Abstract
Domestication is hypothesized to drive correlated responses in animal morphology, physiology and behaviour, a phenomenon known as the domestication syndrome. However, we currently lack quantitative confirmation that suites of behaviours are correlated during domestication. Here we evaluate the strength and direction of behavioural correlations among key prosocial (sociability, playfulness) and reactive (fearfulness, aggression) behaviours implicated in the domestication syndrome in 76,158 dogs representing 78 registered breeds. Consistent with the domestication syndrome hypothesis, behavioural correlations within prosocial and reactive categories demonstrated the expected direction-specificity across dogs. However, correlational strength varied between dog breeds representing early (ancient) and late (modern) stages of domestication, with ancient breeds exhibiting exaggerated correlations compared to modern breeds across prosocial and reactive behaviours. Our results suggest that suites of correlated behaviours have been temporally decoupled during dog domestication and that recent shifts in selection pressures in modern dog breeds affect the expression of domestication-related behaviours independently.
Highlights
Domestication is hypothesized to drive correlated responses in animal morphology, physiology and behaviour, a phenomenon known as the domestication syndrome
We analysed data from the Swedish Kennel Club’s database on 76,158 dogs representing 78 registered dog breeds (7 ancient and 71 modern breeds; Fig. 1a) tested using the Dog Mentality Assessment (DMA) between 1997 and 2013
When we compared the strength of the behavioural correlations based on breed mean values between ancient and modern breeds, we found that ancient breeds had exaggerated direction-specific correlation values significantly more frequently than did modern breeds (14 of the 17 correlations were exaggerate in a direction-specific manner in ancient breeds; Exact binomial test, p = 0.01, Supplementary Table 5)
Summary
Domestication is hypothesized to drive correlated responses in animal morphology, physiology and behaviour, a phenomenon known as the domestication syndrome. Work on foxes[7,13] and other domesticated animals (e.g. rats[24], guinea pigs16) has demonstrated that selection for tame and/or against aggressive behaviours leads to reduced stress responses and correlated responses in the physiological parameters controlling neurotransmitters associated with reductions in fear and aggression[40] Together, these observations across domesticated animals have led to the general prediction that behaviours within prosocial and reactive categories will be positively co-expressed, while behaviours across prosocial and reactive categories will be negatively co-expressed[7,13,14,16,40,41]. Our results broadly support the predictions of the domestications syndrome hypothesis, but suggest that the extensive, recent breeding efforts applied to modern breeds has decoupled the covariance between prosocial and reactive behaviours in modern dog breeds
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