Veterinarians are Responsible for the Welfare of Flat-Faced Dogs

Note: this post was originally published on the Dog International Blog.

What can we do about the welfare problem of flat-faced dogs?

The health problems associated with brachycephalic (flat-faced) dogs are no secret. Dogs bred to have ultra-shortened muzzles often have significant breathing problems, dental problems, bulging eyes prone to injury, and skin disease from deep facial wrinkles. The welfare problem of brachycephalic dogs has been covered before, including here, here, here, and here. The solution is simple: breed dogs with longer muzzles and wider nostrils. They can still have their distinct breed look, but with a real muzzle instead of a flat face. And yet the word isn’t getting out, and dogs with extremely flat faces are still popular with breeders and dog owners. Some of the most common brachycephalic breeds in question are the English bulldog, French bulldog, pug, Boston terrier, Pekingese, boxer, Shi Tzu and Cavalier King Charles Spaniel.

What can be done? What tools do those concerned with the welfare of breeding for extremely flat faces have to convince breeders to breed more moderate animals? What tools do we have to help the general public—the ones who don’t seek out news stories about the welfare of different dog breeds—to find breeders who produce more moderate dogs? As a veterinarian, I really want my profession to be part of the solution to this problem. In veterinary school, I was taught that part of the veterinarian’s job is to be an advocate for the animal. The owner may be the one who pays the bills, but it’s the animal who is the patient, and a good vet should speak up for the animal even when what she has to say is not what the owner wants to hear. However, I also learned that veterinarians, at least in the U.S., are extremely averse to conflict. We may be told to advocate for the animal, but we are trained not to upset the client. This isn’t just about money. If you upset your client too much, they will take their animal away, and your chance to help the animal will be lost. It’s a fine line, but not one that veterinarians are trained to balance. In my experience, much of our training plays lip service to the idea of standing up for the animal while demonstrating a strict policy of non-interference in a client’s decisions about what kind of dog to acquire.

A new policy about brachycephalics from the British Veterinary Association

French bulldog – 2014 Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.
By Pets Adviser from Brooklyn, USA (2014 Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show) [CC BY 2.0 ], via Wikimedia Commons

Things are a little different on the far side of the pond from the U.S., however. In the U.K., the British Veterinary Association (BVA) recently published a new policy statement about brachycephalic dogs. It is a quite forward-thinking document, taking a multi-pronged approach to the problem.

The document begins with CT scans of a brachycephalic and a normal dog, showing the dramatic difference in skull shape. Even their brains are differently shaped! It continues with a policy position, which contains a list of goals beginning with “ensuring healthier future generations of dogs.” It describes an action plan, including campaigning in the media and a ten-point plan for veterinary practices to address engagement with owners of brachycephalic dogs. It concludes with a list of resources for those who want to know or do more.

This is not a document that will shake the foundations of British veterinary medicine. Its description of the health problems with brachycephalic dogs is based on solid evidence, and is not phrased in inflammatory fashion. Its goals are all positive, focused on education and research. Importantly, however, it provides veterinarians with guidance and resources on how to engage with prospective pet owners on the health problems with brachycephalic dogs. And it takes a strong stance: extremely flat faces in dogs aren’t healthy, and we should be moving away from them.

A weak policy from the American Veterinary Medical Association

Contrast the BVA’s policy to the approach taken by the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), which recently passed a three-sentence position statement related to inherited disorders that does not even go so far as to mention brachycephalic dogs specifically. The AVMA’s animal welfare committee had initially proposed a slightly stronger policy that did specifically mention brachycephalics, along with other conditions, but this phrasing was seen as overly controversial. It was particularly opposed by the Cavalier King Charles Spaniel Club, the Bulldog Club of America, and the American Kennel Club. The final policy phrasing names no specific disorders, targeting only “genetic and inherited disorders” generally.

In failing to call out specific problems, the AVMA missed a chance to make the point that extreme brachycephaly is a disorder. The general public often perceives extremely flat-faced animals as normal, and as a result continue to purchase them without recognizing the numerous health problems these dogs face. Simply framing extreme brachycephaly as a disorder is a powerful tool to changing this perception.

The AVMA policy also fails to provide specific guidance to veterinarians. The policy encourages veterinarians to educate themselves, breeders, and owners “on the responsibilities involved with breeding and selecting companion animals.” Compare this to the BVA’s ten-point plan for veterinarians, with guidance on how to interact with owners during pre-purchase examinations, to breeders considering breeding an affected dog, recommendations of specific tests for assessing the health of dogs from brachycephalic breeds, and the provision of resources for veterinarians, such as health surveillance programs for gathering data on the health of brachycephalic animals, a #BreedToBreathe video, and infographics for social media. U.S. veterinarians receive little guidance in veterinary school about how to communicate with clients over difficult topics such as these. Providing resources to help them grapple with the problem in practice is key.

Who are veterinarians afraid of?

The AVMA’s approach to the brachycephalic welfare problem falls far short of the BVA’s. Why didn’t the AVMA at least pass a stronger policy statement, even if providing real guidance to U.S. veterinarians was not on the table? Who are they afraid of?

Note that, according to the news release about the policy statement in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, complaints about the original proposed policy that identified brachycephaly as a disorder came from clubs of breeders of brachycephalic dogs (the Bulldog Club of America and the Cavalier King Charles Spaniel Club) and the umbrella club for many U.S. breed-specific clubs, the American Kennel Club (AKC).

I can’t speak for these clubs, but my understanding is that their concerns are two-fold: first, that if dogs such as bulldogs are bred to have more defined muzzles, the unique character of the bulldog breed will be lost; and second, that if public opinion turns against brachycephalic breeds, these breeds may actually be banned. The second fear is not as far-fetched as you may think, given the existence of a petition to ban bulldogs and pugs in the U.K. The U.K. government does have a history of banning dog breeds that it considers “dangerous” and ear cropping and tail docking are banned in England and Wales for welfare reasons. I can’t predict if this current petition might have teeth, but history suggests it might. For what it’s worth, I believe entirely banning flat-faced breeds goes too far.

