I have a maltese - small, short, white, and with a short hair cut. He absolutely gravitates towards any small white-ish dog but isn’t remotely breed aware. Any small scruffy white or beige thing will be his bestest friend.
Yes, I think that’s true - in demonstrating symmetry my friend’s dog would hump both anything that moved, and most things that didn’t.
When she was introducing me to salukis, DesertRoomie said that they divide the world’s creatures into two classes, salukis and not-salukis (Their People are honorary salukis). The latter they generally ignore as much as they can. When a litter she’d bred was about five weeks old – at the height of cuteness – the neighbors across the street were visited by their daughter and nine-year-old granddaughter. Figuring they’d like to meet some puppies, I grabbed a pair at random and brought them over.
We had them on the front porch since puppies leak and the cocker spaniel the visitors had brought was intensely interested. He came up wagging what was left of his tail furiously, obviously intent on introducing himself to the pups. They absolutely blew him off. I mean, you could practically hear the dialog.
“What’s that?”
“Looks like a dog.”
“Shall we interact with it?”
“You must be joking. Interact with a dog?”
When she got back from work I told DR how even at five weeks old, the puppies were displaying slauki-tude. “Told ya,” was her smug reply.
Some of this may be learned behavior. My little pit bull Simone was a mouthy pup; sometimes she chewed a bit on other dogs’ legs and they’d move away from her. But dogs with long fur on their legs weren’t much bothered by her little teeth. All her life she was attracted to dogs with long, feathery fur on their legs.
Regarding awareness of their own appearance – our current pit bull, Luna, is fine with all dogs. But she clearly recognizes her own reflection in mirrors and will pose and admire herself. A lot. There’s a mirror she can see from near the front door, and I often have to wait a moment for her to admire herself before I can get her harnessed up.
I know she understands reflections, because if I stand in the reflected image and gesture, she’ll turn around and come to me.
My Chihuahua hates Boston terriers and English bull dogs, he goes ballistic when he sees them. I have heard that Chihuahuas are the only breed that recognize each other but I haven’t seen any evidence of that.
My daughters’ GoldenDoodle (half standard poodle, half Golden Retriever) seems to favor Standard Poodles and other Poodle crosses at the local dog park but I think that is probably based on behavior rather than appearance.
She isn’t breedist in the least and will sniff any ass as well as another based on which one is available and they will do the same to her. I can tell you this though, there is no way she is going to be more than casual friends to a junkyard Rottweiler or Heinz 57 as long as I am around but I don’t think she would see any difference.
She is 90 pounds and terrified of small, aggressive dogs that she could easily destroy with one swipe of her paw but she doesn’t realize that. I think we need to get her some doggie therapy to help her learn to have better body awareness and assertiveness skills.
One more anecdotal vote for Boxers recognizing other Boxers, at least.
We are on our third Boxer and, while they will pay attention to any other dog, either barking at them in warning or trying to go greet them, when seeing another Boxer they were more eager to go up to them and, if contained in a car, were more “frantic” about trying to get out to greet the other Boxer, whimpering if they could not. With other breeds or mixes they might whuff or bark, (or, occasionally, growl), but with Boxers they always gave “greeting” noises.
This behavior could even occur when our dog was in the car (scent unlikely) or when both dogs were in separate cars (scent impossible), so it would seem to have been a visual phenomenon.
My family has also had a mongrelle and a Springer Spaniel and I do not recall the same enthusiasm about meeting up with dogs based on appearance. I have no authoritative citations for breed recognition, but it is interesting that we now have multiple anecdotes about Boxers in this thread.
I would not make a claim that Boxers were unique, but they, at least, certainly seem to have that trait.
Not owning a dog I can’t really comment from any experience, but I wonder how much scent has to play - at least in learning something about what they see in other dogs.
We hear the humans - even with their limited scent capabilities have some gene related scent markers. (Hence claims people prefer partners with a different scent to their own, as a mechanism for increasing diversity in immune system genes in their offspring.)
So, it isn’t unreasonable to imagine that in dogs the highly focussed breeding techniques for the various true breeds has resulted in very breed specific scent markers. It could be that a dog like a Boxer might learn that dogs that look like Boxers have their specific scent - and thus learn to recognise their own kind that way. Scents that are linked with suckling etc might be very deeply programmed. Anyway, a sent of own kind, and scents of other breeds seems possible. A mongrel would be expected to have a random scent, or a mix. Depends on the gene rules I would assume.
To a dog, there is no such thing as a “purebred”. This is because it is a Victorian era human construct with no scientific validity. What there are, are artificially separated inbred populations with a very high degree of homozygosity. We call those populations “breeds”.
