Can dogs be born vicious?
I had someone tell me that they don’t believe any dog can be born vicious. All vicious dogs are made that way by their owners.
Do you agree?
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I think that if you believe dogs can be “born vicious”, then you have to also think that children are capable of being “born vicious” or “born bad”. I don’t.
If you don’t believe the latter can be possible, then why should the former be possible? What would make the difference?
No. I believe dogs and people are born with a certain amount of potential self-control. The way they are raised then determines to what extent said potential is achieved.
“Vicious” is a fairly subjective term. Dogs can be bred for personality traits as well as physical ones. Aggressive tendencies can be reinforced by breeding, as can basic intelligence, speed, etc.
As for children? Yes, they can also be born with aggressive tendencies. If you’ve raised kids you know that they are not “tabula rasa” on which the parents write. Nurture plays a big part, yes, but nature has a lot to do with it, too.
Yes, I agree with that statement. I’ve seen puppies from puppy mills that grew to be vicious, probably from some fear instilled in them at the mill.
@kritiper But then you are saying that their environment made them vicious, not that they were born vicious.
It depends on what you mean by vicious. Any puppy not adequately socialized is likely to be fearful and may bite defensively. And as mentioned above, some breeds have been selectively breed for behavioral characteristics such as protectiveness or prey drive. Uneducated owners may wind up with dogs expressing severe dominance issues. There are also rare occasions n which dogs are born with a mental disorder.
Well, my Dakota is very intelligent and very gentle, but the first two years of her life were spent with a person who worked hard to make her mean and vicious. He failed, totally. That’s when he gave her to us. She learned all her guard dog lessons (think K-9) but there wasn’t a thing he could do to get her to be mean. I suspect there was abuse involved, too.
If Dakota was born at that end of the spectrum can’t another dog be born completely at the other end?
People are born passive, or aggressive, or somewhere in between. It depends on what people do with their status to label them a bad person. Hitler was a bad person.
@dappled_leaves to address your comment ”I think that if you believe dogs can be “born vicious”, then you have to also think that children are capable of being “born vicious” or “born bad”. I don’t.
Both people and dogs can be born with aggressive tendencies. The problem with dogs with aggressive tendencies is they can just be mean. They don’t have many positive outlets for their aggression. They also don’t have the intelligence to analyze their aggression the way humans can.
On the other hand, humans with aggressive tendencies often they channel their aggression in other areas, such as sports, or Wall Street or other competition, and often become successful. Others go to bars, get drunk, and get into fights.
My husband is a pretty aggressive guy and he is a very successful salesman.
@Dutchess_III “Both people and dogs can be born with aggressive tendencies”
Citation?
Viciousness is a self defense/self preservation mechanism I believe all animals/humans are born with as it is what can enhance the odds that species will survive in a survival of the fittest scenario we and they all live in. What is learned and taught is how to NOT devour the creature next to you when things get dicey. I think back of the “hundreds” of confrontations both my sons and my hound dog had in the early days of their lives and it was up to me as the parent to teach and defuse these conflicts and teach both man and beast how to play nice. On the same hand those same instincts to defend oneself can be enhanced and encouraged by not intervening in conflicts and further ingrained to be the only response to conflict by a parent or Alpha male in the animal kingdom.
@dappled_leaves: Do you believe that all animals and humans are born blank and only nurture affects the psychological/personality traits? I know that the jury is still out on which has the greatest influence on a being, but surely you recognize that there are many factors, some genetic, some perhaps hormonal, maybe even nutritional that can affect the temperament of an animal before birth?
There are probably a boatload of articles one can find on the Internet to this effect.
As hunter gatherers we’d have to be aggressive to go kill things for food.
Same with dogs.
We’re all born with it. Some are more aggressive than others. In nature, those more aggressive males are the ones that win the females.
I believe that any mammal, dogs and humans included, can be born with personality disorders that will almost certainly manifest as ‘viciousness’ eventually. I’ve personally seen certain dogs and cats born of the same litter and raised in the same environment that were just ‘mean’.
To a certain degree, this could also come from having in internal problem that caused them a lofof pain early in life, bet even then, they were born destined to be mean barring diagnosis and medical treatment.
I think they can be born vicious. They have done studies in people regarding anger genes, and there does seem to be an anger gene.
It’s got to be possible. Take a big enough population and there has to be some animals on each end of the spectrum. They’re upbringing probably has more influence on it, but just given the nature of gene pools it can occur.
No. Any other answer is speculations. I’ve never seen a puppy or kitten at 6–8 weeks of age that weren’t just cute little fluffers, sweet and playful. Dogs are bred by people. They didn’t come out of nature by chance or evolution. You can not equate human evolution with dog breeding.
Aggression doesn’t manifest itself right off the bat.
Actually, I saw a documentary where one guy has a theory that the first dogs bred themselves. It started when humans started settlements. They had trash dumps. The wolves would come around and scavenge. The wolves that were less aggressive and that allowed humans to get a little closer than other wolves, ones that didn’t run away as quickly, started breeding. They suggested that in less than 100 years a much more domesticated type of wolf was born.
What you have now is only a tiny reflection of first domestication. Look at a Chihuahua. They were never wild roaming in the forests.
If you are arguing that dogs can be born vicious the manifestation would be immediate.
Oh, I agree that every dog today has ancestors who were specifically bred by humans to serve a specific purpose. And I especially hate the “designer” dogs they’re playing around with. I hate how it hurts some of the dogs.
Coyotes are pretty damn vicious! I don’t know if it manifests itself at birth.
In almost any litter of puppies that you can observe, some are more dominant than others, and I have seen some in litters be proactively aggressive by removing littermates from nipples while feeding and taking the spot. It is simply a situational survival circumstance. The more aggressive pup gets more nutrition, gets bigger and stronger as a result.
@dappled_leaves Scroll back up to your previous question (stated after my initial response)about what I said about vicious dogs. I meant precisely what you assumed I meant.
@Dutchess_III Coyotes are wild animals. They are vicious because they have to be, and circumstances dictate that they must be that way to survive. The law of the wild :“Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten.”
Right @kritiper. But when we breed dogs specifically for their aggressive tendencies, and their physical abilities, aren’t we throwing them back into the wild?
@Dutchess_III Sure but that doesn’t mean they will continue to be vicious after being raised by kind loving compassionate humans. There would be exceptions, but they would still be less vicious than completely wild, untamed animals.
The question was about born vicious. not whose fault it is how breeds came about, or how they will/might change. Are some dogs born vicious? Yes. So are some cats. When I was very young, a friend had a cat which had a litter in the barn, and they were giving away the kittens at weening time. We took a look. There were about seven kittens rolling around, playing. There was one yellow striped kitten by itself, picking a fight with a tractor. I started toward it. It turned in mid air, and came down hissing. It hissed and spit so hard its little body jumped off the ground. I chose that one, and named it Spitfire. That little sucker grew huge, and stayed mean, though he tolerated human contact, eventually. He liked me. He never stopped being ready to kill anything that would come within three feet of where he was eating. He killed scores of birds. We didn’t get visited by any salesmen during his life. All three of our dogs were afraid of him.
Some animals just take their first breath with an attitude.
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