Quote:
Originally Posted by cuppacoffee  Hi Jason,
I just had one thought here coming at it from the opposite perspective. We HAVE trained/bred some instincts into dogs, so why couldn't we train/bred instincts out of dogs? Coming to mind: herding, hunting, retrieving, tunneling (or whatever you call what terriers do) . These are things that some breeds of dog do instinctively (in a broad generalization)
Thoughts?
Kate |
We haven't actually bred those behaviours "into" dogs, they are all aspects of normal wild canid behaviour, what we have done by selective breeding is hone those instincts and adjust them (for example, herding involves all aspects of stalking and chasing prey EXCEPT for killing). There was a show on PBS just this weekend about precisely this. We can certainly breed instincts out to at least some extent, there are MANY dog breeds which have almost no wild dog instincts whatsoever, because they have been selectively bred to not have them.
There is a famous study done on foxes (see
here for info) which showed that it takes VERY few generations of selectively breeding for certain traits to end up with a very large majority of the study population having those traits. And this was just in 40 years, not 15,000.