure -the mousers of the dog world.
BARBER: But theidea of specific breeds didn't come up until much later in the 1800s.
WU: In theVictorian era, when all of a sudden the priorities around what we should beshaping dogs to be went from, oh, I want this dog to do a specific task that'sgoing to help me with day-to-day life, to I really want a dog that is yay highand has a tail that curls exactly so.
BARBER: Right.
WU: It went fromlike...
BARBER: And canfit into my lap.
WU: Right.Totally. Dogs became these, like, sort of private commodities. It was the eraof, like, fancy everything. Aesthetic became the kind of ruling principle ofdog breeding. And all of a sudden, we got tons of formal dog breeds that weredefined by these super specific, almost dating profile-style criteria for howdogs should look and, to some extent, behave for the sake of fulfilling theseprinciples of purity.
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BARBER: Today onthe show, when purity and reality collide - the complicated history of dogbreeds and what they can and cannot tell us about the personalities of ourcanine companions. I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to SHORT WAVE, thedaily science pup-cast (ph) cast from NPR.
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BARBER: So let'shang out in 1884 and explore the early days of the post-doggie IndustrialRevolution. The American Kennel Club, or AKC, formed to advocate for this ideaof the purebred family companion. It came up with some strict guidelines thatwould dictate all of the physical traits of a breed - like its coat, its bark,its height, but also its personality.
WU: Three of thefirst words you will see on any breed's AKC homepage are these adjectives thatsort of give you a sense of its personality - things like lively or friendly orgentlemanly (laughter) - like, these personality descriptors. And then there isusually this long paragraph about how the dog is expected to behave based onwhat it was bred for and what people wanted it to be.
BARBER: Andthere is some truth to this. Katie says that you can still recognize a lot ofthese ancient traits in the behaviors of some dog breeds today.
WU: Dogs withherder lineage are still pretty herder-y (ph). You know, they really like toys.They're good at listening to commands. And those are the types of things thatprobably made their ancestors really good at their jobs.
BARBER: But theAKC takes it a few steps further.
WU: And if yougo into, you know, these documents called the Breed Standards, which includethe criteria for how a dog should look, there often is a little section calledtemperament. And that can also be super specific. It says the dog has to bebold or vivacious or whatever it is. And often, there's even a line in therethat says if the dog does not meet these behavioral criteria, it should beseverely punished.
BARBER: Katiesays right around here is where the guidelines and the science no longer addup.
WU: Where itgets more subjective and tough to assess is when we get into the aspects ofpersonality that maybe feel a little bit more anthropomorphic...
BARBER: Right.
WU: ...More likea mirror of ourselves. Like, is my dog friendly?
BARBER: Is itgentlemanly?
WU: (Laughter)Right. Like, did I adopt this dog thinking it would be serious-minded, so Itreated it like it would be serious-minded, and then it became serious-minded?
BARBER: FYI, ifyou want a dog that's, quote, "serious-minded," then the AmericanKennel Club says get a Chow Chow. But that advice will only get you so far.
WU: It's areally interesting tension because we do expect dogs to behave in a certain wayif they were adapted to certain careers over millennia. But breeds were so muchabout looks, and so what is the connection here?
BARBER:Researchers have been trying to get to the bottom of this dog personalitydebate for a long time. And finally, there just might be an answer from expertsat UMass Chan Medical School and the Broad Institute.
OK, Katie, inyour piece, you discuss a massive study done recently where the researchersrecruited tens of thousands of dogs and gave a survey asking questions to theowners like, does your dog cower during storms? Does it ignore commands? Andthen they sequenced the genomes of about 2,000 of those dogs. So what doresearchers say is at play when thinking about how they behave?
WU: Right. So Ithought this study was fascinating because there are so many dog breeds outthere today, and it's pretty clear that people have these implicit assumptionsabout how different breeds should behave. You know, when you see a dog on thestreet and you are maybe a dog person, one of the first questions is, what isyour dog? And the answer, whether it's a Chow Chow or a Chihuahua, often tendsto affect how people treat that dog. And these researchers found thatsurprisingly little of a dog's behavior, of its personality or its temperament,whatever we want to call it, is actually attributable to breed.
BARBER: So inthe end, how much did the dog's breed explain their behavior?
WU: Yeah, sothis study found that less than 10% of all the diversity in dog behaviors canbe explained by breed.
