So is genetic testing and careful selection enough

When choosing a breeder we always say to meet mum and dad as far as possible to assess for temperament and select by testing conducted, but is it enough? An interesting read on some new research on phobias. Is there a potential impact on our dogs?

 

I spoke to the head of Guide Dogs breeding programme a couple of months ago. I was asking about pups which get withdrawn during training for various reasons - including medical, temperament and behaviour.

My question was ‘Is there anything that can be done to get the number of withdrawn pups down?’ it’s about one in six at the moment. Her reply was ‘We’ve been breeding, selecting and training for health, temperament and behaviour for 87 years - if there were any more that could be done, we’d be doing it’.

Rather like people, dogs vary for many many reasons. Science brings up more answers very year, but - for now - we work with what we know and the dogs we have


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Nature vs nurture, with an element of luck. Good breeding is only a tiny percentage of the 'finished product'.

 

And the ‘nurture’ bit has plenty of luck attached too. As with humans, traumatic experiences can happen very randomly and change a personality, sometimes permanently.

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I think it’s really impressive that 5 out of 6 Guide Dogs do make it through their training. That says to me that you can and should successfully breed for temperament.

 

Oh yes!

If you go to any puppy class you’ll see lots of very normal, lively, crazy pups, but no growling or nervous pups whatsoever! My question was how to make things even better

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I would say Nurture AND Nature plus a good helping of luck

 

I'm not sure I'd agree with that. I'd say that good breeding has a huge amount to do with the finished product. Looking at my own dogs, brought up in near-as-dammit the same way, and the one bred for confidence is just that, whereas the two with good-on-paper breeding but without any consideration for temperament can't have their personality problems "fixed" whatever nurture I throw at them.

Nando Brown said it well (I'm paraphrasing) : Nature gives us a "window" as far as the temperament goes. Nurture can move the dog from one side of the window to the other, but never beyond.

@Jojo83 Is your original post missing a link for us to read?

 

Such a big question. My first Rottie was from an excellent breeder. Mom and dad placid, gentle dogs. My puppy was also placid and gentle as well as completely bullet-proof. A bomb could go off next to that dog and he'd just shrug and ask what was for dinner.

Brogan, my second dog, was a rescue from a dog-fighting ring bust. Or more accurately his mother was rescued, and had all the puppies in a foster home. The mother wasn't allowed interaction with the pups because foster mom said she tried to kill them. Then foster mom didn't allow interaction between the pups themselves as she said they were too rough with each other. All of this meant by the time I got him, he'd had a very different start, both genetically and environmentally from my first Rottie.

Duncan and Brogan's puppyhood with me was very similar. The outcome was not. Brogan was easily set off (gun shy) and developed all manner of strange phobias throughout his puppyhood. Orange trees, skate boards, trash cans...even paperback books! Trust me, he was never attacked by an orange, but there you go. I think his genetic makeup plus (possibly) his early neuter had a huge amount to do with his fear issues.

Having said that, Brogan was also a good case for the ability for a dog to overcome his breeding. With time and a lot of work, he became just as placid and gentle as Duncan. Never bullet-proof as he was gun shy until he went deaf at 11 years old, but a more gentle and wanting-to-please dog you could not have found.

I'm giving this question a lot of thought these days as I'm making a final decision about a breeder and STILL wrestling with the idea of wanting to find a rescue instead as that is something I really believe in. Frankly, it's literally keeping me awake at night.

Finally, when @Boogie was kind enough to take me to a Guide Dog puppy class with Keir, it was really quite remarkable how much the puppies were able to concentrate during the class. How much of this is because all the puppy walkers put so much effort into their training (which they obviously do) and how much is down to breeding for temperament? Either way, I've been to a LOT of puppy classes in my day, and have certainly never seen that level of concentration in ALL the dogs. It was very impressive!

 

Yes, I agree, you raise a very valid point.

But I suppose we should consider the other side. What about the dog that's a rescue and has been bred in a puppy farm or a 'whoopsie-daisy' or any other less than idea match. With the right home and care, they can be super dogs.
Then, what about the dog with the best breeding and beautiful temperament that's brought up in an awful environment and ends up unhappy in the worst ways.

I agree, I think my statement was a bit extreme and that good breeding may be more important than I suggested. However, I do think that nurture and a huge amount of luck are involved and have the potential to throw the breeding out of the window.

 

I'm inclined to agree that nurture & luck have a big input. We have had 3 rescues - I know nothing of their breeding. One was a pregnant stray. One was a drug-users dog that was sent to be PTS. And one was brought up with children then passed from pillar to unsuitable post before ending up in kennels. They have all ended up slotting nicely into our home life and being as easygoing as anything, though with very different personalities. OH's dad said, when we got Coco, "are you going to make this one as soft as the other 2?". I think the answer to that is "yes".

Obviously, all that said, if you're getting a puppy, start with the best breeding for your requirements and you SHOULD have a much smoother journey.

 

Well spotted @snowbunny rushing to get ready for some personal 121 training
Here's the link now .....
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/sci...ries-passed-down-in-genes-from-ancestors.html

 

I think a dog with naturally good temperament (whether bred deliberately or not) has the ability to "bounce back" from horrible situations. Take our Conchita. No-one would say she was the product of careful breeding and she's had a horrible life, yet is a happy, friendly soul. That's nothing that I've done, it's just who she is. Yes, she has issues caused by her treatment - she was shy in the kennel and is wary of men, for a start - but that is being overcome by good nurture now. Jo-Rosie's pitbull, Archie, had his ears hacked off by cruel humans, and yet is now loving and gentle. If he had been a "Willow" dog when that happened, there would have been no coming back from it.
I think, of course, you can push a dog with sound temperament to a limit where he will collapse, but that's true of any animal. I don't think you can ever make a dog of nervous disposition confident, though.

