A dog’s breed doesn’t determine much about its behavior
Elinor Karlsson has never owned a dog. But ever since she was a graduate student, she’s been studying dog genetics. (They’re good models for studying genetic diseases in humans.) Part of that work involved collecting genetic and behavioral data on thousands of dogs. And all that data meant the research team could ask a question Karlsson had been wondering for years: does a dog’s breed really say anything about how that dog acts?
“Everybody was assuming that breed was predictive of behavior in dogs,” said Karlsson, now the director of the Vertebrate Genomics Group at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, during a press briefing. “And that had never really been asked particularly well. And we could actually do that.”
The answer they...