Welcome to the Individual Animal, a podcast about dogs, people, and animal sheltering. I'm your animal sheltering. I'm your host, Nikki, here with my co -host, Bernice Clifford. How you doing today, Bernice? I'm doing great, Nikki, how are you doing? I'm good. We're just coming off of a really fun interview with Jessica Heckman. We got to talk to her about the functional dog collaborative that she's a part of and also one of the most groundbreaking studies that she was a part of.
So that was a, I thought it was a really good conversation. I thought it was a great conversation. She's one of those people that I feel like we'll have her again, right? Because there was so much more that could be talked about and But I think that we were off to a good start with the conversation we had. I agree. I agree. So if you have any questions from this interview, let us know and maybe when next time Jessica's on we'll be able to ask them then.
If you're not familiar with Jessica Heckman, she graduated from Tufts Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine with a joint DVM MS degree in 2012. Her master's work was on stress and hospitalized dogs. She completed a specialty internship in veterinary shelter medicine at the University of Florida's Maddie's Shelter Medicine Program in 2013. She studied for her PhD at the University of Illinois investigating in dynamics of two lines of foxes, one bred for tamedness and one bred for aggression.
that work that they did was really, really interesting as well. I'm assuming some of you are familiar with it, they're listening. After receiving her PhD in 2017, she went on to work for the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, studying the genomics of behaviors in pets and working dogs as part of the Darwin's Arc Project and the Working Dog Project. Jessica also teaches online and in person seminars.
on biology of she is passionate about supporting ethical breeding and changing the conversation around what makes a reputable breeder. And she founded the functional dog collaborative in 2020, which we're going to talk about today. She lives in Raymond, New Hampshire with her husband and her two dogs. So that is Jessica's very lengthy history. She's done a lot of really great things and we're super appreciative that she took the time to talk to us today. And we hope you enjoy the Yeah.
So the way I like to think about the functional dog collaborative, which I I'll just be calling the FDC for short, is that we currently have a pretty broken system in North America generally for producing dogs. And I'd like to talk about North America rather than other first world countries, because I don't have as much of a experience with them. But I think what I'm going to say pretty much applies to a lot of other.
first world countries as well, which is, you know, we have a specific narrative for sort of where dogs come from and how to get a dog that will fit well into your house and how to do so responsibly. And yet we are producing a massive percentage of the dogs that are being made in this country are coming out of large scale.
commercial kennel based breeding operations, which a lot of people would refer to as puppy mills and or some other percentage, large percentage are coming out of, you know, people's homes, which is a great start, but people who are maybe not as engaged with understanding all the levels of health testing and socialization and thoughtful mate matches that really are important in producing dogs that are going to fit well into, you know,
Whatever their job may be, but I think for our purposes, we're pretty much talking about companion dogs. The FTC is also interested in sports dogs and working dogs, but for this podcast, we can focus on dogs who are good companions. so what I'm not saying is that we need to have more breeders. We do not need to have more breeders. We clearly have plenty of dogs being created right now.
What I think, I hope everyone could get behind is that I'd like to really move that needle where right now, if you look at the spectrum, And let's say on one end of the spectrum are the large scale kennel based operations. Let's say at the very farthest end of the spectrum are the ones that are, you know, where the dogs are basically like living in filth and receiving no medical care. And we all know that those are horrible and need to be gotten rid of.
And you start moving the needle up, you come to the large scale organizations that are actually quite clean and giving the dogs as good enrichment as they can. And those are a lot better, but to my mind, still not a great place to create a dog. And that was a lot of.
what we were talking about in that Tampa Bay interview, when we talked about like, yeah, you can go look at them and gosh, they're actually better than a lot of shelters, but they're still not where I want dogs to be born and raised. As you keep moving the needle up, you're sort of looking at these home -based breeders who maybe aren't doing everything they should be doing.
And then you get up to what we would, you know, different people have different definitions for what a responsible breeder is, but someone who's doing... You know, all the appropriate health testing and, and picking the, you choosing the parents really carefully and socializing the puppies exquisitely. And then also being really careful about when they go home, making really good matches so that the puppies are in a place where they're set up to succeed.
So right now that, that far end is very, a very small percentage of how dogs are being created. And I would like to, again, not have there be more breeders, but just move that needle so that. more of the breeders that already are out there are operating at that level. And my belief is that the dogs who are ending up in shelters are coming from one end of the spectrum much more than the other end of the spectrum.
The easiest way to say this is that part of being a highly responsible breeder is that you take your dogs back, your puppies back for any reason, be it the dog's fault, be it the human's fault, be it nobody's fault, you take them back. if they can't stay in their current home and you either keep them or find a new home for them, which by definition means they're not ending up in shelters. So moving that needle is absolutely good for shelters. I think it's also really good for dogs.
