A new study has identified that there is a direct relationship between a dog's personality, how long it lives, and how much food it eats .
Through the domestication of dogs, humans inadvertently initiated an experiment in artificial personality selection. Dog caregivers chose individuals based on both their appearance and their behavioral traits (activity, aggressiveness, and docility, among others) in order to tailor each breed to perform a specific task. But simultaneously they were also choosing traits of metabolism and longevity , a study from Sherbrooke University (Canada) has shown. Thus, for example, the most obedient races live longer than the disobedient ones. And the most aggressive ones have a higher energy expenditure, which leads them to be more "gluttonous", as the researchers revealed in the journal American Naturalist .
The authors conclude that personality traits are linked to many key aspects of an animal's life, such as energy requirements, growth speed, age at which they reproduce or life expectancy . And this could help us to understand the evolutionary causes and consequences of the different character traits of an individual, also in human beings.
