This may be a very odd statement, but researchers have found that just looking at a dog’s head can tell you whether it is a fast runner or not. What’s more, they say that the capacity to recognize this is inborn in all of us.
William Helton, a senior lecturer at the University of Canturbury’s Department of Psychology studied 217 different dogs and came to the realization that the shape of the head says a lot about the rest of the body.
For instance, very fast runners like greyhounds have very narrow and sharp pointed heads, while the slower dogs like the mastiffs had very broad ones. The dogs inbetween these two are the good endurance runners like the huskies.
Helton says that this is because of our evolution. When you want to run fast, there is a trade off in terms of muscle mass with speed. This means that the faster dogs have much lesser body mass and are consequently not as strong as the slower ones.
In the 217 dogs studied in an International Weight Pulling Association event, most of the dogs that were able to pull heavy weights were those that had broad thick skulls. The narrower headed ones were able to pull much less weight than their more broad headed counterparts, even though there were of a similar size.
Helton says that this is true for all animals. Even human beings, he says share such a nature. In a similar study conducted with human beings, it was found that just by looking at the picture of a person’s face, others could guess with a reasonable degree of accuracy how much they would be able to bench press.
Of course there are a number of other factors like environment, nourishment, genetics etc that play a part, but as a general rule of the thumb, this is pretty accurate.