However, in no way do I believe that breeding bulldogs, pugs, and other brachycephalic breeds to have a more defined muzzle goes too far! The extreme flatness of these dogs’ faces is a recent phenomenon—look at pictures of French bulldogs from fifty or a hundred years ago and you’ll see a dog with a muzzle who still looks uniquely Frenchie. I wager it is in the show ring that a truly flat face—the kind where the muzzle is flat beneath the eyes, almost as flat as a human’s—is prized. The pet owner is much less likely to find dogs with a bit more muzzle unattractive or to feel that they don’t resemble the breed to which they belong.

The AVMA should take a stronger stance on brachycephalic dogs

Finding the right wording in position statements like these is difficult, and alienating the very people you want to convince is an ever present danger. However, I believe the AVMA’s stance is unnecessarily watered down. Surely veterinarians can take the position that health problems due to breeding for extreme body shapes are something to work against. It must be possible to spread the word that ultra-flat faces are harmful to dogs, and that moderation in muzzle length won’t destroy the unique characteristics of a beloved breed. But we do have to try harder to get that message out there, and U.S. veterinarians are lacking strong leadership bringing us forward. How can we help to fix these breeds? One step is a new policy from the AVMA, providing real guidance to the veterinarians on the front lines about how to talk to the owners and breeders of brachycephalic dogs. The Veterinarian’s Oath includes a promise to work for the protection of animal health and welfare, and prevention and relief of animal suffering. Extreme flat faces cause life-long suffering in animals who need a longer muzzle in order to breathe properly, and veterinarians have a responsibility to take action to prevent that suffering.

Extreme flat faces cause lifelong suffering. It’s time for the AVMA to take a stronger stance on breeding for flat faces.

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Resources

• Can the Bulldog Be Saved?
• Why breeding bulldogs is borderline inhumane
• Fighting for air their whole lives
• Brachycephaly: it’s more than just the pretty face
• Stop normalising suffering: vets speaking out about brachys
• I really like your beans but… (Brachycephalics in advertising)
• The Cambridge BOAS research group

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On showing dogs in conformation shows

I’ve been cogitating recently on the statement I’ve seen in a few places that “it makes sense to show a dog in conformation shows before breeding it to make sure a judge has a chance to say that the dog has good or bad conformation.” I just posted this to a breed-specific mailing list in response to that statement, and am curious what y’all think of it:

I think the real question is whether a judge selects a dog based on healthy structure or based on something else. I suspect it varies by judge, but the concern is that, given a ring of dogs all with good structure, the dog with some other flashy attribute will win (thick coat, particular head or ear shape). Then people start breeding for that attribute in order to win. Then that attribute gets valued over good structure. I think the fear that this will happen in any given breed is valid, given what we've seen in other breeds - take the show German Shepherd with its very sloping backline or the tastefully plump show Labrador.

What it comes down to for me is, what is the best way to evaluate healthy structure in a dog before breeding? I don’t think conformation shows are that way. I suggest a) making sure the dog is able to work well and without pain b) giving the dog time to mature to see if it has any structural unsoundness and c) having the dog examined by a veterinary orthopedic specialist. There are plenty of structural issues that are just not going to show up on physical exam (whether performed by vet or by judge), which is why (a) and (b) are so important.

Thoughts from the blogosphere?

Bonus dog photo because every post needs a photo (of a purebred dog out of parents who were never shown in coformation shows, and a mixed breed whose parents were probably not selected with any sort of care at all):

Being the one who remembers: humane housing in shelters

A cat who is clearly not in a shelter.

Last night I wrote the first draft of a document on appropriate housing for shelter animals for IAABC’s new shelter division. Before getting into the nitty gritty details, I wrote as part of the general overview:

Housing for any shelter animal should be clean and safe: easy to sanitize; no sharp edges that could injure the animal; no gaps or broken latches that could allow the animal to escape. Animals should not be housed in temporary enclosures like airplane crates for more than a few hours while longer term housing is located.

I wondered: Is this too basic to even cover? Will readers stop reading the document at this point, thinking it’s worthless?

But then I remembered the story of a cat I encountered at a shelter during my internship. I was working in the kitten house, a small house dedicated to raising kittens during The Season. The cages were mostly roomy enough for moms with their litters; smaller cages were reserved for litters of orphan kittens. But one small cage had an elderly adult cat in it.

This cage was just too small for this cat. Now, some shelters keep all their cats in cages like this. But the thing was, this was a really excellent shelter. They did a great job of providing their cats with roomy housing. And their vet knew the importance of good housing and advocated for it, and moreover had enough authority to make it happen (sadly, a bit of a rarity in many shelters). So what was going on here?

I asked. Turns out, the cat had been adopted by a staff member but had proven to have behavoral issues that made it difficult for her to live in a home. So she had come back to the shelter. She also had a disease or two which made her expensive to keep and difficult to adopt. But the shelter wasn’t willing to euthanize her, so they put her in a spare cage in the kitten house and planned to figure out the situation later. And hadn’t figured it out yet, because in a shelter, there’s always some more pressing problem that has to be figured out today.

What it took for this cat to get good housing was for someone to notice and make her a priority. We moved her into the bathroom for a few days so she could have more legroom, and she hung out with me in the guest bedroom at night. I found a roomy wire crate intended for litters of kittens and we set that up for her for her evenings long term, and during the days she got to hang out on the desk of the kitten house manager.

And that is often the job of the person at a shelter who works on animal behavior and welfare. Not training. Not making plans for Kong programs. Not fighting to change whole banks of cat cages out for something better. But noticing one single animal who got forgotten in an airline crate in a corner. Being the advocate for the little things. Being the one who remembers.

Let chickens be chickens

A week or so ago I encountered a letter to the editor in our local newspaper that made me peevish. Its author opined that chickens have better welfare when they are kept in rather than out of cages, because when not caged they are liable to get parasites and cannibalize each other.

I responded. But the letter to the editor format restricted me to 250 words, and I had more to say. Luckily, I have you guys to rant to! So here is my original piece in full.


Dan Miner's letter, published Dec. 5, sets up a straw-man argument about the welfare of chickens kept in versus out of cages. I'm responding from my experiences as a veterinarian with a special interest in animal welfare.