BARBER: Wow.
WU: And, I mean,I - it's tough. Researchers are still really figuring out how exactly to makethose estimates. There was a study from just three years ago that did kind of aroughly similar analysis. They did their study a little bit differently, butthey found a much higher percentage being attributable to breed - somewherecloser to half, depending on how you slice and dice the data. You know, this isdefinitely a contentious area. If you ask the same questions of humans - howmuch of our personality is from genetics versus environment? - people would definitelydisagree.
BARBER: Right.
WU: I think theonly agreement is it's not zero and it's not a hundred.
BARBER: Right.And when I hear about dog breeding and how do you make the perfect dog, for me,it brings up a lot of stereotypes people make about humans. Like, for myself,being Asian American, I remember hearing Asians are smarter and how that'sdetrimental. And as you said earlier, dog breeds and temperament - thoseconnections came up in the Victorian era, which is when eugenics was all therage, right?
WU: Certainlythis is something that comes up. Any time someone publishes a paper on dogbreeds and behavior and different predispositions, they inevitably getquestions about race. Like, isn't this something that explains, like, whyso-and-so people of this race or ethnicity are more prone to this or behavelike this...
BARBER: Right.
WU: ...Or whycan't we make assumptions? It's so unbelievably different. There is a wonderfulreview that I would highly recommend anyone who's interested in this questioncheck out. It's called "Human Races Are Not Like Dog Breeds: Refuting ARacist Analogy," which just - that title - chef's kiss. And, you know,they really lay out how the history and genetics of dog breeds just is not anapt parallel.
BARBER: Right.
WU: We have toconsider that race is so complex. There are cultural dimensions. There is somuch else going on. And I will also point out that the Victorians sort ofmanifested this idea of breed. And one of the ideals they really held it to waspurity - keeping bloodlines pure. And we know, from dogs and humans, howdisastrous that can be. And we know that a lot of dog breeds today have healthproblems because of rampant inbreeding.
BARBER: Right.
WU: It is notgood for anyone who wants to maintain a species' general well-being.Ultimately, this obsession with purity, in both species, has been to thedetriment of everyone involved.
BARBER: Totally.So, Katie, you've taken us on this 10,000-year journey from wolves to caninebreeds today. From your research into the overarching history of dog breeds andthe origin of these specific doggie personalities, what's your takeaway?
WU: Dogs havebeen shaped by us, and maybe there is some hubris to that. Maybe, you know -humans love to categorize things. We love to anthropomorphize things. We loveto...
BARBER: Right.
WU: ...Attributepersonality traits to even, like, our cars, our microwaves. With dogs, theinclination may be especially strong because we know we have this history withthem. We know that we purposely went out of our way to select them andsubdivide them into breeds and specialize them in ways that we thought wouldmake certain dogs good lap dogs, others good hunters, others good herders, othersgood guide dogs. And maybe if we did that well, then we should be able topredict them. But I think we do have to remember that even though dogs were sovery influenced by us, they remain their own animals. Each dog is anindividual, and it's still going to have its own complex thoughts, its ownability to interact with its surroundings and interpret them. And that'ssomething that we can't forget. And maybe they are the ones shaping us a lot ofthe time.
BARBER: Thankyou, Katie, so much for talking to us. This has been very enlightening.
WU: Absolutely.This was really fun.
BARBER: Checkout Katie Wu's article called "Humans Can't Quit A Basic Myth About DogBreeds." We'll put a link to that and the review she mentioned in ourepisode notes. This episode was produced by Margaret Cirino and RebeccaRamirez, edited by Stephanie O'Neill. Marge, also checked the facts. The audioengineer for this episode was Alex Drewenskus. Andrea Kissack runs the sciencedesk. Edith Chapin and Terence Samuel are the executive editors and vicepresidents of news. And Nancy Barnes is our senior vice president of news. I'mRegina Barber. Thanks for listening to SHORT WAVE, the daily science podcastfrom NPR.
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BARBER: So,Katie, what's your experience with dogs?
WU: So I had adog when I was younger. She was a Pomeranian. But I have not had a dog since. Iam a hardcore cat person.
BARBER: Me too.
WU: I havemultiple cats (laughter). And I don't know if that's ever going to change.
BARBER: Yeah.
WU: I truly feellike once you go cat, you can't go back.
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