Little Dogs

toedtoes wrote:

dturm wrote:
I get a professional SmartBrief email daily that basically searches animal related stories related to veterinary medicine. Yesterday's brief pointed to an article about a study from Penn.

Basically, there are breed tendencies but such a wide variation within a breed and so much cross-over behaviors (they studied aggression) that generalization about breeds becomes a problem.

Serpell says the C-BARQ data paints a more complex picture than expected, even within breeds. So judging a dog based solely on its breed overlooks one of the most important aspects of its behavior: The influence of its owner and environment.

This is a link to the story PRI (public radio international)

I think that is very true. A "breed" problem only seems to exist when a particular breed becomes excessively popular. At that point, there are more "inappropriate" homes for dogs of that breed than there are appropriate homes. The inappropriate homes don't do their research before buying/adopting the dog, and then don't make any effort into properly training the dog. And they don't realize that the effort required to train a GSD or Golden Retriever will be greatly different than the effort required to train a Jack Russell or Siberian Husky.