Are chickens in cages free from walking in their own feces? Yes – because they're standing on wire, which is unhealthy for their feet. Are chickens out of cages walking in their own feces? Only if you keep them crowded too close together. If you keep them with enough space that their surroundings don't fill with poop, then no, they won't be walking in poop.

Are chickens in cages able to engage in cannabalism? No – but they're denied healthy social interactions as well. Chickens don't actually want to kill and eat other chickens. They just do it if they're highly stressed. Keep them in a healthy environment where they have some space and the ability to engage in species-appropriate activities, like perching and scratching for bugs, and they'd much rather do those things instead.

Does the cage system protect chickens from parasites? Sure – and keeping a human in a glass bubble keeps them physically free of parasites, too, but would anyone with a normal immune system be willing to live like that just to avoid normal diseases? Healthy, unstressed chickens have robust immune systems that can handle normal diseases. But a stresssed, crowded animal isn't a healthy animal. When bird flu swept through commercial chicken farms this summer, resulting in massive numbers of deaths, which populations stayed healthiest? The outdoor birds, who were unstressed because they had the ability to engage in species-appropriate behaviors, and therefore had robust immune systems. The stressed-out, crowded indoor birds had weak immune systems with no ability to fight off the virus, and were so packed together that when it got into those populations, it swept straight through.

Chickens are only healthier in cages compared to out of cages if the out-of-cage environment is a crowded, stressful one. Many of those environments are, of course. I encourage those who care about chicken welfare to purchase eggs from chickens who are “pastured” or kept “on grass.” Mr. Miner is correct that “cage free” doesn't mean good welfare. He just doesn't realize that there's a better way to raise these animals – with enough space to move around and the opportunity to scratch around and hunt for bugs. Those are happy chickens.

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.

The spectrum of hoarding

There was almost no furniture in the entire house. This was unusual for hoarder houses, which are usually packed full of stuff or just of trash. But she was a somewhat unusual hoarder, with only 26 cats and one dog. We stood in the living room and talked to her about her animals. We could see into the kitchen, which was swarming with cats, on the counters, poking out of empty cabinets, sleeping in the sink. The woman we were talking to told us how she loved them but how her son had called us in because he was concerned about them and about her.

While we talked, her dog urinated in the middle of the empty floor in front of us. She didn't notice. The room contained a couch and an entertainment center and absolutely nothing else: the entertainment center had a few knicknacks but was mostly empty. On it sat the box of flea preventative that our team had given her months ago. It was unopened.

And everywhere was the smell of urine. I could barely stand to be in the room, but I could do so without a mask, which made it one of the cleaner hoarder homes. All I could think of was getting outside and getting a breath of air that was not thick with ammonia, so thick that my eyes watered and I could not fill my lungs. But this woman lived here. She could no longer smell it. She no longer noticed or cared when her dog urinated in the middle of the floor. And I remembered another time I had smelled this smell: at a cat shelter in another part of the country.

That was in rural New England. The two women running the place called it a shelter, but I knew it was really a hoarding house. They did not know how many cats they had. They would find cats unexpectedly dead, because no one had noticed for days or weeks when they were sick. And everywhere the smell. Not as bad as in the hoarder house in the big city, but bad enough to scare away adopters. Yes, they opened their doors to adopters. They advertised their cats for adoption. But adopters who brought these cats home risked bringing a sick animal into their lives, or contracting ringworm from their new pet, a story I heard unfold at least once from this shelter. The women running the shelter grilled every potential adopter and turned many away for not being good enough for their cats. And they continued taking in more cats — if they turned them away, they said, what would happen to them? But could another fate have been worse than dying trapped in that place, where adopters did not want to come, and were turned away when they did? Was this place a shelter or a hoarding house or some weird combination of the two?

But the combination isn’t weird. It happens all the time. I saw it again at a shelter in the deep South. This shelter proclaimed that they would kill no animals, and they did not, even the dogs who had been there for seven or eight years, that had gone insane and were unadoptable. These dogs were loving with the shelter staff, but when I came within a dozen yards of their enclosures they would erupt in terrifying, violent barking. I had no doubt that if I entered their enclosures I would be badly bitten. One dog was not aggressive, but hardly seemed to see the rest of the world any longer: he spun in circles around his enclosure, up on the roof of his dog house, down on the ground again, paws hitting exactly the same point every time. Over and over and over.

And the dogs who were not yet insane were not moving out fast enough. I could see their fates. This shelter was so overwhelmed with the number of dogs they were managing that they did not have the energy to keep these dogs mentally healthy, or to do the extra legwork it takes to adopt out a large dog in an area like the South which is so overpopulated with them. These dogs needed transfers to different shelters, they needed adoption events, they needed foster care to get a break from the shelter. They got none of those things. And as soon as a cage opened, it was filled with a new dog. This shelter actually transferred dogs in from outside their community. If they had not done so, they told us, what would have happened to those dogs? Where else could they have gone?

When I started to look, I started to see it everywhere. How many shelters provided enough space for their cats? Even the shelters that have big condo-style cages for cats in their adoption areas, with enough space to move around and a separate area for the litter box, even these shelters still have cats in tiny three by three foot cages in the back, in the sick rooms, in the intake and holding rooms: not enough room for a cat to stretch out, not enough room to get away from the litter box to eat. Even these shelters tell me of course they can’t use that antibiotic, because it must be given twice a day, and they don’t have time to visit so many sick animals twice a day, so they must use the one that doesn’t work as well but can be given less often. Even these shelters say, Of course we would love to have dog play groups, but we don’t have enough trained staff to manage them.

So what is sheltering and what is hoarding? A good shelter provides a needed service: a brief place for an animal to stop on its road to a new home, some medical care, some help finding that home. Keeping that stay brief is the hard part. It is, in fact, a very hard part, balancing keeping the animal healthy (it’s hard and potentially unethical to adopt out a sick pet), finding the right adopter (for that pit bull type dog that looks like row upon row of others in your shelter, for that orange cat that doesn’t come to the front of his cage to meet adopters), keeping them mentally healthy while you’re at it (play groups, training, just plain time out of the cage and time with humans).

