Florida animal services agency strikes breed labels from kennel cards and website
Evidence has mounted in recent years that guesses as to a dog’s breed or breeds usually do not correspond with breed identification using DNA technology. Different observers, even those engaged in dog-related professions, frequently disagree with each other when looking at the same dog. Animal behavior and ethology studies have demonstrated that we cannot reliably […]
Assumptions about future behavior of shelter dogs seen as food aggressive are unfounded.
Animal shelters may conduct what they describe as behavioral evaluations of the dogs they receive, in order to discover what they presume will be problem behaviors when the dogs are adopted into new homes. Among the behaviors that evaluations are designed to detect are those labeled “food aggression.” The behaviors described by that term include […]
Animal professionals shown to disagree with each other when assigning breed(s) to dogs of unknown parentage.
Summary A survey of more than 900 people in dog-related professions and services showed that they frequently disagreed with each other when making visual breed identifications of the same dog, and that their opinions may or may not have correlated with DNA breed analysis. More than 70% of the study participants reported that now, or […]
How long before we discard visual breed identification? A new survey confirms that even dog experts can’t tell just by looking.
In the 1960’s, John Paul Scott and John L. Fuller showed that mixed breed dogs may bear little or no resemblance to their purebred ancestors.[i] In 2009, Dr. Victoria Voith and colleagues from Western University published a short report indicating a low agreement between the identification of breeds of dogs by adoption agencies and DNA […]
Maryland Court of Appeals’ Decision Unfairly Burdens Dog Owners, Landlords, and Shelters
The recent Maryland Court of Appeals decision in Tracey v Solesky modifies the common law in Maryland regarding liability for bites attributed to dogs the Court alternately referred to as “pit bull”, “pit bull mix” or “cross‐bred pit bull mix”. The decision establishes a strict liability standard for persons who own, harbor or control “pit bull,” “pit bull […]