After World War II, a group of scientists established a "dog school" in Maine, a massive facility that created a "super dog." But things did not go as planned.
Humans have been somewhat obsessed with dogs for thousands of years. But in the late 1940s, a huge experiment took this obsession to a level that no one had ever known before, and that has never been repeated since.
Dogs have been humans' best friends for 11,000 years
The results helped close one of the darkest chapters in the history of science.
The experiment was revealed in a huge facility specially built on a farm in the American state of Maine, and included the study of more than 500 puppies over a period of 13 years, of the Cocker Spaniel, Beagle, Shetland sheepdog, Basenji, and rough-haired Fox Terrier dogs.
From birth, each puppy's development has been recorded in meticulous and comprehensive detail: its first startle response, its first attempt at solid food, its first playfight with a sibling, and the first time it wags its tail. When the puppies were five weeks old, they began undergoing a series of tests that measured everything from intelligence and dominance to emotional response and readiness for training.
“When a litter of puppies were born, I knew exactly where I would be every day for the next twelve months,” John Fuller, one of the lead researchers, wrote in 1985.
The researchers sought to answer a set of questions. Are some dog breeds smarter than others? Do different breeds have different personalities? How important is parental care for dogs? What happens if you disrupt a puppy's normal development? Is it possible to raise a super-intelligent “super dog”?
From decoding dog genes to discovering the best way to socialize puppies, the results of this massive experiment changed our understanding of dogs forever and dealt a final blow to eugenics.
A huge project to study dogs
World War II had just ended, and a golden age of science had begun in the United States, with large sums of money being poured into research. Scientists were free to think up huge projects, and huge sums of money were allocated without asking many questions.
The “School of Dogs” study - as it was affectionately called - was among the beneficiaries, receiving $632,000 in funding, the equivalent of nearly $9 million today, an unimaginable amount for a similar project today.
By that time, eugenics, the idea that selective breeding could achieve genetic superiority among humans, had been discredited and was considered inappropriate and unethical for study in mainstream scientific circles because of its role in Nazi atrocities during the Holocaust, and as a result of the post-war focus on human rights. However, a number of prominent academics remained fascinated by the eugenics agenda. They remained convinced that genes were the main driver of behavior, and that careful breeding could produce a species that was supposedly better than humans.
Among them was Alan Gregg, then director of the Rockefeller Foundation's Department of Medical Sciences, responsible for allocating the foundation's private charitable funds. Greg was interested in modernizing psychiatry and understanding the root causes of unwanted behaviors. He believed that "delinquents, mentally ill criminals, the emotionally unstable, and psychopathic personalities" could all be explained by bad genes. (In fact, the question of the extent to which our genes determine our personalities and actions is much more complex than that.)
What Greg saw as wasteful spending on education particularly concerned him. He wrote in a 1945 letter that a better understanding of genetics would lead to the realization that man "can make as much intellectual gain from judicious mating as from $800,000 high schools." (The Rockefeller Foundation did not respond to a BBC request for comment on this article.)
At the time, most genetic studies were done on fruit flies or rats, but Greg came up with a new idea. What if researchers tried to breed a highly intelligent dog, a creature that can only capture the public's imagination, to support his idea that intelligence is mostly hereditary? Greg was willing to provide the necessary funds for this hypothetical “super dog.”
The mission to create a super dog
Dogs have long been an interesting question for geneticists: How can breeds differ so much in their appearance? Can a Great Dane and a Pomeranian really belong to the same species?
Their enormous diversity is one reason why dogs are considered ideal subjects for genetic testing: a creature with this much diversity in appearance should exhibit a wide range of cognitive abilities and personality traits as well.
Fuller, the physiologist, and John Paul Scott, the animal behavior geneticist who led the project, were also fascinated by this question. But the results of the dog study quickly deviated from the goals pursued by its funder.
