In a wonderfully upbeat episode of Minute Earth, narrator Kate Yoshida explains how dogs were first categorized into specific breed groups such as sporting, working and herding and how scientists have since discovered that while different breeds in each of group might have a shared set of skills, they demonstrated more in common with breeds in other groups.
In one study in Sweden, researchers ran more than 13,000 dogs of 31 different breeds through a course full of sounds, surprises, and random humans attempting to snuggle. They found that levels of playfulness, curiosity, sociability, and aggression did not differ among breed groups. Even weirder, it turned out that golden retrievers are more similar to Rottweilers than they are to their fellow sporting dogs, and Boxers are more like Labs than they are like other working dogs.
