Maria Fernanda Ziegler
ANN/THE STAR – Dogs walked every day by their owners are less aggressive. Dogs owned by women bark less at strangers. Heavier dogs tend to be less disobedient. Pugs, Shih Tzus and other short-snouted breeds may be more badly behaved than medium- and long snouted dogs, such as Golden Retrievers.
These are some of the findings of a study conducted by researchers at the University of Sao Paulo (USP) in Brazil. The study sample comprised 665 pet dogs of different breeds as well as mongrels.
An article on the study, published in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science, focussed on the correlations between aggressiveness and morphological, environmental, and social factors in the pet dogs analysed.
According to the authors, aggressiveness was influenced both by physical traits such as weight and skull morphology and by social and environmental factors such as the type of household, the animal’s life history and the owner’s gender and age. The findings confirmed the researchers’ hypothesis that behaviour is not only learned or influenced by genetics but also the result of constant interaction with the environment.
The study was supported by FAPESP via a project to develop an ethological approach to social communication among humans and between humans and animals.
“The results highlight something we’ve been studying for some time: Behaviour emerges from interaction between the animal and its context.
“The environment and the owner-pet relationship, as well as morphology, are all factors that influence how pets interact with us and how we interact with them,” said last author of the article and a professor at the Institute of Psychology (IP-USP) Briseida de Resende.
In the study, conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, the owners of the 665 dogs in the sample completed three online questionnaires on themselves, the characteristics of their pets, the environment they lived in and any aggressive behaviour, such as barking at or attacking strangers.
The questionnaires were produced by researcher at IP-USP Natalia Albuquerque, and Professor at the Federal University of Sao Paulo (UNIFESP) Carine Savalli.
“The owner’s gender was found to be a good predictor of behaviour towards strangers, in that absence of aggressiveness was 73 per cent more frequent among women’s dogs,” said first author of the article Flavio Ayrosa.
The pet’s sex also appears to have influenced aggressiveness.
“The likelihood of aggressive behaviour towards the owner was 40 per cent lower among female dogs than among males,” Ayrosa said.
“Snout length was even more significant: Aggressiveness towards the owner was 79 per cent more likely among brachycephalic than mesocephalic dogs.”
In brachycephalic dogs, the snout is short and the cranium rounded. In mesocephalic breeds, the length and width of the skull are intermediate, and it has a squarish or triangular shape.
The study also found that the heavier the dog, the less likely it was to display aggressiveness towards its owner. The probability of aggressive behaviour was found to decrease three per cent per extra kilogramme of body mass.
The owner-related findings are not cause-and-effect correlations, Ayrosa stressed. “We found relationships, but it’s impossible to say which comes first. In the case of the factor ‘walking the dog’, for example, it may be that people walked their dog less because the animal was aggressive, or the dog may have become aggressive because the owner didn’t take it out enough,” he said.
“Traits such as weight, height, cranial morphology, sex and age influence the interaction between dogs and their environment. They may spend more time inside the home because of them, for example.”
Historically, canine aggressiveness used to be associated solely with breed, but there has been a paradigm shift in the last 10 years, owing to research linking behavioural profiles to factors such as the age and sex of the dog, and its metabolism and hormones.
In Brazil, the study conducted by the group at IP-USP was the first to analyse morphology and behaviour, including aggressiveness, in mongrels, or dogs of undefined breed.
“Researchers have only recently begun to investigate the influence of factors relating to the animal’s morphology, life history and origin (purchased or adopted), as well as characteristics of the owner, as our study did,” Ayrosa said.
