Breed Traits, Excuse or Blueprint?

Breed traits seem to have become a con­ve­nient excuse for lazy train­ing. Have you ever heard “because he’s a Bea­gle, they just do that” or “Gold­ens are sup­posed to be friendly” etc? I hear rea­sons why this breed does that and that breed does this. But so what?

I am not say­ing breeds don’t have com­mon char­ac­ter­is­tics because they do. I’m say­ing I hate it when there is no train­ing done and no effort what­so­ever is put forth, and results are expected or demanded. Well here’s a news flash; the entire soul of train­ing is to manip­u­late behavior.

Let’s pre­tend you get a dog “known for” being friendly. And just because he is “sup­posed to” be laid back and good natured, you don’t social­ize and just assume he’ll “sup­posed to.” Guess what? You will not only deprive crit­i­cal social­iza­tion puppy expe­ri­ences, you won’t teach any­thing about the world. (Remem­ber train­ing is teach­ing and dogs are always learn­ing.) So even though Breed X is “sup­posed to” be friendly, it is very real to cre­ate quite the oppo­site by lack of train­ing. I have also seen Breed X being forced to put up with far too much because they are “sup­posed to” be so tol­er­ant. It’s not fair, and I have seen too many Breed X dogs “turn bad” because they were con­stantly thrown into sit­u­a­tions they didn’t like.

On the flip side. Let’s pre­tend you get Breed Y who is “known for” being aloof and more reac­tive. How dumb is it to not take that infor­ma­tion by the horns and start train­ing asap? If the blue­prints are right there say­ing, in a big fat ugly way “these can be poten­tial prob­lems” why ignore that? I actu­ally read about (name­less breed) on (name­less res­cue site), and I quote: “is rather inde­pen­dent and much like a cat will usu­ally not come to you when called.” To which I say what a huge insult not only to the breed, but to cats as well. Sorry, but I call BS.

So I ask you, what do you focus on? Are breed traits restric­tions or blue­prints for training?