Choosing breeding dogs based on breed-specific behaviours

Breed-specific behaviours aren't truly unique; they exist in all dogs. What's breed-specific is that dogs within a particular breed display certain behaviours more often than others. How do you estimate if a behaviour will be inherited, and how do you select breeding stock?

Traits

Defining traits is difficult, and evaluating them as a breeder is a challenging task. A trait is often a collection of behaviours that, together, make up a dog's characteristic. A trait also sometimes requires training through the right environment and conditions. At the very least, traits depend as much on environment as on genetics. What you, as a breeder, are breeding for are the conditions for traits to develop. In your breeding selections, you provide the opportunity for behaviours to develop, but it's the environment and conditions that make the behaviours actually appear.

These hidden traits are called predisposed behaviours, or latent behaviours. Through breeding, the dog has more or less the conditions to learn to perform them. If an individual isn't given the opportunity to perform them, or is perhaps punished for the very behaviours for which genetics has created all the conditions, a good hunting or herding dog, for example, can never develop.

Breed-specific behaviours

If we have a dog that always herds cars, bicycles, the neighbour's children, and dog friends, we have an individual that's triggered very easily to exhibit herding behaviour.

The example above shows an individual that has a high frequency and low trigger level for exhibiting a baiting behaviour/trait. In breeding, frequency is important in combination with the low trigger level. It's useful to look at both how often an individual performs a behaviour and how easily the individual is triggered to do it. For an individual that both performs the behaviour frequently and is easily triggered to do so, you could say they have many predisposed behaviours that can then be trained and conditioned in their puppy buyers. If the individual is also paired with another individual showing the same frequency and being easily triggered, then we can presumably see these behaviours in their offspring too.

Therefore, if we breed an individual that doesn't show the behaviour very often and also requires very clear triggers – for example, a sheep right in front of its nose to herd – it will be difficult to train the offspring. In other words, the conditions for the future litter of puppies are very poor.