Personality traits in competition dogs : a quantitative genetic study on competition dogs

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between performance and personality in three working dog breeds. The breeds that were chosen were the German Shepherd, the Belgian Shepherd Malinois and the Dutch Shepherd (Short haired). Pedigree data included pedigrees from 28536 dogs, out of those dogs 26 572 dogs also had personality test data and 1714 of those dogs had IPO results. The relationship between success in IPO and the five personality traits Playfulness, Curiosity/Fearlessness, Chase-proneness, Sociability and Aggressiveness was analysed using a linear model. Questionnaire data from a modified C-BARQ about everyday behaviour was also collected for analysis. The relationship between fifteen personality and temperament traits from the C-BARQ and main activity and breed was also analysed using a GLM model. The results showed a relationship between Playfulness and Curiosity/Fearlessness for success in IPO1 and between Playfulness and success in IPO 3. Heritabilities for the five personality traits were also estimated and ranged between 0.11-0.61. The results indicate that more studies are needed to find more factors that are involved and it needs to be investigated if Heritabilities of performance in competition can be estimated based on competition results.