The Replacement Dog: how a veterinarian / dog rescuer / geneticist searched for the right puppy

The death of my fifteen year old golden retriever Jack wasn’t just about my loss. It was about finding someone else to do his job, which for the last five years had been serving as a security blanket for Jenny, my shy collie mix. Jenny depended on him to tell her when people did not intend to eat her, to run interference with well-meaning strangers, and to demonstrate calm at the veterinary clinic. We could not remain a single dog household for long.

Jack and Jenny

I adopted Jenny at age 13 months. She had never been off the farm where she was born until her surrender to a shelter, and the world proved much larger than she expected. Jenny has excellent dog skills but a crippling anxiety upon encountering new people or environments. I adopted her knowing about her idiosyncrasies because I wanted to study anxiety in dogs, and wanted to experience it first hand. And so I have; living with Jenny has informed my understanding of anxiety in a way that reading about it never could have.

In my research, studying the way genetics and environment interact to affect the risk of anxiety has brought me back time and again to the importance of early environment: in utero environment, early maternal care, and puppy socialization. How the brain changes during and after the socialization period turns out to be a huge part of my research interests, and to learn from the source as I had done with Jenny, I would need a puppy, and a very young one at that. I’ve only adopted adult dogs in the past, but now is an excellent time for me to raise a puppy, as I work from home many days.

A puppy who would grow up to fit in well with Jenny had to fit a specific mold: confident around people and other dogs, but not so pushy as to annoy her. Someone she could play with. Someone male, because I didn’t want to deal with girl dog politics for the next ten years.

Jenny

Now, I have counseled others that adopting a very young mixed breed puppy from a shelter or rescue group means you really have no idea at all who you have just brought home, and that there is no shame in purchasing a dog from a responsible breeder. However, in practice, I balked at purchasing a dog. I completed an intense shelter medicine internship at the University of Florida several years ago, and I still feel part of that community. As the distance between the present day and that experience increases, I find myself holding tighter to those connections and looking for new ways to remain a part of sheltering. Purchasing a dog who was not going to be in want of a home felt a bit like eating humanely raised meat: I tell myself it’s okay for others to do it, but when I actually try to do it myself, some part of me rebels.

Yet as I looked at puppies from local rescue groups, in short order I found myself in a panic: could I really adopt a puppy whose genetics were completely unknown, whose parents I most likely couldn’t meet, and who had almost certainly had some early life trauma before ending up in foster care? Genetics and early experience are both critical in shaping the adult personality, and while I hope I could handle dealing with another shy dog, Jenny needed someone dependable, not another neurotic failing to keep it together when the mailman drove past.

When I started to seriously consider purchasing a dog, I had to decide on a breed. I love retriever-collie mixes: ideally the best of both worlds, retriever-social and collie-smart. But finding a responsible breeder of retriever-collie mixes seemed a tall order. Border collies are too intense for me. Australian shepherds have their tails docked so short. And I wanted to find a breed that is not recognized by the AKC, that is absolutely not bred for looks, that possibly even has open stud books to keep the genetics pool large and diverse.

I found the Scotch Collie and the English Shepherd. The Scotch Collie club had an open stud book policy going for it (good for them!). The English Shepherd club had a closed stud book policy (open it up, guys!) but it had been open relatively recently, the breed isn’t recognized by the AKC, and the dogs can’t be shown in conformation classes. The breed is a versatile working breed. Both breeds have lovely breed standards that accept a wide range of phenotypes (for example, 30-80 lbs in adult weight - a wide range!), which in itself tells the story of breeding for temperament and not looks.

In the end, I chose the English Shepherd based on the fact that there are more of them around, so it was easier to find a litter promptly. Waiting a few months would mean potty training a puppy in January in the Midwest, an experience I’ll leave to others.

The English Shepherd club maintained a list of breeders who had available puppies, with lots of information about the parents. It’s a well designed resource, and I link to it not to encourage others to run out and get an ES puppy (they are smart and high energy and not for everyone) but to provide an example of what kinds of information should be provided about available litters.

I screened the descriptions of parents: I discarded those who weighed more than 70 lbs, as managing Jack in his dotage had been hard on my back. I discarded those who were described as “protective” or “taking some time to warm up to people.” I checked that the parents had passed the relevant genetic tests (for this breed, tests for several eye diseases and hip dysplasia). Then I looked at the remaining breeders’ websites.

The breeders I liked talked about how they raised the puppies: giving them lots of positive experiences. They talked about what they did with the puppies’ parents - agility, nosework, herding. They often had long applications for potential owners to fill out, which asked all the questions they should: How will you exercise this dog? Do you have a fenced yard? What will you do if he is destructive?