I think it's also really good for people who want to live with dogs. And there's a lot of people out there who are ending up with dogs who are not fitting into their homes all that well. And I'm hearing that from dog trainers and behavior consultants repeatedly that there's just... a real crisis out there of having difficulty of finding a dog who's going to fit well into your house. And I have absolutely experienced that myself with a dog who I lost recently.
So that is what the mission of the Functional Dog Collaborative is in my mind. There are sort of add -on parts of that of addressing things. Again, I feel like for our purposes, talking about behavior and fitting well into a home is super important. There's also a lot of health issues with how we breed dogs. And so we address that as well. From the point of view of this podcast, maybe that's not quite as much what you want to talk about, but I'm happy to, if you want me to.
I mean, think health issues are important because I mean, I, my own experience and I know better. I adopted a dog with a lot of health issues who died at like four years old and it's very expensive. And most people can't do that. So I think health issues are very important. Yeah, for sure. So yeah. And so there's, right. So there's the health testing question, which we talk about a lot of encouraging people to do more health testing.
But then even when you get into that high, that far end of the scale who will call responsible and again, responsible is defined by different people in different ways. But I think the sort of collective understanding of responsible generally has been breeding purebred dogs and. proving them in some way through shows or sports or something like that. And then the ones that are not appropriate for whatever your goals are, are the ones who end up in pet homes.
And we're seeing more and more problems in purebred dogs due to the fact that we've been breeding them with closed gene pools for several hundred years now. And, you know, I can list any number of things off the top of my head. Some of them are things that we didn't do on purpose, like 70 % of golden retrievers will die of cancer. that's horrible and not anything that we did on purpose.
But then we also have the extreme morphologies where there are dogs who are having difficulty moving freely or breathing. And that's a very, and I won't say that every dog in that breed is like that, but that for particular breeds, the risk is extremely high, much higher than it should be. And that is something that we did do on purpose, but maybe sort of haven't really grappled with what the consequences are. of that.
And so that's the other part of the FDC's mission is to try to support people in moving away from breeding dogs. I one of the great things I think for sheltering that you talked about on that podcast is where are the dogs coming from? They're not coming from the shelter. So I thought that was a really great way to look at it to really understand what you guys are doing and why it's so important for people in shelters.
I think there was a big misconception at one point where they thought it was about breeding shelter dogs, which I don't think is what you're saying either. In shelters, anyway. But I thought that was a really great way to look at it is find out where the dogs are coming from so that when they are coming into the shelters, those organizations or those folks breeding the dogs have the resources available breed healthy sound dogs. Yeah, thank you.
So, right, and you know, when we talk about dogs coming from shelters, I think part of that narrative comes from some number of decades ago when there were a lot more unintentional litters than there are today, and that it wasn't all that uncommon for someone to have an unintentional litter and then to just say, when it's time to find homes for them, if I'm having any trouble finding homes for them, I can just take them to the local shelter.
And that was a more acceptable way of of managing your dogs. Right. And the push for spay neuter has been incredibly widely accepted. This is definitely a place where North America is different from Europe. But also in Europe, they're they're also getting really good at not having dogs reproduce unintentionally. And so it's much more rare now that we have these unintentional litters.
And at least in many parts of the country, it's much more common for an unintentional litter to be able to be placed directly without going through the shelter. So it's less and less true that a shelter is a good place to go to get a puppy. And I think that was true at one point, that you could go to a shelter and find a puppy and that it would be just from a couple of pet dogs who got together. And...
It is less and less true that the types of dogs that people may be looking for are available in shelters, and certainly that looking for a puppy in a shelter, particularly in certain parts of the country can be very challenging. So where are they coming from and how are the adults ending up in shelters and what are the various problems? And there's some research about where dogs come from, but it doesn't have the data that we really want.
Um, I think I know I've said elsewhere, but I'll say again here that the Alliance for Contraception in Cats and Dogs, ACC and D is doing a study and I, I don't know if I've been on a podcast yet since it's been funded, but the study is now fully funded. So they're moving forward with, forward with analysis where they're collecting data from Banfield veterinary hospitals.
for people who come in with dogs in their first year of life and asking them where the dog has come from and then asking various other questions, you know, so being able to say, where did you get the dog from? What breed is it? What, you know, what are, are there any health issues as it presents now? Are there any behavior issues as it presents now? That is obviously just one slice of dog dump, the slice that goes to Banfield, but I think it's going to be.
a very interesting first step in figuring out where dogs come from. I personally am really curious to ask how many were bought online and how many were bought in communities. Because that I think is still sort of this open question of those large scale commercial kennels are less and less often selling through pet stores. It turns out pet stores, it was very easy, right? In the past to say, just don't go to a pet store. You could identify what a pet store was pretty easily.
but they're selling much more often online. And so you can just go find the picture of your puppy and click a button and have it shipped to you. So that's very hard for people sometimes to ascertain. Am I working with a large scale commercial breeding operation or am I working with a small scale in home breeding operation? Because the pictures can look very similar. So is that what's happening? Are people buying dogs online that way? Or are they more often going to people in their community?