I don't think "luck" really has any meaning. I'm not talking about deliberate breeding for good or bad temperament, but any creature will naturally have a temperament somewhere on the scale of awful to brilliant (in whatever measure you choose to investigate) and whether or not that has been done intentionally doesn't make it any more or less about the breeding.

 

I find it interesting that we have temperament testing available but few breeders use it. Instead we have only their subjective opinion on the temperament of parents.

I helped out at one test. It was educational and a surprise to me that the breed club applies it's own value to different scores. There were four Rotties at the test and they ALL failed because their reaction at some stations is supposed to be defensive while a defensive reaction from a Lab would be treated quite differently.

https://atts.org/tt-test-description/

 

I totally understand breeders not doing this for puppies. The actual worth of a temperament test is pretty debatable as it's a fixed point in time, affected by whether the puppy is tired, hungry, just had a nap, etc.. I'd rather trust the opinion of a good breeder who has spent all eight weeks with the pups. For adults, it might be interesting...especially if there was some standard test where you could compare potential sires/dams. But again, that's kind of what listing field or obedience titles is about, at least for working lines.

As I found out when I was searching for a rescue dog in Spain and scouring the internet on how to temperament test a shelter dog, any kind of temperament testing is pretty controversial in some circles precisely because it is so subjective. As a "Rottie person", I find it sad that Rotties would be expected to be defensive as opposed to a Lab or any other breed. But that's another thread entirely, I suppose.

I still remember my first brush with a temperament test. I was told to bring one of my first foster puppies back into the shelter for her temperament test prior to adoption. I asked to stay in the room with her while they did it. Imagine my surprise when the temperament test involved a shelter employee suddenly opening the door to the room we were in and chucking a metal folding chair into the room onto to the concrete floor next to the puppy and me. My foster puppy "failed" because she wet herself out of fear. I nearly did as well, for that matter. I grabbed her, took her out of there and told the volunteer co-ordinator I would quit fostering if they ever made me do that again. Never had to, but as you can probably tell, I'm still angry about it.

Just to illustrate that there's no common temperament tests and they can vary widely, depending on who administers them.

 

I'm really interested in measuring dogs' confidence at the moment; it would be really useful if there were an objective test I could perform to show whether my dogs' confidence is improving over time as I do certain exercises with them. The more I look into it, though, the less this seems feasible. The standard measure is through testing cortisol, but that is really a poor measure, since you can't tell whether the levels are raised due to fear, excitement, hunger, thirst, cold etc. I can obviously tell that Willow is no longer afraid of the sound of gunshot (except when scary hunter man is standing only a few metres away), but it would be incredibly useful if I could quantify this for less obvious anxieties, and to keep measurements when she is taken off the medication, so I can see if there are any potential issues. Being able to measure confidence on a regular basis would also alert me to trigger stacking that I hadn't noticed occurring.

Sorry, that musing was supposed to be in response to temperament tests. How can you take any moment in time and perform a test and declare that the dog's personality is XYZ, because there are so many other factors at play. Done regularly over time, you'd have a better idea, but I think it really is, for now, a subjective thing and that's where the experience of the breeder comes in.
In the case of shelter dogs, I think they're even more prone to error. Rescue dogs can take weeks to settle into a home and for their full true nature to show, so why should we expect the picture that we see in the shelter to be a good indication of how they will behave once in a family environment?

 

And just a few further thoughts on nature v nurture

http://blog.dogyearbook.com/dog-behavior-untangling-nature-and-nurture/

 

To go back to nature vs. nurture, on one of my breeder visits, the breeder did something interesting when we were talking about "bullet-proof" dogs and whether it's genetic or environmental. The breeder had two dogs in the kitchen, littermates, both bred and owned by her as house dogs, one male, one female. She got out the vacuum cleaner and immediately the female left the room in a sulk. The male just sat there and didn't budge. The breeder just shrugged and smiled: "You just never know how they'll turn out!".

 

The same would happen in this house, except it would be Shadow leaving the room, as he's the one that's scared of the hoover. If the female who left was scared and not put out for some other reason; maybe she knew it would mean she kept being moved, or maybe she didn't like the smell - there could be lots of other reasons than fear - but let's say she was scared, I'd be left wondering, "OK, she's scared of the hoover. So what is he scared of?", because here, you'd see Shadow run away and might assume he was the more scared of the two, as Willow would be completely unfazed by it. But we all know that, even though Shadow might be the more jumpy with the hoover, in general it's Willow that's the more afraid out of the two of them.

What I'm saying is that, of course no two dogs are the same, even within a litter. They are all individuals and some will be more robust than others. They may also have different triggers. Just as in a human family, you might have just one sibling that has mental health issues. There are no guarantees. It doesn't mean those mental health issues are caused by external factors, they could still very easily be physiological and part of the person's genetic make-up which, although having similarities, is still different to their siblings'.
But we do know that personality traits are heritable and so robust dogs are more likely to make robust puppies. Hence why the GD breeding programme is so successful

 

It seemed less like real fear and more like, "For Pete's sake, not that nasty loud monster again! I'm outta here!"