The Relevance of Breed when Choosing a Dog - National Canine Research Council

Is "Breed" Relevant?

A look at how much breed really matters to creating positive relationships between dogs and people.

Breed identification is often used to help people choose a dog who aligns with their hopes and expectations. However, science suggests that breed is a poor predictor of a dog's behavior and personality.

The Relevance of Breed in Choosing a Companion Dog

Here are key points to consider:

Most dogs in the U.S. are not purebred, so you cannot determine their ancestry by looking at them.
Research has not shown that a dog’s personality has much correlation with breed.
Specific behaviors associated with breeds are weakly related, if at all, to desirable qualities in pet dogs.
Relying on breed identification for choosing a pet or determining dangerous-dog designations should be abandoned.
Dog professionals should transition to alternative ways of describing individual dogs, based on the individual dog’s behavior and on their appearance, if this is important to the adopter.
The dog guardian’s choices about how they live with a dog shape the dog's behavior.
Public policy decisions and standards should be based on the actual behavior of both the individual dog and its human guardian.

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One goal is to help adopters choose a dog who is likely to satisfy that adopter’s hopes regarding daily life with a canine companion. In organizations with the human resources to do it, this often means talking with that potential adopter to try to unpack what those hopes really are and suggest individual dogs who may fit well into that picture of the adopter’s daily life.

Janis Bradley

The Relavance of Breed when Choosing a Companion Dog

Meet the Author

Janis Bradley

Janis, the Director of Communications and Research for National Canine Research Council, holds a B.A. in Philosophy and a Masters in English. She first pursued a career as a college teacher, counselor, and administrator. Leaving academia, she then took up professionally her passion for the human-canine relationship. From 2000 through 2009, Janis trained more than 400 professional pet dog trainers.

Janis has co-author of the articles: “No better than flipping a coin: Reconsidering canine behavior evaluations in animal shelters” , “Who is minding the bibliography? Daisy chaining, dropped leads, and other bad behavior using examples from the dog bite literature,” and “Defaming Rover: Error-Based Latent Rhetoric in the Medical Literature on Dog Bites”. She is also the author of Dogs Bite, But Balloons and Slippers are More Dangerous (James and Kenneth), the complete guide to research on dog bites; Dog Bites: Problems and Solutions (Animals and Society Institute).. All of this comes from an abiding interest in finding the very best information about the remarkable relationship between dogs and people.