Like when I was buying dog food the other day and there was a piece of paper stuck to the door saying that there were AKC registered golden retriever puppies available in my town and I could go buy one if I wanted to. Is that where people are getting their dogs more often? I don't know which is more common. And there's different approaches to the problem based on which is more common.
week and somebody was saying how now those larger warehouse type facilities are using adopt instead of buy in order to sort of yes, yeah. So it gets tricky. Yeah, it's all very murky, right? I mean, then there's like the definition of shelter versus rescue group is becoming murky.
And there's questions of, even the question of shelter versus pet store becomes murky when, you know, when pet stores, you know, particularly I think with cats, but sometimes with dogs where there's the shelter can have shelter animals available for adoption through a store. And the person acquiring the animal may not understand that that's a shelter animal.
Um, but then there's also the flip side of that is, you know, understanding, well, you know, I'm going to go to a rescue rather than a shelter. And some rescues are going and purchasing dogs to make available through rescue. Right. And that's this whole like, well, they're purchasing dogs that are being sold at auction, coming out of breeding facilities. But. you know, is that rescue and do people really understand where the dog's coming from? And I'm not answering any of those questions here.
Those are really hard questions, but I'm just trying to make the point that it's all super murky, right? Like where does the dog come from? It's we don't have the bins that we used to have. And that makes it much harder to say just go to a shelter. And if you can't find what you want in a shelter, then go to a responsible breeder. Done. Like that was, I feel like that was easier pre -internet and pre -COVID. And it's getting harder and harder now. understand how to navigate all this.
at FDC to move that needle a little bit more towards the home side of things? So we're doing a lot of talking. So we have the podcast and the, and a sort of associated Facebook group. And those are for the dog nerds. So those are for people who are breeding. So one of the things that we really want to do is support people who are breeding in ways that we agree with. And so we're trying to provide that support. So provide a lot of, of nerdy, but Hey, it's kind of fun.
People who are listening to this, I do encourage you to check out the podcast cause it's fun. It's. It's interview style. So I interview experts and then people, um, you, so you would sort of get some information to help you think through how my, you know, is, is how I'm breeding the really the best way I could be, or there's some other things I could try.
There's the Facebook group, which is a great place for people to make connections and to also, um, as a community have this conversation about, you know, well, what would you do in this situation or what would you do in that situation? And that is, um, hopefully it was meant to be, and I hope that it is. place for people to come together who are breeding in more out of the box ways to be able to connect with each other and support each other.
And that didn't really exist before for people who didn't have like a breed club or something like that. On the other end, my dogs come to say hello, so they just got back from their walk.
On the other end of things, the non -dog nerd things, we have social media feeds on Instagram and TikTok where we are trying to reach the people who are, you know, perhaps not breeders and, uh, but love dogs and are interested in thinking about dogs and to try to talk through some of these issues of where dogs come from and, you know, how can we look at the narrative again and maybe think some things through differently.
The really crucial thing that I spend most of my time trying to figure out is we really want a data platform for breeders to put. Obviously pedigree information, that's just the basic information that has to be there. But then health testing information, genetic testing information, going forward behavior, like owner surveys about behavior.
Going forward from there, we would love to have a way for owners and the breeders and the owners of other puppies in the litters to all connect and share health information. And as a way, and that would also be a way of supporting people who were breeding in ways that we really agree with, that we really think that, you know, they're sort of doing everything that, that we say is the way we'd like.
I don't, I'm trying not to say doing it all right, because there's lots of different rights, but, um, having a trusted place for people who are interested in this style of breeding to go. So I think, you know, I think that is going to be a hundred percent. The crucial part of really seeing change. I think just talking about it is, is not sufficient. Shockingly, it turns out to be hard to fund. So we do have a data platform, which is very close to the sort of bare bones of what we want.
And there's many more features that we'd add on in the future. Developers are expensive and there's not an obvious route for funding. We don't want to go down the for -profit path. Cause I've seen other groups do something similar to this, but when you go down the for -profit path, it really becomes. Um, that, you know, you're struggling with what's your goal is my goal, the mission, or is my goal bringing in money.
