Field Guide · Glossary
Breed-specific behaviors
Learning scienceBehavioral tendencies that show up more often in some breeds than others, traced back to the jobs those breeds were selected to do.
How it works
Breeds were shaped by people choosing dogs who did a task well: herding livestock, retrieving birds, following a scent trail, guarding property, or catching rodents. Choosing for the task turned some parts of normal dog behavior up and others down, so a herding breed tends to watch and circle moving things, and a scent hound tends to put their nose down and follow it. These are tendencies, and individual dogs within any breed vary widely. A large genetic study published in Science in 2022, which surveyed owners of more than eighteen thousand dogs and sequenced the DNA of over two thousand, found that breed explained about nine percent of the behavioral differences between individual dogs. Some traits, such as how readily a dog responds to cues, were more closely tied to breed than others.
What it looks like
Two border collies from the same breeder grow up in similar homes. One stares and crouches at every bicycle and needs a herding outlet to settle. The other ignores bicycles and spends most of the day following the family from room to room. Both are typical border collies, and neither one is what a breed description alone would predict.
Commonly confused with
- Species-typical behavior
- Species-typical behavior is what dogs in general do, such as sniffing, chewing and chasing. Breed-specific behaviors describe how strongly particular breeds tend to show some of those same behaviors.
Related terms
Sources