I found a litter in Virginia with a male who sounded perfect: confident, social, and by the way athletic. My husband and I stuffed Jenny into the car and drove 9.5 hours to pick up our boy. He cost, by the way, probably more than twice what a rescue puppy would have cost, but I have paid for knowing that he is clear of some genetic diseases for which he might have been at risk, and for knowing that he was in the uterus of a calm, happy mother; raised with a litter who had plenty of high quality food and safe places; and had extensive early socialization (including the Early Neurological Stimulation and Early Scent Stimulation programs). He has proven, in his first week and a half with us, to be social and sweet, willing to settle down when asked so long as he is given plenty of exercise and mental stimulation, and terrifyingly smart. He and Jenny are already wrestling for hours daily, laying the foundation for what I trust will be a long friendship.

That is the story of how we found Dashiell.

Dashiell

Talking about shelter behavior assessments

Today I presented at APDT's 2015 conference on shelter behavior assessments. It's incredibly important to be able to identify dangerous dogs when they come into shelters so we don't put them on the adoption floor, and to be able to identify dogs who we can perhaps help improve their behavior while in the shelter.

Or is it? I talked for three hours -- well, not quite three hours; my amazing audience helped out with some really fascinating discussion -- about how shelter behavior assessments aren't really all that good at identifying dogs who are just sorta likely to be aggressive. They're great at identifying really aggressive dogs and they're great at identifying really safe dogs -- but then again, we don't really need their help at that as it isn't all that hard to do. What neither these tests nor us humans are great at is identifying the in between, hard to categorize dogs.

I argued that we should continue to perform shelter behavioral assessments on dogs because those interactions with dogs give us more information about the dogs' personalities, and that information is useful. What we really should not do is use these tests as yes-no decision making tools for deciding the dogs' fate. They are not decision making tools; they are information gathering tools. One of the other main themes of the talk was that assessing a dog's personality is something that should be done by someone with plenty of dog experience, not the shelter staff member who read the behavioral assessment guidelines once and figures that's all she needs.

After the talk I said hi to Janis Bradley of the National Canine Research Council and she basically said, Hey, fun talk, but I really think we shouldn't be doing behavior assessments on shelter dogs at all. I've asked lots of competent shelter staff if they know which of the dogs in their shelters are dangerous, and they say sure they do. I've asked if it was a behavioral assessment that helped them figure that out and they say it never has been. It's been the dog's interactions with staff and volunteers.

I replied that we really need to collect as much information as possible about shelter dogs, not to identify the easy to identify extreme cases, but to identify the harder to identify in between cases -- the dog who isn't aggressive to all dogs, just certain dogs, for example.

She said sure, but she still thinks a better way of collecting that information is through careful, possibly structured documentation of the interactions of the various shelter staff and volunteers with the dog during its time in the shelter. That's what we should be focusing on.

Now, I am absolutely down with recording as much data as possible about a shelter dog's behavior. But advocating against formal behavioral assessments, even in shelters that have the resources to do them? My heart isn't quite there yet, but it's an interesting idea. If you have opinions, feel free to weigh in in the comments or on Twitter!

Who funds dog research?

As I move through my training and think ahead to my future career, I wonder: who will pay for all this research I want to do on dogs? I have so many questions to ask!

• What changes happen in the canine brain as it enters, and then leaves, the socialization period?
• How is the brain of a fearful dog different from that of a confident dog?
• What are the genetic differences behind these variations?
• How do environmental differences (prenatal stress, early learning, adult life) change the brain?

In other words, what are the mechanisms in the brain that differ in fearful dogs — receptors, neurotransmitters, synaptic wiring? And how can I learn about them without using invasive (painful and/or terminal) techniques?

Who are the caretakers of Dog, the species, who care about fearfulness? We as dog owners and lovers care, but dog owners and lovers aren’t the ones who are trained to heal unhealthy dogs, to perform research aimed at understanding them, and we (mostly) aren’t the ones who breed them. So who are the groups who are the caretakers of Dog, and what subsets of Dog do they care for?

Veterinarians

We (I am a veterinarian) are trained to heal sick dogs. Relatively few veterinarians perform research compared to those who engage solely in clinical practice. But some do perform research: most commonly as faculty at veterinary schools alongside a clinical practice, or less commonly as researchers without a clinical practice at research instititutions.

