Humans have taken the mighty wolf and turned it into the pug, a dog so malformed it struggles to breathe. That, of course, is not our only attempt at playing God with dogs. We crossbreed and create new kinds of dogs all the time, and every once in a while we try to do it on a mass scale.
The BBC recently ran a feature on one such large-scale attempt: scientists in Maine in the 1940s built a huge facility to create a kind of “super-dog,” an experiment that went quite terribly, though thankfully fell short of devolving into an Island of Doctor Monroe-style disaster.
After World War II, according to the BBC, a eugenics-obsessed Rockefeller Foundation director named Alan Gregg put up a ton of money, which today would equal about $9 million, for a 13-year project called the “School For Dogs.” That sounds like a fun Disney-produced family film from 2007, but it was actually a bit more nefarious.
The idea was to subject over 500 puppies of varying species to a series of maze runs and intelligence tests to prove that dog smarts are purely genetic, and then use that to breed some kind of hyper-intelligent super dog.
More Than 500 Puppies Were Part of a ‘Super-Dog’ Experiment. Here’s What Happened.
The research team, led by John Paul Scott and John Fuller, quickly found a rather funny universal truth: no single dog breed is smarter than any other. Yes, some breeds excel at specific tasks, but overall they found that trying to find one dog breed that was definitively, cumulatively smarter than any other was a waste of time.
The result of all this was a series of experiments that intended to prove eugenics right, but instead proved that eugenics is in itself a stupid pursuit that will not lead to the creation of any kind of master race, dog or otherwise, and it did that by proving that social species thrive on a mix of diverse personalities rather than a single genetically engineered master race.
When the dream of building the genetically superior super dog fell apart, the researchers pivoted to even darker experiments, like raising puppies in total isolation behind eight-foot fences to study attachment styles, which led to discovering that puppies deprived of human contact between four and 12 weeks turned into unmanageable a**holes.
The Rockefeller Foundation pulled its funding when the higher-ups realized they weren’t going to get an ingenious dog from it. The facility was eventually shut down in 1958.
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