How a 1940s US experiment tried, and failed, to create a 'super dog'

In 1940s Maine, a group of scientists built the School for Dogs, a massive facility to breed a "super-dog". Things didn't go as planned.

Humans have been a little bit obsessed with dogs for millennia. In the late 1940s, though, an enormous experiment took that obsession to a level never seen before or since. 

The findings would help close one of the darkest chapters in scientific history. 

Unfolding at a giant, specially built facility on a farm in Maine, US, it involved studying more than 500 puppies – cocker spaniels, beagles, Shetland sheep dogs, basenjis and wire‐haired fox terriers – over 13 years. 

From birth, each puppy's development was recorded in exhaustive detail: its first startle response, its first attempt at consuming solid food, its first playfight with a sibling, its first tail wag. At five weeks old, the puppies began a battery of tests assessing everything from intelligence and dominance to emotional reactivity and aptitude for training. 

"When a litter of pups was born, I knew exactly where I would be for each day of the next 12 months," wrote one of the lead investigators, John Fuller, in 1985.

The researchers set out to answer a host of questions. Are some dog breeds smarter than others? Do different breeds have different personalities? How important is canine parenting? If you disrupt a puppy's normal development, what happens? And might it be possible to breed a hyper-intelligent "super dog"?

From decoding doggie genetics to discovering the best way to socialise puppies, the findings from this mega experiment would change our understanding of dogs forever – as well as landing a final blow against eugenics.

World War Two had just ended, and a golden age for science in the US was beginning, with sizeable chunks of money funnelled into research. Scientists were free to think big, and large wads of cash were signed over without too many questions.  

The School for Dogs study, as it was affectionately nicknamed, was one of the beneficiaries, awarded funding of $632,000 (£465,000), or close to $9m (£7m) now – an unimaginable sum for an equivalent project today.

By this time, eugenics – the idea that selective breeding could achieve genetic superiority in humans – was discredited and considered inappropriate and unethical for mainstream study due to its role in Nazi atrocities during the Holocaust and the post-war focus on human rights. However, several prominent academics remained in thrall to the eugenicist agenda. They were still convinced that genetics was the main driver of behaviour, and that careful breeding could result in a supposedly better kind of human.

Among them was Alan Gregg, then director of the Rockefeller Foundation's Division of Medical Science and in charge of allocating the organisations' private philanthropic funds. Gregg was interested in modernising psychiatry and understanding the root causes of undesirable behaviours. "Delinquents, the criminal insane, the emotionally unstable, the psychopathic personalities," could all be explained, he believed, by bad genes. (In reality, how much our personalities and actions are determined by our genetics is far more complicated than this.) 

What he viewed as wasted expenditure on education was of particular concern to Gregg. A better understanding of genetics would force a realisation that man has "as much to gain intellectually by wise matings as by $800,000 high schools", he wrote in a 1945 letter. (The Rockefeller Foundation did not reply to the BBC's request for a comment for this piece.)

At that time, most........

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