realistically i COULD look this up, so absolutely no pressure to answer, but i like the way you talk about dog breeding. so. how the hell do you breed dogs for personality traits.
can you really just find some calm, friendly dogs and their puppies will be calm and friendly too? that doesn’t feel like it would work, but people do it all the time so it probably does.
like what. yeah i get you can breed them for color and shape and any other physical traits. but personality? how?
I'm sure you were expecting this answer, but: it's s complicated! If you do look it up, which I think you should bc there's some really interesting info out there, the term used when discussing this is typically "temperament," rather than "personality," but there's been a lot of research and discussion into the heritability of temperament and other factors that influence it!
Genetics are absolutely a factor. Its much more complex than finding two friendly dogs; firstly some people aren't looking for "friendly" (some are, but plenty of folks want a dog that's loving with people it knows and aloof or indifferent to strangers,) so firstly you have to think about what "good temperament" means to you! I try to frame this as "dog that is well suited to exist under the conditions it will be expected to live in & deal with the expectations placed upon it in a way that isn't detrimental to the dog or the other people and animals around it." Like, I'm breeding for something specific and someone breeding anatolian shepherds to be herd guardians would be breeding something MUCH different! The dogs who are themselves being bred exhibiting the desired traits is obviously good, but it's important to also have information about those dogs' relatives, both horizontal and vertical (which is a term referring to pedigrees/family trees: vertical means the dogs they're descended from, and horizontal means their siblings and half siblings etc,) because temperament traits can be present in a family without necessarily being displayed by any given individual. An example for this is that I'm going to be prepping the Glimmergrubs owners to know what to expect if any of their puppies display reactivity to other animals on walks during adolescence despite the fact that neither Skippy nor Glimmer do or did this, bc they both have relatives who have struggled with that as younger dogs, and so I know there is a chance it might pop up in their offspring, particularly under certain circumstances! And that's where raising comes in, too, which I'll talk about in a second.
An underdiscussed component of temperament in puppies is epigenetics, which you can and should look up bc I'm not a scientist, but broadly in this context I'm talking about things like "the nutrition and stress or lack thereof that a mother dog undergoes during pregnancy can have a big impact on the puppies," which is also something that is true of people! This is one of the ways that generational trauma perpetuates itself in human populations, bc the stress our parents undergo actually can have an impact on our developing nervous and immune systems. The same is true of dogs, and there's some interesting studies about this (and many other things) available in layman's terms on the Functional Dog Collaborative website!
The other part of temperament that we have some control over as breeders is in the raising of the puppies. Also as with humans, the conditions a baby dog experiences during crucial developmental periods of its life will impact its temperament and behavior in adulthood. There's a lot of consideration that thoughtful breeders give to the impact that different kinds of raising can have -- in general, we want to be able to gently introduce SAFE stress that the puppies are able to feel supported while navigating, so that they can learn early on that problem solving and stressful situations aren't necessarily a huge scary emergency. This doesn't mean being overprotective or doing everything for them; on the contrary, a lot of the time it involves simply being present as a safe and supportive presence while the puppies figure things like "how to navigate different spaces and surfaces while my little legs are developing" out, and providing support after things like introductions to new places and concepts that might be experienced as especially overwhelming or stressful (...like, puppy aftercare...)
You'll probably hear people talk about "socialization" in this context, and that's definitely part of this, but it's not the whole picture. Introducing them to new things is important, but what is MOST important is making sure they feel safe and supported during those introductions! When they're introduced to a whole lot of things WITHOUT any thought being given to whether they feel supported or overwhelmed, that's typically referred to as "flooding," and it's not good for puppies. We want them to be able to generalize "this is new and weird, but I can trust my person to make sure I won't be hurt by it and I can afford to approach it with curiosity," even if we aren't able to introduce them to ABSOLUTELY every single thing they might encounter later in life. This also involves doing things in such a way that optimism is formed/encouraged, by which I largely mean "the ability to see adverse events as aberrations that don't necessarily indicate that the world at large is an unsafe place." I talked about this some with Fantine, bc she was a shockingly optimistic dog for a random stray pittie in the sense that her trust in us was not damaged by small stressors or mildly negative incidents like taking her to the vet etc. Resilience is something we really really want to build into our puppies. This has elements of both nature and nurture, and while we don't fully understand exactly how either of those things shake down in terms of future behavior, we can certainly stack the deck in our favor by looking carefully at the behavior of related dogs and by being very thoughtful about puppy raising and informed about the various developmental stages contained within the 8-12 weeks that a breeder typically has the puppies for. Socialization and thoughtful raising continue after the puppy goes home, obviously, and experiences in that time can definitely have a huge impact on a dog. But the first 8-12 weeks can absolutely be quite crucial for installing certain software on a puppy, if that makes sense -- there's many different approaches to this and the most well known is probably Puppy Culture, which you can read about on their website. Apsara and Mandala both do things a little bit differently, and there's also a few other programs such as Avidog, but all of these approaches tend to be building on one another and tailored by each breeder as they gain experience using the techniques and observing the outcomes.
I hope this helps and I definitely recommend looking more into it yourself, the heritability of temperament is a very interesting subject and there is a ton to learn about!