Veterinary research, as a result of this strong emphasis on healing the unhealthy, is focused on clinical results. Veterinarians most commonly perform research which asks questions about the effectiveness of particular techniques — medications, surgical approaches, new equipment. Veterinary research very rarely addresses root questions about mechanisms, particularly in the area of behavior. Rather than asking “How are the brains of fearful dogs different?”, veterinary research is more likely to ask how we could fix a fearful dog: “Does this medication make a fearful dog less fearful?”

In fact, as I pursue my mechanism-based questions, I am asked if I miss being a veterinarian. The perception is that because I am engaged in basic, rather than clinical, research, I am no longer working as a veterinarian.

Basic science researchers

If veterinarians do clinical research studies, then who does basic research biomedical studies, studies that look not at how to fix problems but at how the body works? Ph.D. researchers are more likely to do this sort of research, which is why I am currently engaged in obtaining a Ph.D.

Traditionally, Ph.D. researchers have not been interested in dogs. In fact, way back in 2004 when I was originally deciding between a Ph.D. and a D.V.M., I was told by a Ph.D. animal behaviorist, “Ph.D.s don’t study domesticated animals. Veterinarians study those.” (Actually, veterinarians mostly just try to fix unhealthy domesticated animals, not study the healthy ones.)

That perception has changed in a big way in the intervening eleven years. There are now multiple laboratories studying dogs. But where does their funding come from — who cares enough about dogs as dogs, not as models for human problems, to provide the impressive funding needed for a genomics study? (The work I am doing for my Ph.D., sequencing messenger RNA, costs around $45,000.)

The U.S. federal government

The traditional source of funding for basic research is the federal government: the National Institutes of Health for health-based research and the National Science Foundation for more basic research. But these two massive institutions are very much focused on human health — as they should be, as they are funded by the tax dollars of American citizens. The economy can’t support all the research American researchers would like to do, and getting an NIH or NSF grant is becoming more and more difficult as grant funding is cut. Funding to study dogs as models of human disease? Maybe, but isn’t it easier to study laboratory rodents (on which you can perform invasive studies) or work on humans directly? Funding to study dogs as dogs? Go lie down until it passes.

In my experience, the small number of laboratories directly studying dogs are either studying them as models for questions about human health or evolution, operate on a shoestring budget, or have great trouble obtaining funding for what they want to do.

Animal welfare organizations

So who cares about dogs? Animal welfare organizations, some of which are national in scope and do perform research. Some major players in this field are the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), the Center for Shelter Dogs (CSD), and the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). I am most familiar with the research coming out of the ASPCA and the CSD, and it is exciting stuff. But it is again mostly focused on applied questions: how can we help the shelter dogs in our care?

I reviewed some of the research these two organizations have performed on how to identify and treat food aggression in shelter dogs in my story for the Bark on shelter behavioral assessments. This was ground-breaking research and I am really glad to see it published. But it doesn’t ask the basic (i.e., non-applied) research questions I am interested in: what is it about the brains of these dogs that differs from the brains of dogs without food aggression? That kind of research doesn’t have immediate applied benefit. You can’t take it to a shelter worker with a recommendation about whether or not to put a food aggressive dog on the adoption floor. It is incredibly impressive that these shelter-focused organizations perform any research at all, and it is absolutely appropriate that the research they perform should have a highly applied focus, with clear questions that, when answered, will provide guidance on how to improve the lives of shelter dogs, immediately. They do not have the resources to pursue these sort of mechanism questions that I want to ask, which do not have immediate applicability.

So who cares about understanding how dog brains work, with the hope that that information will provide a base for future applied research? Who cares about the whole species, not just the subset in shelters or the subset in hospitals?

Breed organizations

Breed organizations care very much about the health and welfare of dogs, and in fact have provided funding into the mechanisms behind health issues specific to their breed. A recent paper about associations between spay/neuter status and health issues in Golden Retrievers was partially funded by the American Kennel Club’s Canine Health Foundation (AKC/CHF), and a similar study on Vizslas was funded by the Vizsla Club of America Welfare Foundation. (I blogged about these studies elsewhere.)

These organizations can fund basic research on how and why particular diseases occur in their breeds, and may even be willing to fund expensive genetic studies, such as a recent one on the genetics of cancer in Golden Retrievers, supported in part by both the AKC/CHF and the Golden Retriever Foundation. However, their focus is very much on the problems of a particular breed. My questions are broader: why do dogs of all breeds have different personalities, some more or less fearful? These organizations are really the caretakers of breed subsets of Dog, not of Dog itself.

Who, then?

Who does that leave as a group willing to fund studies on Dog? On problems common to all breeds? On problems which may or may not provide good models for humans? If I hope to one day run a laboratory which studies these problems, who can I hope to help pay for the research?