And keeping large animals like dogs takes space. In fact, keeping a small animal like a cat takes space, much more space than we as a sheltering community realized until recently. Sheltering can so easily start to slip down the spectrum. It is a spectrum! Many shelters, real shelters, shelters that have legal non-profit status with the government, shelters that don’t smell like urine and have lots of volunteers and get grants and have spay-neuter services, yes these shelters too can fail to provide minimally acceptable care for their animals. Simply because they have too many.

What’s the answer? In one sense, it is simple. Call in someone from the outside, who can see your facility with unbiased eyes. Someone who doesn’t have to answer all the calls for pets that need homes. Someone who can look at the pets that you have and tell you how you are keeping them. This person must know how to assess humane capacity, so it can’t be just any animal lover. They should be able to look at your facility, know how much space is appropriate for animals of different sizes, and calculate how much space you have for each animal. Then they must look at your staffing, and calculate how much staff time you have for each animal. Not just to feed and clean them, but to spend time with them. To notice when they are sick: to look at them every day, carefully, and think about what they need and how to get it to them. To not be running ragged putting out fires, but to be able to plan adoption events, and to notice that dog that’s been here for months and needs special work to get out.

When this person tells you how many animals you can care for humanely, not just how many you can fit in your facility, you will be shocked. You will deny it. You will say that’s half what you can handle. You will point to your records: you’ve had many more than that for years! But they will insist: yes, you’ve had more. But you haven’t had them humanely. You have had a toe on the road to the hoarder end of the spectrum.

So in another sense, it is not at all simple. Because embracing humane capacity means accepting that you have not done as well in the past for your animals as you could. It means not beating yourself up over this, not feeling guilty, not indulging in denial. It means moving forward: it means promising yourself and the animals in your care that you will do better in the future.

And even harder, it means saying no. No to the animals that need a place. No to the people who just can’t find a home for their pit bull type dog but have to move, and the new place does not take animals. No to the mom whose dog bit her child but is such a loving dog with adults. No to the stray cat who is so sweet. Surely you can find homes for these animals? If you don’t, who will?

But that is the central point: you can’t do it humanely, but you try anyway, you will add to the problem. Sheltering is where it is because shelters try to do too much, and if a shelter’s doors are open, animals will pass through them. Shelters which have put waiting lists into place have found that many people do manage to find homes for their animals, if they have to keep trying. Some don’t, and they wait until a place opens. Will these people abandon their animals on the street? Will they take them to a quiet spot and shoot them between the eyes? Very, very rarely does this happen: when it does, it is big news. But you know what? Doing that is illegal. And that is where we need to prevent it: with laws, and enforcement of them. Not by saying, Okay, I will take over your responsibility for you.

That is what we as a society must embrace: responsibility. Not taking in animals that we can’t care for appropriately. And not accepting someone else’s responsibility. Being strong, and doing only what we can, and no more. Because by doing more, we actually do less.

Organic standards and animal welfare

Over on Animal Science Review, Austin J. Bouck just posted his paper, Do organic animal operations encourage management decisions that negatively impact animal welfare? Personally, I do tend to buy organic dairy products when I can in hopes that I’m contributing to improved animal welfare, even though deep in my heart I suspect I’m doing no such thing. In veterinary school, classmates told me they avoided buying organic because of things they had seen on organic farms. I’ve argued before that the best way to ensure the welfare of the animals whose products you consume is to make your purchases at a local farmer’s market, but of course not everyone has access to those. So this question of whether organic is good for animal welfare or not is a pressing one.

Austin starts out with a discussion of terminology. The word “organic” has a legal meaning, but many producers also use terms like “natural” and “free-range,” which don’t. What do these terms mean to producers and what do they mean to consumers? I have heard veterinarians dismiss these terms as meaningless, but Austin describes a tendency among organic producers to view their ecocentric model of farm management as a way of managing their animals “naturally.” In an ecocentric model, overall sustainability of the farm and interactions with the environment take priority over individual health.

If that’s the case, what are the consequences to individual health of prioritizing the environment over the individual? Austin uses as his examples dairy cows, focusing on the use of antibiotics to treat infected udders, and chickens, focusing on the use of medication for parasite infection. In both cases, he describes the strong incentives for organic farmers to withhold treatment for disease, as once an animal has been treated with an antibiotic or antiparasitic, its products (milk, meat, or eggs) can no longer be considered organic. Austin explores alternative treatments and concludes that none are effective. He notes that in Europe, use of antibiotics and antiparasitics to treat clinical disease is legal in organic production; only preventive use is banned. He advocates a change in U.S. regulations to imitate the European model, on the reasonable theory that if incentive to withhold treatment is removed, then more sick animals will be treated.

I agree! I would have been very interested to hear some statistics about how many animals go untreated on organic farms, or how far illness on these farms might be allowed to progress before animals are treated, compared farms using conventional methods. Austin doesn’t say, and I think this is because no one really knows. It would be an interesting line of research, and possibly a necessary one if we want to get the American public fired up to support change in the current regulations. If a video of a sick cow being moved by a forklift was invigorating to the animal welfare community, maybe some videos of untreated sick animals on organic farms would be as well.

Check out the paper. It’s an interesting read.

Perceptions of snoring pugs

Researchers at a veterinary hospital were studying the prevalence of particular diseases in different breeds of dogs, and owner recognition of the diseases. They asked the owners of 285 dogs about a particular respiratory disease. 31 dogs met the criteria for the disease, and 19 had difficulty breathing according to the owners’ answers, but only 18 (of 31) owners believed that their dogs had respiratory disease. So far, so good — veterinarians need to educate better about this disease (and I’m here today to help with that). But the really interesting part is this: of the 17 dogs that had been referred to the hospital for suspicion of this exact disease, 7 owners (41%) stated that their dogs did not have respiratory disease — the disease that they were seeing a specialist for that day.

What is the disease? Brachycephalic obstructive airway syndrome (BOAS). This is a common disease among the flat-faced dog breeds, especially pugs, bulldogs, and Pekinese. These dogs have been bred to have flatter, more human-like faces, but as their muzzles have shortened, the soft tissue in the back of their mouths has not. They are left with excess tissue in the back of their throats which significantly blocks airflow (elongated soft palate). They also often have tiny nostrils (stenotic nares). These two physiologic handicaps together cause so much resistance in the path of the air moving from nose to lung that eventually the inside of their throat can become further deformed, increasing the resistance to airflow (everted laryngeal saccules).

