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Scientists Tried to Breed a ‘Super-Dog.’ It Did Not Go Well.

A 13-year project in Maine sought to breed a ‘super-dog.’ Instead, its findings challenged assumptions about canine intelligence.

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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.

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