Your dog is a good boy, but that's not necessarily because of its breed
A new study based on thousands of DNA sequences and owner surveys finds that less than 10% of a dog's behavior — like howling, herding or retrieving — can be explained by its breed.
Labrador retrievers fetch, border collies herd, huskies howl: It's conventional wisdom that many dog breeds act in certain ways because they've been bred to do so over the course of many generations.
But a new study to be published Friday in the journal Science finds that though some dog behaviors are indeed associated with particular breeds, breed plays less of a role overall than that conventional wisdom holds.
"We found things like German shorthaired pointers were slightly more likely to point, or golden retrievers were
