Talk:British Longhair

"Behavior" section

Here's a great example of what's wrong with so many "Behavior", "Behaviour", "Temperament", "Personality" or "Disposition" sections in articles on domestic animal breeds; this is the full text of that section from British Longhair until I removed most of the garbage and flagged the rest for citations being needed:

According to breeders, British Longhairs are quite calm and easy going. They are fun-loving and playful, particularly as kittens. These cats attach quickly to their owners, with great affection. British Longhairs are good for owners who have to work, because they will enjoy just laying around all day. They are not destructive, and do not need any other animals for company. However, some individuals do enjoy living with another British Longhair that is similar in personality.[1]

This is sourced to a single, tertiary, categorically unreliable blog that doesn't cite its sources. There is no evidence anywhere that this breed is unusually "calm and easy going"; it's an absurd overgeneralization. All cat breeds are "fun-loving and playful, particularly as kittens". All cat breeds "attach quickly to their owners, with great affection". All cat breeds "enjoy just laying around all day" (cats of all breeds spend more than 80% of their lives asleep). There is no breed that does not engage in scratching, territory marking and other behaviors that some would classify as "destructive". Like all of this blather, whether a particular animal desires the company of other animals is an individual trait, and a generalization about this across the entire breed is unsupportable. There is no evidence anywhere of a particular domestic breed of anything able to distinguish much less prefer members of the same breed; this would be quite a revelation if true – front-page news in major science journals – since it would be proof of near-human intelligence.

Sections of this sort, in all sorts of domestic animal breed articles, have severe WP:RS / WP:NPOV / WP:NOR / WP:COMMONSENSE / WP:BOLLOCKS problems like this, but this article was among the worst. Fancier magazines and websites are not reliable or independent sources for this sort of behavior/temperament "information" either, almost invariably, because they uncritically parrot promotional materials of breeders, and their content is at least partially under the thumb of their advertisers. They also pander to the lowest-common denominator reader, which tends to be children and little old ladies who want story-book material about how special and precious their pets are. Worse, the average "breed profile" article in such a publication is written by a breeder of that breed, the opposite of WP:INDY; it's like a Disney executive writing a review of a Disney film.

See WT:ANIMALS for a more active and generalized version of this discussion, across species. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ^⊝כ^⊙þ Contrib. 20:04, 7 March 2013 (UTC)