Points used to measure the length of a dog’s skull (A,B) and muzzle (B,C). Compare the labrador retriever’s B,C length (top) with the pug’s (bottom).

So yes, this makes it hard to breathe, and if you want to see for yourself, try this experiment: squeeze your nostrils shut so that only about 1/4 of the normal space is left. Keep your mouth closed. Now exercise. And imagine breathing that way for your entire life.

I think it is probably a lot like when you are very congested and trying to sleep: you can’t sleep with your mouth open, but when you close it you can’t get enough oxygen. A lot of these dogs constantly pant in order to get enough air. 100% of them snore at night, and 32% snore while awake, compared to 21% of normal dogs who snore at night. The noises pugs make are certainly unusual — when I walk in to a veterinary clinic I know if a pug is in the room before I see it. A lot of people find these noises cute. What these researchers found surprising was how many people found the noises normal.

Normal for the breed, that is; the owners who stated that their dogs did not have respiratory disease wrote things like “No, but he is a pug!” Breed-specific problems have come to be considered not problems simply because they are expected. I have had veterinarians tell me that they recommend dogs for corrective surgery for BOAS simply based on the breed. When I asked one surgeon what criteria she had used to recommend surgery for our six month old patient, she replied, “He’s a bulldog.” (Those owners agreed to the surgery, but initially hesitated because they were concerned that widening their dog’s nostrils would change his appearance.)

Where to place the blame? I feel that veterinarians are doing very little to make this problem clear to owners (as much as we will shake our heads in despair in the back room when the owner is not around). One of my daily tasks in veterinary school was to write up an assessment of the health status of my patients. If I had a flat-faced patient with loud breathing, I would certainly note that in my list of physical characteristics. But I did not include it in my list of problems which needed to be addressed. The dog was invariably in the hospital for some other problem, and I knew that I’d be considered obnoxious, if not a troublemaker, if I called out this other problem which everyone was aware of and no one was trying to address.

I’ll do better in the future, and I hope that other veterinarians will start talking more to their clients about the reality of the problems these dogs face. It is upsetting that a veterinarian can refer an owner to a specialist for dealing with BOAS without making clear to the owner that the dog has a disease. Just because the dog has always had the problem, and just because the problem was intentionally selected for, does not mean it is not a disease. Dog owners need to start pushing back on breeders and buying only puppies who breathe quietly (awake and asleep!). Breeders need to start selecting for somewhat longer muzzles, long enough that dogs can breathe properly.

And the dogs who are already out there with breathing problems? If your flat-faced dog makes loud noises when he breathes, particularly when he is awake, he probably isn’t breathing comfortably. If your primary care veterinarian doesn’t think your dog has a problem, get a second opinion from a veterinary surgeon (someone who preferably has a title ending in “DACVS” to indicate that they are a surgical specialist). Dogs who can’t breathe comfortably don’t have a good quality of life. It seems obvious, but sometimes we need to say it.


Packer, R. (2012). Do dog owners perceive the clinical signs related to conformational inherited disorders as 'normal' for the breed? A potential constraint to improving canine welfare, Animal Welfare, 21 (1s) DOI: 10.7120/096272812X13345905673809

The Dairy Welfare Farm Tour, part 2: growing calves

(Continued from The Dairy Welfare Farm Tour, part 1.)

We pulled up at the farm where Dr. Mulain performs a weekly herd check every Tuesday morning, checking a bunch of potentially pregnant cows to determine if they are in fact knocked up. Lots of rectals! While we were sticking our arms inside of cows, Dr. Mulain pointed out that we can tell a lot about how cows are handled by how they respond to us. When you are in the middle of a herd of cows, do they panic and run away? They have probably not had great experiences with humans in the past. Do they come up to you, sniff you, lick you, follow you around, and generally make pains of themselves? It is likely they have had good experiences with humans in the past. These cows were like mosquitoes; I was literally batting them away. When I yelled “Shoo!” and waved my arms at them, they stared at me blankly. They had clearly been handled gently by the farm workers.

After the herd check was over, we visited the calves in their hutches. This farm used the conventional method of raising calves: separate them from their mothers immediately and raise them in tiny hutches that look like plastic igloos. The hutches are typically clustered together in a little village, but must be far enough apart that the calves can't touch each other. Calves typically live in individual hutches like this from birth until shortly after weaning.

Although the little village of hutches is adorable, something in me rebels at the idea of raising social animals in isolation like this, where they cannot touch another member of their species. Why do we do it? We raise them separately to keep them cleaner. Calves inevitably have diarrhea, and if you raise them together, that will be the method of transmission of all sorts of (sometimes fatal) diseases. So it is safer for them to keep them separate until their immune systems mature. Also, taking them away from their mothers leaves more milk for sale (they are most often raised on milk replacer, which costs less than the real stuff).

This method of raising calves is the conventionally accepted one in the industry, and is what we were taught about in our large animal medicine class. But Dr. Mulain told us about a new method that some farmers are trying, and took us to see it in practice on other farms. You can apparently raise healthy calves in groups if you free feed them, in other words, let them consume as much milk, or replacer, as they want. With the extra nutrition, their immune systems are more robust. The calves grow faster, too.

Dr. Mulain said wryly, “Remember, this isn't abnormally fast growth. This is normal growth.” His perspective is that the dairy industry has been feeding calves smaller amounts to cut costs, but this has resulted in weakened immune systems and smaller calves. With time, we have come to see these weakened immune systems as normal, but they are not.

We saw one farm in which calves had access to a big bucket of milk replacer. They were living in a group of just a few calves. Another farm had turned about ten calves in with three lactating cows. Cows chosen for nanny duty were the low producing cows — the ones later in their lactation cycles who produce less milk. It is amazing that we have bred cows to produce so much milk that a low producing cow can easily support three calves! The calves didn’t bond with a particular cow, but just partook of the nearest milk bar. Because these were low producing cows, they were by definition late in their lactation cycle, so it is unlikely that any of the calves were actually theirs.