I’ve heard a number of times that breeds “recognize their own kind”, but I think some of this may be attributable to memory of their mother and siblings, and quite a bit is a reflection of the excitement their owner toward the other dog.
It also could be similar “energy” or style of social interactivity that they are recognizing.
It is a commonplace (among herding breed owners) that a lot of the true herding breed dogs (Aussies, Border Collies, Heelers) have a distinct antipathy toward Labradors in particular. This is because herding breeds are acutely aware of boundaries, space bubbles, and distinctions, this is part of the innate toolbox they use to control livestock. Needless to say, a normal Labrador never met a boundary in its life. This can be really irritating to herding breeds.
But it has nothing to do with “pure” breeding, just innate behavior associated with a type of dog.
The cutest thing at the dog park yesterday was a full-grown boxer wrestling with a twelve-week old pit puppy. The boxer kept rolling over and letting the puppy tear into him. It was adorable.
At our old dog park, my mutt used to play with a pair of Salukis all the time. Maybe your type of myth is offered by dog breeders to encourage people to buy more than one dog at a time. It also encourages owners to socialize with each other, reinforcing their attachment to the breed. My Corgi owning friend goes to Corgi meetups regularly.
This is a great post and seems really plausible. I disagree a little with the last line. I think dogs may learn to identify and judge dogs based on appearance, like how my dog learned to distrust dogs that look like Aussie shepherds, rather than having any seeming innate dislike. However, I don’t think his dislike has anything to do with whether the targeted dog is a purebred. I think the purebred concept is meaningless to him.
A bit odd here how most are focusing on appearance and sense of smell is getting virtually no mention.
A dog’s sense of smell is orders of magnitude better than a human’s; they have about 50 times as many nasal receptors, with the ability to recognize about 1000 times as many different odours and have a sensitivity that is millions of times higher than ours.
Smell pays a critical part in how dogs recognize other dogs as any dog owner can observe.
So I would WAG that dogs have a good idea (in the sense of instincts, not conscious understanding), based on smell, of how closely related another dog is to itself.
What effect that would have would require further WAGing, I’d guess that for mating purposes they would find unfamiliar scents more attractive, but in other situations could have different or no preference.
Whether a dog is “pure” is not going to be a concept with any relevance (is mapped to any instinct) for a dog.
Our dog is a heeler\beagle mix. Since beagles don’t recognize boundaries, she must be very conflicted.
I wonder about this as well. They clearly respond based on sight of another dog but I suspect smell plays a large part also, we just can’t really quantify it because we are so “odor-blind” compared to the dogs.
I have another anecdote to throw into the ring:
I have retired racing greyhounds. They’re quite capable of barking but tend not to be vocal. When I first adopted one and took her to a greyhound social event where we met around 50 other greyhounds, I was blown away at how they all greeted each other as if they’d known each other all their lives. A brief sniff followed by calmly hanging out together. Subsequently at other events, I noticed they responded to whippets the same way. They are a bit leery of Italian greyhounds, though, likely because of the nervous energy. (Italian greyhounds “iggys” are a toy breed version of a greyhound and have the typical toy nervousness.)
And then I got into rescuing Spanish greyhounds aka Galgos. Helped to bring a few over to the USA for rehoming, and those adopters started bringing their galgos to our greyhound social events. Our greyhounds instantly accepted them into the “pack” - again - as if they’d known each other all their lives. So even these dogs from 1/3 of the way around the world, and with very different upbringings, were recognized still as “like me”. Also, packs of galgos instantly accept a retired racer inserted into their midst.
I’d guess it’s less instinct and more remembering on some level what their mom and littermates smelled and looked like and recognizing that in other similar dogs.
I don’t think this is factual. All breeds are almost completely artificial. A lot of the “prized look” of breeds is just historical happenstance - someone at some point decided that floppy ears were good, or that short noses were good, or that pointy ears were good, and for whatever cultural reason, some combinations were preserved over others, in many cases for not much more reason than the rationale as to why bell bottoms were popular in the '70’s. Run history over again , and while you might see see similar overall characteristics developed for “hunting dogs” vs. “herding dogs” vs. “sled dogs”, the kennel club breeds would not look anything like they do today.
I think the point he was making is that some dogs were bred to work together. The ancient breed of Norwegian Elkhounds work in unison to pull down large elk many times the size of just one dog. Recognizing other dogs of their type may be useful to them, and this could be inbred behavior. I don’t know that it is, I assume while trying to pull down an elk the dogs would appreciate any help they get, but it’s possible that recognizing their own kind is instinctive. I do think that smell and appearance of litter mates is a big factor in dogs preferences for other dogs though.