is this an “old wives tale” (for lack of a better term atm) that turned out to be true? i swear my parents used this as a reason to get a mutt for me as a kid in the 90s..
today’s pure breed dogs are sometimes sad to see..
Working dogs were bred, historically, for character traits. Breeders didn’t care if the parents were one breed or another. It was about getting the desired size, intelligence, disposition for a job.
We've been breeders for at least 10s of thousands of years, not just with dogs, but endless work animals, livestock, plants.
Empirically one can go a long way, into understanding that inbreeding is bad, that diversity is good. I wouldn't be surprised to see Greek, or Sumerian texts on breeding...
Amazingly this isn’t true. You would think selective would have been invented by the Greeks or Romans, someone, but the first evidence of long run sustained breeding programmes for a desired trait using careful record keeping was during the British Agricultural Revolution of the 1700s. For more detail read the link https://gwern.net/review/bakewell
today’s pure breed dogs are sometimes sad to see..