This approach to raising calves feels emotionally better to me. I don’t like to see babies of social species raised out of physical contact with other social animals. So the approach to raising calves in groups is appealing. Time will tell if it works well, producing healthy calves and saving farmers money.

The Dairy Welfare Farm Tour, part 1: humane handling certification

I woke up at 6 am, and it felt luxuriously late after my 5:30 am wake up the previous morning. This was the morning of the second of my two electives during third year elective week. The day before I had spent the day in a small animal emergency room. Today, I would ride with a cow vet and some other students, seeing different farms and comparing how they care for their cows. It was chilly, but warmer than it had been, and the weather site I checked suggested a warm afternoon. I dithered between my insulated coveralls and the regular ones, before opting for the regular ones.

Two other students met me at my house, and we made the hour’s drive to the Ambulatory clinic together, where we met the fourth member of our little group. At the clinic, we hovered somewhat aimlessly in the break room and made small talk with the fourth year students there who were on a week of Ambulatory rotation. After a few minutes, Dr. Maolain, who was running the farm tour, walked through and asked us if we all had our boots. We were scornful. Did he really think we would have shown up for a day on farm without boots? (The boots are of course much appreciated when you are walking through a soup of cow manure. They are also more scrubbable than street shoes — easier to hose off and soap before leaving a farm, so that you do not carry infectious disease to the next farm you visit.)

We piled into Dr. Maolain’s truck, a tight fit, and headed out. We had a forty minute drive to our first stop, during which time Dr. Maolain taught us, via a mixture of the Socratic method and long rambles, about the state of third party certification for humane handling of dairy cows.
I have written about this before, but here is the situation in a nutshell: consumers want to buy milk from producers who treat their cows well. Some consumers purchase organic milk for this reason. However, organic certification in no way guarantees cow welfare. Currently, the only way to be sure you’re supporting a producer who treats his cows well is to buy the milk directly from an individual farmer whose practices you know. This is impractical, to say the least, especially for the average consumer who may not know enough about dairy practices to be able to identify those which result in good cow welfare.

One solution to this problem could be third party certification. An organization like American Humane offers certification to farmers for a fee. Consumers then buy milk from producers who are certified by this third party.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t work either! There is no system in place to allow individual producers to have their milk pasteurized and marketed separately. The milk truck collects milk from multiple farms before delivery to the processing plant: if one farmer is certified and another is not, the milk nevertheless mixes together on the truck and in the plant. There is no way to process certified milk separately so that it can be marketed separately.

What’s the solution to that? More processing plants? Maybe, but they are expensive to build, and I don’t know all the relevant issues involved in their funding and construction. It is an interesting problem. I know the public has an interest in milk from humanely raised cows, and it frustrates me that the market systems are not in place to deliver it to them.

(More to come...)

Shades of grey in the ethics of animal research

This afternoon I read Animal Research: Animal Welfare vs. Animal Rights, by Walter Jessen of Highlight Health. The article addressed some myths about animal research, explaining why it is necessary and what we do to maintain the health of research animals. In many ways, it was a typical volley in the debate between scientists and animal rightists about animal research.

I have issues with the arguments used by both sides of this debate, which miss a lot of shades of gray in the question about whether it is wrong to perform research on animals. The article ably addressed some of the myths and mis-framings presented by the animal rights side of the debate. That is important communication to provide. However, it introduced some mis-framings of its own, and I’d like to address those here, while recognizing that the article is completely factually correct.

Animal rights vs. animal welfare

Jessen starts by defining his terms (“animal rights” and “animal welfare”). He chooses the most extreme position for animal rightists, describing them as people who “reject eating any animal as food, abstain from taking any over-the-counter drug and/or prescription medication, and refuse all vaccinations and/or medical treatment.”

In my experience, that description characterizes a truly extreme group. It leaves out those who take a more graded approach, such as a belief that animals shouldn’t be eaten, but may be used in some forms of research. This may be an attempt to frame the argument in terms of scientists versus fringe crazies. What about the people who fit in neither camp? Isn’t that where most of us lie, accepting medical treatments but feeling somewhat uncomfortable about animal research? Can’t scientists address that discomfort without resorting to the suggestion that anyone who feels that animal research may be wrong must reject all medical treatment?

Immoral and necessary

Jessen argues that animal research is necessary because “animal systems provide invaluable and irreplaceable insights into human systems.” That is completely true (and I would add that animal research provides invaluable and irreplaceable insights into animal systems as well. It isn’t only useful in human medicine). Jessen doesn’t go so far as to say that because animal research is necessary, choosing to perform it is also moral. But that seems to me to be the point of his article: we don’t need to feel bad about this; this is necessary. But just because something is necessary doesn’t mean we should be completely comfortable with it. Can’t animal research be both necessary and immoral? Can’t we choose as a society to do it without absolving ourselves from feeling disturbed by it? When we read about an interesting experiment that involved animal research, can’t we think how cool the results are and how we feel sorry for the animals?

A mountain climber is stranded in a snowstorm. Help won’t come for days. His companion dies. Our hero eats his friend so that he won’t starve to death himself. Immoral, but necessary. He does it, and he knows it is the right choice. But he feels terrible about doing it. Perhaps he will take care to provide for his companion’s children.

A single mother in a country that does not have welfare loses her job through no fault of her own. Her savings are gone. She loses her home. Living on the street, she steals food to give her children. She knows it is wrong, and she feels bad about it. But she also knows it’s the right choice.

Recently I had elective surgery. After the surgery, I chose to use painkillers that surely had been tested on animals. I know that animal research is wrong, and I feel bad about it. But I also know that it is the right choice to continue to learn about how to keep humans and animals healthy.

The debate about animal research is often presented as two choices: it’s wrong, and we should never do it; or it is necessary, so we shouldn’t feel bad about it. We should feel bad about it. And we should continue to do it. (But we should do it somewhat differently than we do now. Read on.)

Are research animals comfortable?

