Science

To preface, I owned rottweilers, but I would never trust a pit bull. "That's anecdotal" yes it is. I'm staying the hell away from those fuckers. I don't know if it's genetic, or that pit bull owners are just fucked in the head, or can't take care of dogs responsibly, or something else entirely, but a fact is that most deathly incidents happen with pit bulls.

Awesome, I guess I can just own a husky in my apartment just like a chihuahua and not worry about it, because its breed characteristics of being high energy and needing physical exercise (even compared to similar sized dogs) were just make believe! I guess retrievers being gentle, shiba inus being willful, and pitbulls having strong latching tendencies is all just a collective delusion.

Dog breed characteristics are absolutely real, and even considering them comparable to human genetic behaviors is basically doing race science believers' work for them. "Behaviors" among humans are completely different than an instinct driven animal like a dog, which is why evopsych and race science shit are trash science.

Looking at the actual study, the problems that cause the obviously bogus result are:

• They are going by survey responses. I can't even start to explain how this does nothing except aggregate beliefs. Who is gonna be like "oh yeah my sweet baby pitbull Cupcakes is extremely aggressive to other dogs and children and exhibits strong latching instinct!"
• Dangerous dog breeds often attack instinctually in ways that are completely different than their socialized nature. If you say your dog has never done something, that's not the same as saying the dog doesn't have a tendency towards it.
• They had to further muddle the data by trying to highlight a linear correspondence between breed DNA and reliability of that behavior. That's not how DNA works. For example, Corgi visual phenotypes are fairly dominant so breeding them with anything else will be guaranteed to look more like a Corgi. If you assume behavior is determined by DNA, the same idea applies.

If you want to insultingly compare this to human eugenic atrocities, then try going over to eastern Europe and do a survey of 20,000 people on what behaviors they've observed from different groups of people. Let me know how great the survey approach turns out there.

I think where this more likely applies is how every dog breed has a laundry list of ultraspecific behavioral tendencies that really tend to be nonsense in the same way wine tasting notes are often silly. They're way too specific and determined by limited subjective experience and bias. But you can absolutely identify broad characteristics among breeds.

The research did find some genes associated with traits like human sociability and howling frequency.

Oh cool, that last part was the only even slight counter-argument I have. There's a youtube channel I like that's just a dog groomer grooming dogs, and the most reliable thing to expect is that if she's grooming a Husky, it'll start howling like mad.

All other dog breed stereotypes being bullshit is something I can easily accept.

:shocked-pikachu: whaaaaaaaaat???

ive always suspected this, its just socially acceptable to be racist about animals who can't punch you in the mouth