I would be remiss if I did not mention Morris Animal Foundation here. While their important Golden Retriever Lifetime Study happens to focus on the health issues of a single breed, their mission is to fund research into studies of small animals (dogs and cats), livestock, and wild animals, with no breed limitations. This group is doing important work, and I applaud them.

But one organization is not enough for a laboratory to depend on for survival, especially in these times with research funding so hard to come by. And so I wonder: are we, the dog lovers of the world, the ones to start supporting research into what it is to be a dog? We, who own dogs of all breeds and mixes, with all sorts of problems, who know what problems most plague us as owners — not just medical problems, but behavioral ones?

And so I leave you with my dreams of crowdfunding, in which a researcher proposes a study and asks the public to support it through donations. Such an approach allows the dog community to take the task of answering basic questions about Dogness into their own hands. This direct connection between a researcher and the community affected by their research is a new benefit of this age of social media. Is this approach right for this particular problem? Time will tell.

Testing behavioral assessment

My Bark article, Testing the Tests, is now available on the web for free. I did a lot of background reading for this story and I learned a lot of interesting stuff about shelter behavioral assessments: how they're designed, how to evaluate whether they work, and new work that's going into improving them. Check it out!

Shelter dogs, movement, and stress

The always-awesome group of researchers at the Center for Shelter Dogs (associated with the Animal Rescue League of Boston, MA) has just published a new paper. They took a bucketful of different kinds of stress measurements of dogs in their shelter and looked to see if there were correlations between the different kinds. They are working on the same problem that I tackled in my Master’s work: it is awfully hard to tell which dogs in a population are stressed; can we use some kind of easy marker (like observing behavior) to do it? They got similar results to mine: yes, it’s super hard! There is no silver bullet answer. But they provide some interesting insight into how to move forward in the quest to improve stress detection methods.

Jones S., Dowling-Guyer S., Patronek G.J., Marder A.R., Segurson D’Arpino S. & McCobb E. (2014). Use of Accelerometers to Measure Stress Levels in Shelter Dogs, Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science, 17 (1) 18-28. DOI: 10.1080/10888705.2014.856241

The biggest contribution this paper makes, I think, is the use of an accelerometer to test activity levels in shelter dogs. They attached this device to the collars of dogs when they first came in to the shelter, and got a report of how much the dogs moved around over the course of 24 hours. Because cortisol is such a difficult measurement of stress to interpret, it’s important to supplement cortisol measurements with other measurements, to sort of triangulate your answer. Movement in the kennel is one that I haven’t seen measured before in shelter dogs, and is something that might provide some interesting answers: do dogs move around a lot when they are stressed (pacing) or very little (depression)? I’m really happy to see this new measurement entering the shelter dog literature.

The researchers also attempted to provide a stress score of the dogs by watching them and subjectively assessing stress levels based on a minute’s worth of behavior. This is the holy grail of stress studies: can we look at a dog and tell how stressed it is? If so, we wouldn't need to do all this correlation with cortisol levels. I think we all want to say that someone who really understands dog body language can tell if a dog is stressed by looking at it. I know that I believe that I can estimate the average dog's stress level by looking at it. If you see a dog with low body posture, refusing to meet your eyes, maybe shaking, it’s stressed, right? How hard is that?

Well, if you try to compare your observations (particularly over a very short period of time — in my work, I had more luck with 20 minutes than with 2), the answer is, it’s extremely hard. In this study, they tried to assess an average level of stress in the dogs by taking multiple cortisol measurements, both salivary and urinary. Salivary cortisol changes so very fast that I wouldn’t expect it to correlate well to a day’s worth of exercise, or even to behavioral observations unless they were taken within just a few minutes of the saliva sample, but as this study involved multiple saliva samples over time, I was interested to see if a better average measure was obtained. The researchers also compared salivary cortisol samples with urinary cortisol samples, and since urine builds up in the bladder over time, I’d expect urinary samples to produce a better average as well.

So what did they find? To the question of movement (measured by the accelerometer) vs cortisol (salivary and urinary):

• Maximum activity level correlated with salivary cortisol (p = 0.025)
• Maximum activity level did not correlate with urinary cortisol
• Mean (average) activity level correlated with mean urinary cortisol (p = 0.028)
• Mean activity level did not correlate with salivary cortisol

To the question of the behavioral scoring: no correlation with cortisol of either kind.

So how we interpret all this?