Jessen writes that  “the vast majority of biomedical research does not result in significant discomfort or distress to research animals.” I think he is addressing the misconception that research animals spend the majority of their lives in a great deal of pain, and wants to make the point that they are kept mostly pain-free. However, he writes that “57 percent of all research procedures with animals involved no more than slight or momentary pain or distress.” I note that that leaves 43 percent of procedures that do involve more than momentary pain or distress. That’s a significant fraction.

He also writes that “thirty-eight percent of the research procedures employed anesthesia and post- operative painkillers.” I should hope that painkillers were employed where indicated! But I also would like to point out that painkillers don’t remove all the pain. Would you choose to undergo an unnecessary surgery if you were offered the best possible pain relief afterwards? What if you were offered the surgery but had to recover in a hospital where no one spoke your language, and you had no way of requesting more painkillers if the standard dose was not enough for you?

I’d also like to move the discussion away from pain, which both sides of the debate are (in my opinion) overly focused on. Pain is sometimes necessary in research. What isn’t always necessary is keeping animals in cramped quarters lacking environmental enrichment. I have seen facilities where the mice and rats lack even an exercise wheel, and where there are multiple animals in a cage so small I wouldn’t feel comfortable keeping even a single pet rat in it. That’s not necessary; that’s a choice, due to the fact that more space and more enrichment is expensive.

Again, I don’t think the argument has to be so black and white. We don’t have to argue that research animals are in constant, excruciating pain (because that is untrue). But we can also admit that research animals do often (possibly 43 percent of the time) experience pain as part of the research process. We can feel bad about that, but still do it, because the alternative is so unthinkable. And we can accept that if we’re asking these animals to give up their lives, we don’t also need to ask them to live in such unenriched environments. They require mental stimulation just like we do. If they were so different from us, we wouldn’t be using them to model us.

The indifference of researchers

Jessen argues that “researchers are deeply concerned about the condition of the animals they study.” I agree. Researchers aren’t unfeeling monsters, and I wish that the people arguing on the other side of this divide would stop trying to make them out to be.

However, I think researchers often (not always, but often) subscribe to the black and white version of this particular moral dilemma: it is necessary, so I don’t need to feel bad about it. I have every respect for and sympathy with someone who is living day in, day out with animals that they know will die at the end of the experiment. It would be easier if the cages were big enough, if the animals didn’t lack enrichment, if the painkillers were always sufficient and took away all the pain, if the animals had some place to go after non-terminal experiments. But despite my sympathy for the research community, I would like to see a little more effort on their part to address some welfare issues, and to recognize the moral difficulties inherent in animal research. I do think that it is possible to do animal research, and still sympathize with the viewpoint of people out there who find the idea of animal research disturbing. It should be disturbing. Even though it is necessary.


Moving forward

Am I saying that everyone who benefits from animal research should be guilt-stricken all the time? Of course not. That wouldn’t be very productive. I am saying we should recognize the shades of grey. And that, as a society, we should feel bad enough about animal research to make improving lab animal welfare more of a priority. More of the money that goes to research could go to making the lives of research animals more comfortable. (If a pet rat lives in a bigger cage, so should a research rat!) If they are giving their lives for us, and we recognize that that is wrong, we should also recognize that it is our responsibility to make their lives not just as pain free as possible, but as good as possible. We’re doing a decent job on the former. I don’t think we are working anywhere near hard enough on the latter.

Domesticating foxes for fun and profit

The Thoughtful Animal has been writing about domesticated foxes and has pointed out that they are commercially available.

Dude! I want one right now! For the low price of $5,950, why not?

Let’s assume the cost isn’t actually an issue. (I want one of these guys badly enough that I would probably find the money somewhere.)

It’s just like a dog, and we know all about taking care of them. It won’t be like owning an exotic animal. It will be like owning an extra cute dog.

Well, it isn’t exactly just like a dog; they aren’t closely related enough to interbreed, for example. One thing vet school has impressed upon me is that species differences jump out at you when you least expect them. We have lived with dogs for a long, long time. In fact, I will hazard a guess that veterinary medicine was practiced on them very early. We know a lot about what makes them tick. We don’t know all that much about foxes.

Well, I live just up the street from a wildlife clinic. They could provide veterinary care.

Actually, in my case, this is true. However, the approach to veterinary care at a wildlife clinic is different from the approach at a small animal veterinary clinic. Ask me again after I have done my wildlife rotation, but I imagine they are not as used in that clinic to the kind of care we expect to give to our pets. For example, I had cardiology specialists caring for my cat when she was in heart failure. They knew all about how cats respond to heart failure (differently from dogs). Cardiologists wouldn’t have the first idea about species differences in foxes, but the wildlife clinicians would be much less skilled at reading a cardiac echo. Neither would be quite able to provide complete care for a pet fox. And the number of foxes a wildlife veterinarian sees a year is much, much smaller than the number of dogs a small animal veterinarian sees a year. It would just not be the same as getting veterinary care for a dog.

My guess is that your local vet would refuse to see the fox at all, with good reason. If you know someone who owns a bird or bunny, ask them how hard it is to find a vet to see one of those animals! And if you can only find one vet who’s even willing, you will have no choice of where you get care.

This will be a young, healthy animal, so I’m not worried about veterinary care.

Are you worried about behavior?

It’s domesticated. That means it’s just like a dog.

In this case, the foxes were “domesticated” by being bred to not be afraid of humans. They weren’t bred to be good house pets, though. They have been maintained as laboratory animals since their strain was developed, living in runs. They won’t bite you. But they may chew up your house, kill your cat, pee inappropriately — actually, a dog will do any of those things. Who knows what else a fox might come up with? We don’t have all the experience with their quirks that we have with dogs.

I’ll take him to a good trainer and make sure none of those things happen.

I’m betting you will have trouble finding a dog obedience class which will allow him in. You will have to shell out for private lessons.

Well, I’ll get him lots of exercise. A tired fox is a good fox.

Who will play with him? Will you take him to the dog park? Will his unusual smell and unusual body language (I’m just guessing here that a different species speaks a slightly different language) make it harder for dogs to accept him? Is it OK with you that he will never see another member of his species for the rest of his life?

And what will you feed him?

Dog food, of course.