And even if you want your goal to be the mission, the investors have a right to ask you to make money. So, um, we're struggling to find ways to keep it for profit, but finding grants is challenging because animal welfare organizations are hesitant to work with anything that's about breeding and organizations that are, you know, about more about breeding dogs are hesitant to work with. a group that's trying to change the narrative.
And so we're still figuring that part out, but a group of us are moving it forward sort of by main force. And so I continue to hope that that will be available in the future. And then we do have a couple of breeding cooperatives. We have the companion dog project with its associated companion dog registry, and we have the co -pilot breeding cooperative. And so those are groups of breeders.
within a cooperative organization or a project organization that sets goals to say, you know, if you're going to be part of this group, then you're going to need to meet these goals for health testing and breeding dogs in ways that, you know, socialization practices, breeding dogs in ways that they're getting their best possible start in life. Those are, again, a crucial part of everything. They need to be much bigger in order to actually make change, but as an initial start they are fantastic.
if I'm sheltered, I want to find like a list of breeders that I can recommend to somebody. Is that something that you guys have available? So that is what the data platform needs to be. So people, that is a question that people always ask.
And, um, you know, we tried to put together sort of a directory and unsurprisingly, what happens if you just have someone come and like sign something that says, Oh yes, I breathe the way, you know, why are you going to, it's on our website, by the way, we have these guidelines of like, you know, should we be reading healthy dogs defined this way and behaviorally resilient dogs to find this way. And so it's very easy for someone to come and say, yes, I do that. Mm -hmm.
may or may not believe that they do that. But without having data from their breeding program, I can't say that they do that. And so I don't want to stand behind a group and say, yes, I recommend them and I'll send people here without having some way of validating that they're actually doing what they say that they're doing. So for something that's super trustworthy, that is what the data platform needs to be. So, which probably gives you a bit more of a vision of why it's so important.
We do have a sister project called the Puppy Seekers Project, which you can find on Facebook and I highly recommend them. They are a group of people who are looking for puppies and of people who run the group who are very good at helping people in their puppy search. Um, including volunteers who are breeders themselves to help people in their puppy search.
They are less about providing lists of breeders, although going in there, you will find like, you know, just going in there and saying, Hey, I'm looking for XYZ. There will be other people who can help recommend something, but they are very good at helping you. You know, once you found a breeder helping you figure out, is this a breeder I'm comfortable with? Um, cause that's the really hard part. Finding a breeder is not hard.
deciding whether it's a breeder you actually want to get a puppy from is extremely challenging. So this group, I highly recommend this group as a place to go to do that. So if I were a shelter and someone were to come in saying, I'm looking for a puppy. And I were to say, well, we don't have any puppies or we don't have any small breed puppies. And the person says, okay, well, I'll just go buy something online then. I would recommend the puppy seekers group and say, go talk to this group.
You can find whatever you want online, but then go talk to the group before you actually click buy. and they can help people figure out what their options are and what they actually want to do. I I would prefer, you know, everybody adopt a dog from a shelter, but also everybody should have the dog that they're looking for and they want and works for their house.
So if you are an organization or shelter or rescue, I think it's important to have those resources to send people to the place that's not, you know, a puppy mill type place and not make that relationship with that with that person. For sure. Yeah. And I think that's really important to recognize, right?
Is that if someone comes in looking for a small dog, because they actually need a small dog in their life and a shelter is full of large dogs, which is a pretty typical presentation of a shelter, a secret interaction, sort of saying to someone, well, you know, we don't have one now, but keep coming back. I'm sure we'll have one sometime in the next two years. It does push people. to buying from the types of producers that we don't want to push people to.
And this is part of why the system is so broken. And we say, well, I support you going to a responsible breeder. Go find a responsible breeder. So finding one is really hard. And when you do find one, the waiting list may be two years. So when I talk about moving that needle, that's what I mean is that even if I had that list for you, I can almost guarantee that you'd go and get on a waiting list and it would be six months at the absolute minimum, maybe more like two years.
Um, and the average person, how long are they willing to wait? And I don't, I don't judge them for that. Like I have, I have two dogs right now. One of them is, um, I mean, she is going to live for several more decades for sure, but she's 14 and she has cancer. So just in case that it turns out to be a problem, I am thinking about. You know, well, when I lose her and I'm down to one dog, you know, how long am I willing to wait? Since I really like having two dogs in my house.
And if you're someone who only lives with one dog at a time and you lose that dog, how long are you willing to have an empty house? And should we ask someone to wait for two years? You know, if it's the right time in someone's life, when I got my, um, the only dog I ever got as a puppy, I got him when I was writing my thesis, my PhD thesis. So I knew that I was going to have six months at home writing the thesis. It's a great time for me to get a puppy.
