Abstract
Without a doubt, the scientific interest in dogs has grown tremendously. Previously, dogs were considered “artificial” animals and of little interest to biologists studying the causes of behavior. However, things have changed, partly due to parallel developments of thoughts and research efforts in ethology, genetics, and evolutionary biology. Many researchers have realized that if scientific questions are asked in the right way, the biological study of dogs could provide valuable (and even generalizable) answers. These new insights have put dogs in the forefront of biology, and this is particularly the case for medical and behavioral genetics.
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Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Judit Vas, Krisztina Héjjas, Zsolt Rónai, Eszter Szántai, Zsófia Nemoda, Anna Székely, Éva Kereszturi, Gabriella Kolmann, Borbála Turcsán, and Ildikó Brúder for their help in collecting and evaluating the data. Michele Wan had valuable comments on a previous version of this manuscript. The research described here was supported by the European Union (NEST 012787, LIREC-215554), the Bolyai Foundation of the HAS for E.K. and the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (T048576 and PD48495).
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Kubinyi, E., Sasvári-Székely, M., Miklósi, Á. (2011). “Genetics and the Social Behavior of the Dog” Revisited: Searching for Genes Relating to Personality in Dogs. In: Inoue-Murayama, M., Kawamura, S., Weiss, A. (eds) From Genes to Animal Behavior. Primatology Monographs. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-53892-9_12
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