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(NPR)Labrador retrievers fetch, border collies herd, huskies howl: It's conventional wisdom that many dog breeds act in certain ways because they've been bred to do so over the course of many generations.
But a new study to be published Friday in the journal Science finds that though some dog behaviors are indeed associated with particular breeds, breed plays less of a role overall than that conventional wisdom holds.
"We found things like German shorthaired pointers were slightly more likely to point, or golden retrievers were slightly more likely to retrieve, or huskies more likely to howl, than the general dog population," says Kathryn Lord, a researcher at the UMass Chan Medical School and an author of the study.
Researchers surveyed the owners of more than 18,000 dogs and analyzed the DNA of about 2,100 animals to see if physical traits and behaviors can be correlated with dog breeds.
