Question submitted by the audience in our recent webinar: "The Importance of Exercising Your Dog's Brain for Optimal Physical and Mental Health":
How do the breeds and styles affect performance in terms of your tests and their approaches?
Answer by:Karen Overall, MA, VMD, PhD, DACVB
This is an excellent question and profoundly important. The answer is … breeds less so than how the dogs were raised and trained. Rescue and puppy mill dogs – those with rough starts – do not excel on this test even when they do well. They are less sure and move more. One of the future studies we want to do is an early comparison on puppies from enriched backgrounds (excellent breeders) and those from puppy mills (deprived environments) and test the dogs 4 times over a year. I hypothesize that the trajectories of learning and types of approaches differ dramatically. However, I do think that early exposure to these types of tests may be part of a good treatment and recovery plan for dogs with deprived backgrounds. Again, this is another hypothesis to be tested and another study to fund.
How the dog was raised – whether they had enrichment, whether they work, whether they did nosework, whether they were couch-potato pets – all affected outcomes. Remember, we are still testing dogs and will be immersed in data for a long time. This study produced such surprising results that there is much more here than anticipated. This finding has profound implications for both pet and working dogs. Because of the way the working dogs were trained, we had a fairly consistent test routine. For pet dogs, we have had to be more adaptable in our reward structure because these dogs are not as consistent in the way they were raised. So that we were not evaluating an artifact, we had to be willing to change rewards. As a result, we needed to test more dogs so that we had adequate sample sizes in each group. Our original study plan called for 50 dogs with complete information. We are now over 100 dogs and not done. Fortunately, the dog community in the area is so supportive and enthusiastic!
