Abstract
Human-directed play behaviour is a distinct behavioural feature of domestic dogs. But the role that artificial selection for contemporary dog breeds has played for human-directed play behaviour remains elusive. Here, we investigate how human-directed play behaviour has evolved in relation to the selection for different functions, considering processes of shared ancestry and gene flow among the different breeds. We use the American Kennel Club (AKC) breed group categorization to reflect the major functional differences and combine this with observational data on human-directed play behaviour for over 132 breeds across 89 352 individuals from the Swedish Dog Mentality Assessment project. Our analyses demonstrate that ancestor dogs already showed intermediate levels of human-directed play behaviour, levels that are shared with several modern breed types. Herding and Sporting breeds display higher levels of human-directed play behaviour, statistically distinguishable from Non-sporting and Toy breeds. Our results suggest that human-directed play behaviour played a role in the early domestication of dogs and that subsequent artificial selection for function has been important for contemporary variation in a behavioural phenotype mediating the social bond with humans.
Highlights
Play behaviour is a near-ubiquitous aspect of sub-adult behaviour in mammals (e.g. [1])
For the comparison of human-directed play behaviour scores across the American Kennel Club (AKC) groups, we compared the posterior distribution of human-directed play behaviour separately in each functional group as calculated from the appropriate phylogenetic mixed model summarized in table 1
This comparison revealed that the Herding (3.51) and Sporting (3.71) Groups had the highest levels of human-directed play behaviour and that these were significantly different from the Non-sporting and Toy Groups
Summary
Play behaviour is a near-ubiquitous aspect of sub-adult behaviour in mammals (e.g. [1]). It has been suggested that human-directed play behaviour was important during dog domestication and dog breeding in general, and that selection for playful individuals may have played an important role in the artificial selection regime that the domestic dog has gone through in the past few hundred years [9]. This could have been important in working breeds, where accentuated human-directed play behaviour may have been an important training tool that strengthened the social bond between for instance a hunter and its hunting dog All analyses are based on an analytical approach that controls for effects of shared ancestry and gene flow among the different breeds [15]
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