• HerbSolo@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    My neighbours had a small hunting terrier when i was a kid, forgot the name of the breed. Fucking asshole dog tried to bite me every time she saw me although i went in and out there every day. Also she killed everything that moved, cats, birds, hedgehogs, …

    Neighbour was a hunter and those fuckers were bred to follow badgers into their sett and kill them. Badgers can be quite nasty themselves so most animals stay away, but not this breed. Only chance the badger has is to kill the dog, even if half of its nose is bitten off, it doesn’t give a shit.

    So I’m a bit sceptical about the whole “aggression is not bred” theory.

    • Jax@sh.itjust.works
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      1 day ago

      Bred for the size, trained for the aggression. I’ve seen typically passive breeds be overly aggressive in exactly the way that the breed is known for not being.

      They’re animals.

      • HerbSolo@lemmy.world
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        17 hours ago

        If you’re suggesting my neighbours trained her to be aggressive - they didn’t - it was their family dog, they did the standard obedience training (sit, stay…) but no protection training. All their other dogs (german shepherds) were friendly.

        • Jax@sh.itjust.works
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          4 hours ago

          Do you know how they treated their dogs? I’m not insinuating anything, I’ve just never dealt with a dog that becomes aggressive and I’ve owned both rotties and pitties.

      • IMongoose@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Have you ever seen a puppy of a working dog? Pointers will point. The training they receive is what to point, not how. Retrievers will retrieve, herders will herd, trackers will track. But when someone suggests that a dog that has been specifically bred to fight and kill, oh, they were just trained that way. No, they have been specifically selected for aggression and prey drive. It is at best naive and at worst deadly to think that a working dog comes as a blank slate and will only perform actions it has been trained on.

        • zalgotext@sh.itjust.works
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          1 day ago

          Have you ever seen a puppy of a working dog? Pointers will point. The training they receive is what to point, not how. Retrievers will retrieve, herders will herd, trackers will track.

          That’s not how genetics works my guy. None of those things are heritable traits. Being smart, being trainable, those are traits that puppies can inherit. Being a good tracker isn’t. That’s learned behavior. If you’ve seen puppies pointing, retrieving, herding, or tracking, it’s because they learned it from some other dog, animal, or human.

          • Wilco@lemm.ee
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            15 hours ago

            This is EXACTLY how genetics works. Research the Belyaev’s domestic fox program. It took about 4 generations of choosing the calmest and friendliest to make a domestic fix on par with our domestic dog breeds.

            This is what dog breeding is. Breeding to get a specific dog behaviour was literally 90% of dog breeding … before the weird cosmetic trend started.

          • acchariya@lemmy.world
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            16 hours ago

            So the owners of retrievers what, subconsciously all train them to retrieve because they knew the breed?

              • IMongoose@lemmy.world
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                23 hours ago

                A bird can naturally know how to build a nest but a dog can’t naturally know how to follow an animal?

                  • IMongoose@lemmy.world
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                    8 hours ago

                    It is comparable.

                    I implore you to look up videos of working dog puppies. Duck hunters don’t get retrievers because they like how they look, they get them because they have been selected over generations on their inherent retrieving drive, which is a natural trait of dogs. You are objectively wrong about these traits not being inheritable. These dogs need to be trained what to retrieve, or what to point, not how to do these things. My sister’s pointer would point piles of shit, she had to train it to point birds.

                    I’m sorry but you are completely wrong about this topic.