And I got him when one dog died and my spot opened up. Well, I didn't have two years to wait. I had a great, a great spot there for raising a puppy. And I, it was important to me to get one in fairly short order. So I understand that people have those needs. And if we don't have a way to provide enough dogs, cause we do have a shortage of dogs raised really well. And if we continue to have that shortage, people are going to continue to support people raising dogs the other way.
And then those people are going to keep, you know, they're getting money for it. So they're going to keep doing it. So that's the cycle that we're stuck in. you should be making it very easy for people to adopt your dogs, making those adoption matches, of course.
But just in my experience, you know, I mean, this is, you know, 15 years ago at this point, having filled out dozens and dozens of applications, a roommate of mine for shelters and making it so hard to get a dog from the shelter, not hearing back, going through all these loopholes. she ended up going down to who knows where and got a dog in two seconds.
So being able to, you know, not being able to wait on those waiting lists for certain dogs, but also if you're, you know, have a dog that, you know, you might want to adopt from a shelter, shelters should be making that process super easy for them so they don't have to wait or jump through loopholes. 100%. So again, there's not data on this. So I'm just going to just say upfront, this is anecdotal.
But my experience has been that while shelters are starting to embrace what's called open adoptions, which is sort of more what you're talking about, trusting people more and not insisting on the six foot fence or what have you. Um, rescues, anecdotally, many of them are still having the five page form and the home visit and the waiting the month for the home visit. And then the fence is not too high and you have an intact dog in the home. Um, or, or whatnot.
Um, and the, the number of people that I've talked to who said things to me, like, you know, well, I'm a veterinary technician and I couldn't adopt a dog for rescue, you know? Um, It's so that's that is certainly a major problem and something that I think is yeah something that is definitely part of of the system that needs to be addressed. Anything else on the functional dog collaborative that you want to talk about?
Okay. So I want to get in a little bit to the favorite study that I love to reference, but I'm always like, am I getting this correct? Because it is a very comprehensive study that you worked on. And we'll link to it in the show notes as well as in the NCRC summary of it. But I'm... I have, I've Yeah, my husband keeps telling me that I should...
It's poorly named because we think it means one thing and scientifically it means something very, very, very specific, but we use it commonly to mean something more general. So my husband keeps saying when you're teaching it, you should just tell them it's called like watermelon or make up a word or something like that. And then once they understand it, then you're allowed to tell them what the word is. So I would say, I don't like to say people are using it wrong.
I'd say people are using it in one way, because a word can mean different things in different situations, right? So when you're talking about it from a scientific perspective, there is a particular calculation that you run. And it's the result of that calculation that is the heritability. And I'll talk more about what that is. And then when we use it, I don't even know anymore what people mean when they use it.
in the sort of more general speaking, because I have been working with it and teaching it for so long. And I think probably different people mean different things by it. And it's a lot like talking about a responsible breeder. Like you think you know what it means or domestication is another one. Like define domestication, define responsible breeder. And then, you know, I know what it is. I can I know it is when I see it. So I think a lot of people think they know what it means.
And if you ask them to define it, they'd be like, oh, that's actually harder than I thought to define it. So. I'm happy to talk about the strict definition of it, but I did a, I don't know if she's released it yet, but I did a interview with Sarah Streming on Cogdog Radio recently about heritability. Oh no, it wasn't on her podcast. Sorry. It was on her, her private Patreon. So that's probably why you guys haven't seen it.
And I realized midway through sort of what was the more useful way of explaining it. So it's really about selective breeding is the easiest way to explain it. So if you can make progress on some trait selectively breeding for it, then it's heritable. If you can't make progress selectively breeding for it, perhaps you would be easier to change it by changing the environment. or perhaps it's impossible to change in the population that you're working with, then it's not heritable.
So giving you some examples, my new favorite example is the trait of a human being who has one head. We all have one head. Could you selectively breed humans to have two heads? Hey, could you selectively breed dogs to have two heads? How would you do that? You would not be able to do it, right? It's not possible. Is that because... Genetics are not involved. No, genetics are absolutely involved in the fact that you have one head. But it's not heritable because you can't breathe for it, right?
Color and Labrador Retrievers, highly heritable. If you had a population of labs, so for probably everybody knows that labs come in three colors, black, chocolate and yellow. If you had a population of labs in all three colors and you wanted to breathe them so that you only had black labs, given enough time, you could do it, right? Selectively breeding, you just keep breeding the black ones to each other and not breed the others. So that's highly heritable. You'd have no problems with it.
So those are sort of two far ends of the example. So it gets interesting when we talk about behavior. and behaviors somewhere in the middle, right? So one of the findings from the paper that you're talking about was about human sociability. So how human sociable, how interested in being around humans are dogs? Is that something that you can affect by selective breeding? And a really good way of looking at that is, is it different in different breeds?
