The Top Three Most Aggressive Dog Breeds- You’ll Be Surprised!

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101. a good academic article discussing aggression in dogs...

Last edited Mon Feb 4, 2013, 11:18 PM - Edit history (1)

http://www.scribd.com/doc/14810086/Heritability-of-Behavior-in-the-Abnormally-Aggressive-Dog-by-A-Semyonova

Probably everyone understands that all of the dog breeds we have created are a result of our own manipulation of inherited physical traits. Until recently, most of us recognized that much of the behavior of pure bred dogs is also a result of manipulating inheritance: if you want to do sheep trials, you get a border collie; if you get a beagle, he will likely become instantly deaf to your calls if he picks up a scent to track. Once the discussion started about perhaps banning breeds that, as a breed, have a high tendency to attack and kill, everything got confused. People started to dispute the heritability of any kind of behavior in dogs, let alone killing behavior...

You will also not prevent the dog from being what he is genetically predisposed to be. Because the inbred postures and behaviors feel good, fitting the body and brain the dog has been bred with, they are internally motivated and internally rewarded. This means that the behavior is practically impossible to extinguish by manipulating external environmental stimuli. The reward is not in the environment, but in the dog itself! As Coppinger and Coppinger (2001, p. 202) put it, “The dog gets such pleasure out of performing its motor pattern that it keeps looking for places to display it.” Some dogs get stuck in their particular inbred motor pattern. We are all familiar with the golden retriever who just will not come out of the water, the border collie who escapes every afternoon to herd the children at the school playground, and the pointer who gets stuck in his point (sometimes for hours, until the owner finally finds him standing there frozen in the woods – a not uncommon problem during training and competitions)...

The heritability of abnormal aggression in certain breeds of dogs can no longer be denied. We have, first of all, to do with physical conformation. The bodies of these dogs have been selected to be able to execute the killing bite better and more efficiently than other breeds of dogs. These dogs all share a certain physical conformation to the task of killing: the exaggerated jaw muscles, heavy necks and shoulder areas, and body mass that makes defence against an attack much more difficult, often impossible. It remains a fact that if you want a dog who can kill, these are the breeds of choice because they are physically better fit for it than other breeds – no less than the border collie is best fit for herding sheep because of the particular way his body has been shaped by hundreds of years of selective breeding.

But breeders also selected for behavioral conformation. For hundreds of years, they have selected these dogs on the basis of performance for their specific task. To perform well, the pit-fighters had to attack without provocation or warning in a sudden outburst of unbridled aggression and to continue attacking regardless of the responses of the other. The bull- and bear-baiters had to be willing to attack in the absence of species-specific signs that normally provoke aggression, responding to the mere presence of another species, again not stopping in the response to any external stimuli. The dogs used to guard extended farmlands in such countries as France (the Bordeaux) or South Africa (the Boerbull), the slave-chasers (Dogo Argentino, Fila Brasiliero), they were all selected for killing performance at the sight of strangers of another species – thus again a willingness to attack in the absence of the normal signals that provoke aggression in a dog and the unwillingness to stop (sometimes even after the other is long dead).

The bodies and brains of all these breeds have, just like the pointer, the husky, the greyhound and the border collie, been selected so that certain postures and behaviors just simply feel good. These dogs will seek opportunities to execute the behaviors they've been bred for, just simply because the behavior feels good. The behaviors are internally motivated and rewarded, thus the behaviors are not subject to extinction. Learning and socialization do not play a role and will not prevent the behaviors from appearing. The owner of such a dog might hope that learning and socialization could help the behavior to appear only at appropriate moments, however this is unrealistic. It’s also not realistic to pretend that impulsive aggression is not pathological. The environments (the fighting pit, the baited bull, the escaping slave) for which these behaviors were selected as an adaptive response are so extreme that in fact there is no appropriate context for these behaviors in normal life.Functional in the pit or facing the bear, these behaviors must, in all other contexts, be called pathological. In addition, the fact we now know that selection took place for impulsive aggressivity (Peremans 2002) means, by definition, that the behavior will always emerge suddenly and unpredictably, thus always escaping secure control by the owner of such a dog.