Head lecturer at the Centre of Applied Pet Ethology speaks on the history of dog cross-breeding
The lecturer explained that dogs bred for their functions can be predicted to some degree but it was never 100% guaranteed since environmental factors did affect the dogs' behaviour.
In her more than 20 years of consulting with dog and cat owners, Karin Pienaar, the head lecturer at the Centre of Applied Pet Ethology, explained some of the benefits and drawbacks of cross-breeding dogs.
Pienaar has been working in the field of animal behaviour therapy since 1997.
She explained how all dogs possessed a complete predatory motor pattern of ‘orient, eye, stalk, chase, grab, bite, crush, kill, dissect and consume’, but, not all dogs expressed this complete pattern, and they did not express it at the same rate.
Pienaar said when dogs were domesticated many years ago, people started breeding them based on the behaviour they expressed.
“If a dog, who lived with a community of sheep farmers, showed a strong ‘eye, stalk, chase’ but not ‘grab-bite’ to livestock, that dog became useful to people because he was good at herding sheep,” she explained.
“If he did show ‘grab-bite or kill-bite’ to sheep, he was culled as he would have been too dangerous to keep around the flock.”
She added that those dogs with useful characteristics to people were valuable and were then bred with other dogs that showed the same characteristics, while the ones who did not show useful traits were either actively removed from the gene pool or were not given as much support as the ones who did a job.
Pienaar said after a while, dogs which were bred for a specific function all started looking alike from a shape or musculature point of view.
With the creation of breed clubs and kennel unions, the breeding criteria changed again and were determined based on what the dog looked like, instead of what the dog did.
“Fast-forward a couple of 100 years and now we have dogs which are almost exclusively being bred for what they look like [form] instead of what they do [function].”
Dogs bred for their functions can be predicted to some degree but it was never 100% guaranteed since environmental factors did affect the dogs’ behaviour, she added.
“When you have a pit bull who has been bred from several generations of pit bulls, it’s reasonably safe to say that you’re looking at certain behavioural characteristics that will present themselves in the right circumstances. Arousal thresholds are likely low, and the dog disinhibits quickly in response to certain stimuli and that’s where the problem comes in with pit bulls that we’re facing now.”
She said when dogs were bred for form instead of function, there could be a fallout. Dogs bred for form could also be behaviourally unpredictable, since the criteria for selection was not what the dog did, anymore.
“Take a show border collie – he may look like a border collie [black and white, standing X high at the shoulder, medium-length coat, ears like Y], but there is no guarantee that he could do the job of a border collie at all. That is because the selection criteria are not the same as a dog who expresses ‘eye-stalk-chase’ characteristics, irrespective of coat colour.”
However, when dogs are bred for other reasons such as crosses, or to create a new breed such as ‘Labradoodles’, the offspring may show behavioural characteristics from one of the parents, both of the parents, or none of the parents.
“If we look at cross-breeds, it is possible to determine thresholds and the behavioural characteristics that this dog exhibits based on how the dog behaves and responds to stimuli, but it takes a pretty decent behaviourist to be able to determine that safely without putting anyone at risk.”
She concluded that cross-breeding may on the one hand reduce the expression of dangerous characteristics such as low arousal thresholds, but it may also increase the risk for the unpredictability of what characteristics were present.
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