So would you say that, for example, golden retrievers are more interested in being around humans, even ones that they've never met before, compared to, say, German shepherds? Would you say that's true? You don't know. I think most people who are comfortable with Goldens and German shepherds would say that the typical Golden wants to come up to you and crawl into your lap. And the typical German shepherd is sort of like, yep, pleased to meet you. I'm with my mom right now.
So, um, so when there's a trait, maybe a better one would be that would be easier to answer. Answer would be Labradors and retrieving. Does the typical Labrador like to retrieve? That's a behavioral trait. You say yes. Um, So when you see these traits being different in different populations, so in the case of dogs in different breeds, if the trait is different in different breeds, it's pretty straightforward to say that we got there by selection, therefore it's heritable.
Is this making some sense so far? Yes. So given that what the study looked into was sort of, was how heritable these different traits are in the population of dogs that we had, which were, you know, dogs with owners who had their sort of relationship with their dogs where they wanted to answer 200 questions about them on the internet. This is a very specific population of owners. But. So in the case of behavior, you can sort of say, you know, where is it? Is it like the single head thing?
Or is it like the coat collar thing? In behavior, it's always in between those two things. It's never one or the other. But sometimes with behavior, it's so close to the head thing that it's like, it's not even worth trying to selectively breed for. And sometimes it's really close to the coat collar end where you're like, oh yeah, this is pretty easy to selectively breed for.
So we... had some findings in those populations about different traits where we could sort of put them on different ends of the spectrum. For behavior, mostly what we find is that it's a bit closer to the end where it matters more what the environment is. And the thing that I need to say at this point, because now we're starting to get to the point where people want to talk about individual dogs, It's always about populations.
So if you're trying in a population to change a trait, and a good example here is a guide dog school. So guide dog school is trying to train dogs to be a little more comfortable with having the harness put on them, body sensitivity, right? Some dogs don't want to have the harness put on them. They're not going to make a good guide dog. So this is a trait. Is it that you should be breeding the dogs who are really comfortable with having the harnesses put on them?
Or is it that you should change how you're managing the puppies to like be touching their bodies more when they're really little, which is going to be more effective for you. So that's one of the things that heritability can tell you. It can say, oh yeah, that's very heritable, meaning go ahead and focus on the breeding or that's not very heritable. So you may or may not be able to change it, but you may as well try the environment thing, the how you're socializing the puppies.
So I'm going to stop talking and see. of being closer to the head thing or closer to the coat collar thing is super helpful. I think it definitely puts things into a more understandable perspective, at least for me. I had to learn about heritability in grad school three separate times before I really retained it and understood it in a deep way. I mean, I was like midway through my PhD when I, before I was like, oh, okay, okay. I think I've really got it now.
And then since then I've been teaching, I teach this class at Virginia Tech, by the way, it's a, they have an online master's degree, entirely online master's degree for animal welfare and behavior, which I highly recommend. And I teach a class. Yeah, it's, it's a great degree. Yeah. Uh, Lisa Gunter. Yeah. Um, so highly recommended. Um, and I teach the sort of, uh, I call it behavioral biology. So it's like, how does the brain work and how do hormones work? And one week is what is heritability.
And that used to be the hardest week in the class. And I've taught the class like five times now, I think. And so every time I teach it, I like, look at all the questions that people ask. And then I go back and change how I teach it the next time. And this time. For the first time ever, students were more confused by something else than by heritability, which is not that something else got harder. It's that I finally figured out how to teach heritability, I think.
But even so, it's a complicated concept. So even like you'll hear me saying it, and at least I'm getting you closer now, I think, but I feel like you still have to hear it several times before it really sticks. That's okay. then hearing it again, it was click, it's clicking even more. So. study that you did and how if an owner and then you can just. tell me what it said after I tell you what it said probably wrongly.
That when owners knew that they owned a dog of a specific breed, they were more likely to place stereotypical breed behaviors on their dogs. Even though when your statistical analysis that you guys did in the study didn't match those behaviors to the particular breed.
Yeah, so that was one of the big questions that Dr. Eleanor Carlson, who was the lead on that study, that was one of the big questions that she really wanted to ask was, is it true that there are types of behaviors that are typical for different breeds, are breeds separated by behavior? And if... You know, and there are papers out there already that suggested that that is true.
And she said, is that the case that when you ask someone with a purebred dog to describe their dog's behavior, that they do so basically differently based on what their expectations of the dog are. And you can think of that in a lot of different ways. Like it could be that someone thinks their dog is a certain way because, you know, he's a Labrador. So therefore, yes, of course he likes to fetch when come to find out he actually doesn't, but they don't really see that.