The Rockefeller Foundation hoped that certain breeds would exhibit greater cognitive abilities. Accordingly, the dogs underwent a range of intelligence tests, such as maze tests in which they had to find food within a branching structure, and learning tests in which they were faced with the same problem repeatedly to see if their performance improved.
Instead, it turned out that, although certain strains excelled in some tests, no strain excelled in all of them. Ultimately, the researchers concluded that one breed cannot be said to be “smarter” than another.
At the level of character, there seemed to be some differences between the breeds. Fox Terriers showed a greater capacity for violence, as they were ultimately bred to be hunting dogs, although the context influenced this to a great extent. “The same breed may be fearful in one situation and confident in another,” Scott and Fuller wrote in 1965. “The Basenji dogs were afraid of strange situations, but they were not afraid of other dogs at all.”
Overall, Scott and Fuller saw their findings as a refutation of eugenicists' notions of "super dogs" that could be produced through superior breeding. This result had important implications for humans as well. “Since the time of the Greeks... people have dreamed of superhuman or heroic figures who combine the physical strength of a gorilla, the intelligence of Einstein, the musical talent of Beethoven, and the beauty of a Greek god,” they wrote.
The evidence from their study revealed why this is impossible. In social animals, different traits are distributed among group members innately.
Let's take a trait like boldness. While courage may help some dogs, and humans as well, confront danger, a more fearful dog may help raise the alarm in the first place. A successful social group needs to cover all possibilities.
Scott and Fuller concluded that “superhumanity does not exist as an individual, but as a well-developed human community.”
Attachment styles in dogs
Ultimately, rather than aiming to create a plucky superdog, Scott and Fuller began to be interested in how a puppy's early experiences affected his later adult dog. At the time, Freud's theories of child development were widely popular, while John Bowlby was working on his influential ideas about attachment styles, which posited that the care a child received influenced his or her future emotional life.
Scott and Fuller began thinking about attachment in the dogs in their care. What would happen if puppies were raised in isolation? How will this affect its growth? In this new experiment, which would not be accepted by researchers today, the puppies were raised individually in large, open-air fields surrounded by eight-foot-high fences, and food and water were provided to them through these fences, so that they did not see humans or other dogs.
By varying how long pups stay alone, Scott and Fuller discovered that there appears to be a “critical period” extending from four to 12 weeks of age: if an isolated pup interacts with a person or dog during this period, it can be socialized normally.
But Scott told oral historian Susan Mertens in 1986: “If you don't allow them to form bonds at this point, you're never going to have a very satisfactory dog. Without any contact with humans...the dogs were turning into little wild animals by the age of 14 or 15 weeks.”
Around 1958, the study of the “dog school” began to gradually stop. The Rockefeller Foundation had refused to renew its funding after it became clear that no super dogs would emerge from the facility's gates. The dogs were distributed to laboratories in the United States and Europe. A decade later, the boom years that characterized the golden age of science in the United States were over.
Huge experience
To this day, researchers remain impressed by the scale and ambition of Scott and Fuller's efforts. “This went on for years, involving hundreds of dogs,” says Clive Wynn, director of the Collaborative Canine Science Laboratory at Arizona State University. “They had acres of facilities and dozens of employees. This is what we call big science.”
But Wynn says some of Scott and Fuller's experiments would not be acceptable today. Raising puppies in complete isolation would likely be considered too cruel to be repeated, especially since the untamable “wild” puppies that resulted from this experiment were eventually culled. “Nowadays, if you're going to study people's dogs, you better not do to their dog something you wouldn't do to their child,” he says.
However, there are some larger projects. For example, the Puppy Kindergarten at Duke University tested and trained 101 puppies to see if researchers could predict which puppies would succeed as guide dogs. “No one had been ambitious or reckless enough to do a Scott and Fuller-style experiment until we came along,” Woods says with a laugh.
So far, her work has identified traits that are important for success, such as self-control, memory, and how well puppies are able to read social cues. But it agrees with Scott and Fuller's assertion that no breed can be conclusively said to be "smarter" than another. “This finding really held up,” she says.
