Question submitted by the audience in our recent webinar: "The Importance of Exercising Your Dog's Brain for Optimal Physical and Mental Health":
Are there any recent good studies done on Early Neurological Stimulation on puppies? Does it really jump start specific parts of the brain, and how easy is it to overdo it (over stress) and have adverse results? I did do ENS on one litter back in 2000 but I couldn't judge the results.
Answer by: Karen Overall, MA, VMD, PhD, DACVB
This is a very common question. People who compete with or just train their dogs in activities for sport or enjoyment ask about ENS often. The only data are in the paper I discussed with the Bosnian mine detection dogs, who were already raised in a super-enriched cognitive environment (Schoon A, Groth Berntsen T. Evaluating the effect of early neurological stimulation on the development and training of mine detection dogs. J Vet Behav: Clin Appl Res 2011;6:150-157.). In this controlled study, half of each litter underwent ENS and half did not … without statistically significant effects on development and training outcomes.
No one can actually evaluate the effect of this or any other intervention on just one litter ... this is why we do experiments. Simply, you cannot raise the same puppy 2 ways – with and without the stimulation. The way science manages this problem is to have a large enough sample to be able to randomly assign dogs within a litter to each group. Doing science well is difficult and can be costly in time and money. Unfortunately, doing science poorly is easy and even more costly. So, it is possible for this question to be answered….the data have just never been collected in a way that actually tested whether ENS made a difference to later behavior, social skills, learning or immune health. I mention the latter because some parts of ENS involve immune stressors.
In fact, it is a pet peeve of mine that we actually do not know – we have not measured – most of the rudimentary developmental landmarks in dogs. The last time things like age of tooth eruption, first day or tail wagging, et cetera were measured and compared across breeds and litters was in Scott and Fuller’s work in the 1950s and 1960s and they used ONLY 5 breeds of the same basic size and shape whose major variation was that they came from different breed groups (cocker spaniels, basenjis, fox terriers, beagles and Shelties). Even the environment of these study dogs was pretty constant.
However, we COULD get these data in a crowd source way by using a standardized tick sheet for people breeding pups (this tick sheet was used for the Schoon and Groth Berntsen study cited above). I would suspect that dog breeds differ and dogs from different lines – especially if they have been selected for work v. pet lifestyles – should differ. I would also suspect that pre-, peri- and post-natal environments are far more important than people think. I have developed an updated version of this sheet if anyone wants to participate in this type of group science project on neurodevelopmental landmarks! I’ll send it to Dr. Berger to see if she can attach it to this Q & A, but otherwise people can contact me. Warning: collecting good data is harder than most people realize. For us to establish developmental landmarks and to learn how variable they are, we would need information on the rearing environment, but some also must assess each pup at the same time daily for each of a series of changes, and record that information every day. Then, the first day each pup shows the behavior would need to be recorded on a master sheet. Once people engage in data collection and entry, they often have some sympathy for what we don’t know.
