The earliest breedsdeveloped as people sought dogs specialised for different purposes:hunting, guarding, pulling, food and companionship.
In other words, starting from a common ancestral stock related to the wolf and making use of instinctive behavioural patterns — such as the predatory sequence described by Raymond and Lorna Coppinger — people gradually selected animals whose characteristics best suited particular goals.
Selection in dogs has been relatively intuitive and remarkably rapid in evolutionary terms. Experiments such as those associated with Belyaev help illustrate how quickly traits can change under selection. The result has been an extraordinary number of breeds and a degree of physical diversity rarely seen within a single domestic species.
It is quite possible that early humans who kept wolf-like animals as sentinels because of their sharp senses, used them for hunting or even as food, also watched them fight or harnessed them to pull loads.But the emotional bond that developed between people and dogs is difficult to compare with our relationship with most other species.
All breeds were, at some point in their origins, crossbreeds, in the sense that different dogs were crossed in order to establish or improve particular traits such as scenting ability, guarding instinct, tractability or working drive.
In a world where myth, advertising and exaggeration can be difficult to separate from fact, functional ability has become the primary criterion for only a minority of breeders.
And fashion begins to dictate breeding.
Years ago in Great Britain, a slogan appeared: “If you do not have sheep, do not get a Border Collie”. It reflected the large number of Border Collies being bought purely as pets and later abandoned because their needs had not been understood. Similar fashions have followed films and famous dogs: 101 Dalmatians, Babe, Max, Rin Tin Tin and many others.
Some breeds have paid a high price for these fashions, including theDobermann, theRottweiler, thePit Bull, theMalinois, among others.
The market creates an image, generates demand and, as a consequence, encourages excessive and poorly controlled production.
Only a limited number of breeders work with the sole objective of genuinely improving a breed. In many cases breeding is an economic activity, and in Spain it has not always been controlled as rigorously as it should be from either a legal or ethical point of view.
Technically, a crossbreed is the offspring of dogs of different breeds, although in everyday language we also use the term for dogs with no clearly identifiable breed background.
With these dogs, except where a cross has been deliberately planned — as with certain working crosses or with recognised inter-variety matings — it can be difficult to predict the characteristics of the adult dog. Within theBelgian Shepherdfamily, for example, or in deliberately produced “Malinois–German Shepherd crosses”, involving aMalinoisand aGerman Shepherd, or in theLabradoodle, a cross between aLabrador Retrieverand aStandard Poodle, predictability is still limited. If choosing a pedigree dog can already involve uncertainty, with mixed ancestry there may be even more variation.
Knowing the parents can be a useful reference.
Two extremely high-energy parents are unlikely to produce consistently calm offspring.
Most modern breeds are themselves the result of earlier crosses, and some current crosses may eventually acquire recognised breed status.
A dog’s temperament is influenced partly by genetics, partly by experience and partly by individualpersonality, but shaping behaviour and providing education are our responsibility. For that purpose, whether a dog is pedigree or crossbred is not the decisive factor.
Ignacio Alarcón
