The Retriever, Dog, & Wildlife Blog

The internet is a place where people go to fight with strangers.

And because one can make one’s online identity virtually anonymous, one suddenly realizes that one has license to be as crazy and vindictive as possible.

The people who do this as a hobby are known as trolls, but even accounting for those people, the internet is still a decent place to have a discussion about issues that one normally wouldn’t discuss with others.

But there are some debates that I find tedious.

One that wears me out is the debate about which predator will best another in a hypothetical fight to the death. People even make Youtube videos about this crap, where they post things like clips of Sir David Attenborough claiming that Amur tigers eat brown bears or footage of a crocodile eating a bull shark (albeit a small one).

In that same vein, another debate that wears me out is the old golden retriever vs. Labrador debate.

I shouldn’t dignify this schism by calling it a “debate.”

It’s really a game of one-upmanship that involves people bringing up anecdotes and other good examples of what might be called confirmation bias.

Each camp will bring up bits and pieces of information that make their case:  golden retrievers win more obedience titles than Labradors; more Labradors are guide dogs than golden retrievers.

And then we’d get anecdotes.

If I were to make my case, I’d say that I have lived with golden retrievers that have figured out how to open doors, get tennis balls thrown when a person passes a lawn mower over it, and find missing Christmas money and an errant beanie baby.

I would say that most of the Labs I’ve known have been big lunkers of dogs that remind me more of Jethro Bodine or Homer Simpson that the dogs celebrated in duck blinds and guide dog schools throughout the country.

But that’s because the golden retrievers I’ve known have all come from working lines or were partially derived from them.

The Labs were all giant pet line dogs, most of which had no interest in retrieving or swimming.

The truth is there is no way one can make any of these claims rationally.

Both of these breeds are derived from the same stock, and both were essentially developed in their current form in the United Kingdom. They also have been heavily interbred throughout their development. They really aren’t distinct “taxa” as people might assume. Golden retrievers have a well-known outcross to a yellow Labrador, and it is well-accepted that golden retrievers were crossed into yellow Labrador lines to lengthen the coat.

Labradors in the US have undergone selective breeding for our kind of retriever trial, which, of course, means they are superior at winning this kind of trial.

But both of these breeds are capable of doing what they were bred for.

Golden retrievers are just much less likely to have been bred for it.

But a golden retriever that’s been bred for it is going to best a Labrador that has not.

And to make things even more complicated, both of these breeds are so common that it is really foolish to make broad, sweeping statements about either.

There are so many of these dogs that exist in so many different lines that have experienced so many different kinds of selection pressures that you simply cannot make generalizations about them.

Except for two:  golden retrievers tend to be a softer, more sensitive breed than Labradors, and Labradors tend to mature faster than golden retrievers.

Tendency is not the same as an absolute.

And when you ask people questions about what the best breed is you’re not going to get anything useful.

You’re going to get people who look at it from their own perspectives and experiences, which includes biases based upon anecdote and cultural mores.

You’re much better off meeting a dog as an individual.

And stay the heck away from internet forums and Yahoo! groups.

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