Or is it that they're answering it sort of contextually where you ask, you know, is he's a Labrador, is he friendly? Labs are all supposed to be friendly.
And so are they sort of starting from a different zero point maybe than if you ask someone with, um, I hate picking the not friendly breeds because I don't want to piss people off, but I, I do feel that German shepherds, it's, it's not a bad thing, but they're not the like immediately like, Hey, I want to come crawl into your, into your lap type breed there. you know, a little more standoffish. So one of the things that there were two things that were really groundbreaking about this study.
And the first one was that we looked not just at purebreds, but also at mutts, which is something that not a lot of people had done before. And the second thing is that we tied the behavioral questions about individual dogs into the individual dog's genetics. And for technical reasons that hadn't been done before, what people had done before was because getting the genetic information is expensive, sequencing is expensive, or genotyping in that case.
What people would do, previous studies had done, it was they would go find information online about like, what do boxers tend to look like genetically? And then they would go to online databases, typically C -BARC, canine research and behavior questionnaire, a very well known survey tool out of University of Pennsylvania and Dr. James Rappel. So people would typically go get C. bark data and say, what's the average of what all boxers on C. bark tend to behave behave like?
And then what is the genetics that are available on boxers? And then compare that to golden retrievers or German shepherds or, you know, Dobermans or whatever. And so the, what they weren't able to do at that time was to say that this, the genetics of this particular boxer, what is this particular dog's behavior, right? It was these groups. And the assumption was that it was okay to sort of average the behavior of all boxers and assume that they're all similar enough. sorry.
compare them to genetics and the genetics and that you'd find something. And what Eleanor did that was groundbreaking was say, well, first of all, she figured out how to do it in an affordable way to get the genetic information for each dog much more affordably. That's partly because she was very good at figuring those things out and partly also because genetic information gets cheaper and cheaper to get as the technology improves.
So she was able to look at individual dogs behavior and individual dogs genetics for the first time. Plus she included mutts, which also hadn't been done before. So that was huge. And to answer your question, Nikki, in the way she got at answering if, you know, are people answering differently about golden retrievers? And this is also why heritability is important.
is that first we looked at how heritable we expected a particular trait to be, meaning that when you look at a dog that is part golden retriever, and we know that this particular trait is highly heritable, then if that dog is similar or not is fairly similar to golden retrievers, then should it sort of be similar in those traits, because the traits are mostly about genetics.
So we're able to make predictions for if you compare a golden to a dog that's like 20 % golden, how similar should they be behaviorally? And be able to make a correlation. So you'd expect the correlation to look like this. And then we looked at what the correlation actually looked like. You both tilted your head simultaneously. It was adorable. And so what we found, and different ways of interpreting this, what we found is that the correlation was not exactly as predicted, right?
is that indeed people did answer somewhat differently for purebreds than for mutts. So, or not exactly as you would have predicted them to answer for mutts. And so, but it wasn't horribly, it wasn't like completely off. There was some, there was some similarity. So why is that? Is that because people are answering differently because dogs are purebreds and they have expectations? That is definitely a possible answer.
Is it because the environmental differences are different in the different populations? So is it that purebreds tend to come from certain backgrounds and be bought by people who manage them in certain ways, and mutts tend to come from different backgrounds and be owned by people who manage them in different ways? That's also possible, right? That the environmental component is just more different than we expected. And there's a variety of other possibilities as well.
So the answer was, Well, it's not, it's not exactly like it's to me, it wasn't a, um, a very clear cut answer either way. Um, it was sort of, yeah, there, there are differences here. We're not completely sure why, and it's definitely possible that it's that people are answering differently, uh, based on whether they know how much golden is in their dog. Um, I, and I think that there could be more studies done to dig into that more. Um, but nevertheless, it was some really important.
that you guys found in the study, what would you say is your either favorite or like the most important takeaway? Sorry, or you could, that could be two, that could be two parter. I'm Yeah. So, so the, the two things that I've been, the two pieces of information that I've been pushing and I keep debating whether people should actually be making decision, like large scale decisions based on this are two heritability estimates that we found.
So we looked at how heritable a bunch of different things were, but one was human sociability. It was how much the dog really likes to be around people. And then the other one was aggression. And I, we call that agnostic threshold.
And it's, for me, it's sort of like, if the dog is going to be afraid of something or have some sort of issue in its life that it needs to deal with, how likely is it to use aggression to deal with that problem versus something like freezing or running away or something else? And what we found was that human sociability was surprisingly much more heritable than we expected. 68%, so that's zero to a hundred. 68 % is much closer to the coat collar end than you would expect.
