Dog behavior co-varies with height, bodyweight and skull shape

Dogs offer unique opportunities to study correlations between morphology and behavior because skull shapes and body shape are so diverse among breeds. Several studies have shown relationships between canine cephalic index (CI: the ratio of skull width to skull length) and neural architecture. Data o...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2013-12, Vol.8 (12), p.e80529-e80529
Main Authors: McGreevy, Paul D, Georgevsky, Dana, Carrasco, Johanna, Valenzuela, Michael, Duffy, Deborah L, Serpell, James A
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Aggression - physiology
Animal behavior
Animals
Attention
Behavior
Behavior, Animal - physiology
Body Weight - physiology
Brain
Brain research
Cephalometry
Correlation analysis
Defecation
Dogs
Excitability
Fear
Fear - physiology
Female
Females
Genomes
Grooming
Male
Males
Object recognition
Regression coefficients
Skull
Skull - anatomy & histology
Surveys and Questionnaires
Urination
Urine
Veterinary colleges
Veterinary medicine
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Summary:Dogs offer unique opportunities to study correlations between morphology and behavior because skull shapes and body shape are so diverse among breeds. Several studies have shown relationships between canine cephalic index (CI: the ratio of skull width to skull length) and neural architecture. Data on the CI of adult, show-quality dogs (six males and six females) were sourced in Australia along with existing data on the breeds' height, bodyweight and related to data on 36 behavioral traits of companion dogs (n = 8,301) of various common breeds (n = 49) collected internationally using the Canine Behavioral Assessment and Research Questionnaire (C-BARQ). Stepwise backward elimination regressions revealed that, across the breeds, 33 behavioral traits all but one of which are undesirable in companion animals correlated with either height alone (n = 14), bodyweight alone (n = 5), CI alone (n = 3), bodyweight-and-skull shape combined (n = 2), height-and-skull shape combined (n = 3) or height-and-bodyweight combined (n = 6). For example, breed average height showed strongly significant inverse relationships (p
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0080529