First off, this study ended up enrolling only 13 dogs, taking quite a few measurements of each dog (I haven’t actually covered all of their findings here), and trying to draw conclusions. On the one hand, I want to emphasize that this is how stress studies in dogs are done. I did exactly the same thing in my stress study of hospitalized dogs. It is just extremely hard to enroll enough dogs. If you read the paper itself you get a feel for what the primary researcher went through, as she lists the reasons she had to exclude dogs from the study. It reminded me of my intense frustration during my Master’s work as I had to give up on dog after dog for a variety of reasons. This is par for the course in all these studies: it is almost impossible to get the time and funding to enroll enough subjects to have solid statistical findings. So I am not in any way criticizing these researchers, who did a great job introducing some interesting findings.

But on the other hand, it’s important to recognize that with so many questions and such a small sample set, it is almost impossible to trust the statistical significance of the results. If you do a study in which you ask 100 questions, and you set your p value at 0.05 (which is usual), then you are saying that you expect 5 of your answers to look significant even though they are not. That's what a p value is: setting the bar at which you accept a few false positives. One way around this is to have more subjects, which will lower your p values. Then you can say you'll only accept p < 0.01 or something even more stringent. This makes your findings a bit more trustworthy.

For the number of questions this study asked and the size of their sample set, I would take their findings with a grain of salt. Does activity level correlate with cortisol level? I think it's likely that it does. But I also think that what this study tells us is “this is an interesting area which is worth more study,” not “you should trust that these findings are absolutely true.”

Moreover, what are high cortisol levels telling us about dogs who move around a lot? Exercise itself can increase cortisol levels. This can be a good stressor. So are these dogs distressed or not? This is a problem which is going to be very hard to pick apart. I think a lot of the dogs in a shelter who pace incessantly are indeed very distressed, but some, as this paper points out, are coping with their distress by means of that exercise and are doing better than the dogs who don’t move. The paper also asks the question about how to interpret movement in small versus large dogs. Small dogs simply have relatively more room to move in a little shelter kennel. So how does that change the equation?

As for the lack of correlation between the behavioral stress score and cortisol levels: I feel pretty confident interpreting that one despite my comments about statistics above, because this is a question that has been asked before, and is always answered the same way. We can’t tell what a dog’s cortisol level will be by looking at its behavior. Why not? Is it because we don’t know what the dog's inner experience is (we don’t know if the dog is feeling stress)? Or is it the cortisol level that is lying to us, doing a terrible job of telling us about stress levels, and we’re interpreting the behavior just fine? We don't know, but we do keep trying to find out. Hopefully one day we will.

In the end, I enjoyed this paper. Kudos to the researchers for exploring stress levels in a variety of ways, instead of just one or two. This study was well designed, in my opinion; it just needed a lot more dogs. Hopefully this group or another one will be able to pull together a bigger study going forward.

Working with Sadie

Sadie was a rambunctious young shelter dog whom I had been assigned to exercise and train. We were working in an auditorium, the best space the shelter had for exercising dogs indoors. Like most of the dogs I worked with in there, Sadie had some trouble with the smooth floors; every time she ran to catch a ball she would slide and slam into the wall. Because she was basically an oversized puppy, this didn’t faze her. We were having a great time, working on her retrieving skills, practicing “drop it” (at that point, just a swap of the ball for some treats).

Then Sadie saw some dogs playing outside through the big glass doors on one side of the auditorium. Sadie was already diagnosed as dog aggressive, which was part of why she was inside playing alone with me. The mood of the session changed immediately. Sadie ran at the glass doors, barking and racing back and forth. I tried to interpose my body between her and the doors, to back her up and get her attention back on me, but it was like I wasn’t there. I wanted to put her leash on to back her away, but I was worried that grabbing her collar would cause her to turn and bite me.

I made Sadie’s leash into a loop and lassoed her with it, then backed her away from the glass doors. She still wasn’t focusing on me, but neither was she turning to bite me as we backed to the far end of the room, where I sat down on a low stage and kept her on leash. She had her back to me, focusing on the doors. She couldn’t see the dogs any more, but she could hear their deep hound barks, and she really wanted to get at them.

Sadie had worked with a clicker already, so I pulled out my clicker and started to click her for any movement away from the door. Step back towards me: click, handful of treats. Quick look over her shoulder when I made kissing noises at her: click, handful of treats. I kept up a very high rate of reinforcement to keep her interest, so she was essentially being fed a steady stream of pieces of hot dog. Gradually her body language changed, so that she was not arrow-straight pointing at the door. She became looser, more relaxed. She turned towards me, looked at me (treat, treat, treat). And then finally she was lying down next to me, leaning into me, enjoying having her sides rubbed. When the dogs barked, she looked over towards the doors briefly, then back at me. She was with me again.