And shockingly so, like behavioral heritabilities are normally more in the 10 to 20 or 30 area. And then the aggression was 11. And what the guide dog schools who've been working with heritability for a while and using it to decide, are we going to use genetics? Are we going to use environment to deal with our goals? They say if something's under 15%, it's not worth trying to breed away from it. You should use environment to deal with it.
So if we believe these findings, what they say is that it should be pretty straightforward to breed dogs who really like people. And that as for aggression, it may be that the answer is more about early environment and socialization rather than genetics. So the reason I hesitate to tell people to make really big decisions based on this is particularly because in terms of aggression, we weren't really going out there.
in looking, I'm not sure we have a representative selection of truly aggressive dogs. I think people who had truly aggressive dogs may have felt uncomfortable answering 200 questions about them. A lot of people who have aggressive dogs may not have been the kind of owner who wants to answer questions about their dogs in general. So I'm not sure that that's a representative population, but it still was very interesting to me, even in the population that we had, to say that the number was so low.
Um, and to me, that is evidence, bringing it back to your, your earlier questions about what the FTC does. Um, to me, that's evidence that it's, it actually is really important how we raise puppies. And if we are as a society right now, without having really made the decision, I feel like as a society, we're sort of just saying like, it's okay for dogs to be born and raised in kennels and sold. know, live in a kennel until they're eight weeks.
And to me, if we really want to deal with the issue of aggressive dogs in the home, which is 100 % an important issue, then to me, looking at what the early socialization of dogs is, is really important.
And we know there's other scientific literature that I was not at all part of, but that I'm very, have been very interested in reading that shows, that you know although we all know that you bring the puppy home at eight weeks and then you socialize the hell out of it there's a lot of literature that shows that prior to eight weeks is super important and super formative and even in the in the uterus is important that the mom not be stressed so are we really
focusing on that i'm not sure we are sorry go ahead Oh, okay, okay. I give talks on that, but I haven't done my own research on it. I just have research in the sense of literature review. I've done a fair amount of literature diving on that, but not my own research. But I love reading about it because it's really interesting. good thing to know that human sociability is super heritable, right?
Because that's, I mean, given how we live with dogs nowadays and how we've gone, you know, just in the past 30 years, you know, dogs are in our homes more and, you know. Yep. Right. Yeah. And, and to me, human sociability is pretty important. So I have, um, one of the dogs that I have right now is a dog who was, came into a shelter at age, I think she was supposed to be, I think she was 10 months when she came into a shelter and she had not been socialized at all.
And when I got her at 13 months, she was very, very fearful. And one of the reasons that she's improved so much over the 13 years I've had her has been that, so being afraid of people and liking people are two separate things, it turns out. And she really likes people. She's just afraid of new people. And that means that she really tries to get over her fear. So with her having, I would say she's very human social and that has been a massive tool for me to use.
And she has gone from when I first got her, the first time a stranger came to my house after I got her, she pooped and sat in it. Like she was just so... terrified. I could tell you more stories, but it was rough the first year. And now she's still boo -woo -woo's when people come, but they can, once they toss her food, she has a lab stomach. Once they toss her food, she's like, Oh, okay. And then she like, will immediately start working them for food and being cute. And you can do it here.
And what if I wave my paw? I have my one trick. So she really likes people. And that's, that's just critical. It has, has been. massively helpful to me in helping her overcome. had. Bernice, do you have anything extra? This was super informative. I feel like I have a better grasp on a lot of things now, so I appreciate that. Do you wanna tell everybody where they can find you, where they can listen to your podcast? Yeah, so for the FDC, it's functionalbreeding .org.
And that's the website will take you to the Facebook group and the Instagram feed and the TikTok feed. And we have a library of lay level summaries of scientific articles. There's all kinds of good stuff on the website. And if you are interested in me, you can go to dogzombie .com because I used to go buy the dog zombie before I as a blogger before I came out and started using my real name.
And that has information about things like when I'm teaching another webinar and how to get on my mailing list. You can find out when I'm teaching another webinar and stuff like that. Those are the best places to go. So some of the health stuff I get a little bit a little bit over my head. But the one with the tip, the Bay SPCA was really great. And the one with Lisa was really, really great. And it goes to be good shelter ones for shelter folks to listen to for sure. Yeah. Mm -hmm.
Yeah, that's Lisa Gunter, yeah, where we specifically talked about shelters. Yeah, I think there's a wide variety of types of episodes for sure, so I think it's worth people picking and choosing to figure out what interests them. You definitely can avoid the health stuff. the one I was listening to last night, but I just, I say definitely check them all out. They're really great. Yeah. Excellent. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. And that is sorry. I didn't say that explicitly.
That is the functional breeding podcast, which you can get to from the website, but functional breeding podcast, if you want it to go directly there. Okay. Yeah, thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it.