There’s a lot of debate over what’s healthy food even for a dog these days. Again, we don’t know as much about foxes. And remember, they are only maintained in the laboratory for a few years, so the researchers don’t have experience with what is healthy for them as they get old. How hard is it to feed an animal right? Well, before we discovered that taurine was a required nutrient for cats, cats which ate commercial cat food tended to go blind as they got older. What might we be missing in a fox’s diet?

We take a lot of things for granted with dogs, and even so, they can be a big commitment. I really, really want a domesticated silver fox. But it is not a good idea for me or anyone else to have one. We have plenty of species of domesticated animals already which make excellent pets about which we know a great deal. We have a much better chance of providing good husbandry for a dog or cat. The foxes make for fascinating research animals, and I am glad that they exist (though I am sad that they have to live in a laboratory in order to be studied). But turning them into pets is not a responsible thing to do.

The assessment of emotional expression in dogs

“The assessment of emotional expression in dogs using a Free Choice Profiling methodology” (Walker et. al., Animal Welfare).

Do different people tend to have overlapping or at least complementary ways of describing dog behaviors? And if they do, can a computer put together a behavior scale out of those descriptions, even without any understanding of what’s actually being described? Put a different way: Can we describe a group of observations of dog behavior using a fancy statistical technique which is hard for Dog Zombies to understand? Our intrepid investigators put a bunch of college women together with some dog videos and applied a lot of statistical processing to find out.

The mammals

The people: eighteen undergraduate women with varying levels of familiarity with dogs, but all currently studying animal behavior. (At a guess, they were all students in a class taught by one of the investigators.)

The dogs: ten Beagles trained as customs dogs.

The setup: The 18 women sit in a movie theater. They watch video clips of the beagles. They write down words that come to mind as useful in describing the dogs.

At the end of this first session, they hand in their terms. They then are sat down again (it doesn’t say if they’re all together in the movie theater this time, but I imagine them at individual desks for some reason) with the list of terms that they had generated. Each person gets their own list; there’s no collation yet at this point. They watch some of the beagle videos again. (I sympathize. I have watched a lot of Dog TV lately.) They rate each dog against each term using a visual analog scale. That’s a line, from zero to lots, and you put a mark on the line to rate the dog.

So if I were to have the word “energetic,” and be asked to rate my dog Jack at this moment, I’d draw a line and put a mark on it to rate how far along the “energetic” scale he is. Jack is currently fully lateral on the floor and twitching, so I’d put the mark on the far left of the scale. If you then asked me to rate him for “cute,” I’d put the mark on the far right. For “red,” I’d put the mark somewhere in the middle, based on my personal assessment of how red he is on the scale of blond to brick. (Jack’s sort of a strawberry blond, so the marker would be a little left of center.) So these are very individual sorts of assessments.

The computers

The investigators then took all this data and turned it into numbers by measuring the distance of the marks in terms of millimeters. And they handed it to a computer, which performed Generalized Procrustes Analysis (GPA) on it. I love that this technique involves the name “Procrustes.”

So, this is where I sort of want a companion blogger who is an expert in statistics to take over for a few paragraphs. I am not an expert in statistics by any means, but I will give explaining what happens next a shot. Please take it all with a grain of salt; I may be completely inaccurate.

Basically, I imagine the computer spreading all these scores out and seeing which ones match. I think the idea is, if one dog gets a 3-4 mm score by lots of observers, then the computer guesses that those people are all measuring the same thing with those particular terms. The computer checks to see if other dogs also rank similarly with those terms. So if one dog scores 1-2 mm on Term 2 from Observer 5, and Term 3 from Observer 7, then Observer 5’s Term 2 might be describing the same thing as Observer 7’s Term 3. It would then be worth checking a second dog. Is its score on Observer 5’s Term 2 (say 4.4 mm) similar to its score on Term 3 from Observer 7 (say 4.6 mm)? If so, and if other dogs are also similar, those two terms might be describing the same thing (“nervous” vs “shy,” for example).

In addition to seeing which terms might be measuring the same thing, the computer is also trying to figure out which terms are related to each other in other ways. If this dog scores high on Term 1 from Observer 13, does he also score low on Term 3 from Observer 13? Maybe those terms are opposites. (“Outgoing” vs “shy,” for example.) If this dog scores very high on Term 2 from Observer 10, does he also score mid-range to high on Term 7 from Observer 12? Maybe those terms have some sort of relationship, but aren’t exactly the same thing (“outgoing” vs “friendly,” for example).

From all this, the computer comes up with “dimensions.” Although the eighteen women had just ranked each dog in terms of “how much of this term does it have?”, the dimensions are paired, so that a group of positive terms are at one end, and a group of negative (opposite) terms are at the other. In this case, they got three dimensions:

• playful/happy/confident versus nervous/unsure/tense
• alert/inquisitive/investigative versus attention-seeking/quiet/unsure
• playful/nervous/boisterous versus calm/relaxed/confident

So each of the observers’ original terms were allocated to one (or more?) of these dimensions. “GPA thus transforms the 18 different dog-scoring configurations into one multidimensional consensus profile, entirely independently of any interpretation by the experimenter.” In other words, a computer has done all the assignments, and it does not understand what the terms mean. The assignments were done in the complete absence of semantics. There is a point in the process where a check for “satisfactory semantic convergence between observer word charts” is done, checking to see if the grouped terms are reasonable concepts to put together. It’s not clear if a computer or a human performs that check. (How would a computer do it? Using a digital thesaurus? I love the idea of a database with weights for how similar each English word is to every other English word.)

They assure us that the eighteen observers, when their terms are applied to this scale, score the dogs very similarly. I started to lose the thread of the statistics at this point, but they did helpfully provide an image of a bullseye. Thirteen of the observers were inside the bullseye (scored dogs similarly). Five were outside.

The meaning

So what have they actually done here? It looks like these observers tended to pick up on similar traits. So if you show a dog to a bunch of people, they will have similar ideas about it. They may use different words, but whether they say “nervous” or “shy,” they will have comparable amounts of that trait in mind. And that is really interesting.

Of course, I also want to say what this is not. These people may all agree about how shy a dog is, but that doesn’t mean that they are any good at telling if the dog actually is shy. The scale generated here, and the scores these observers made, has not been tested for its predictive power. I would love to see something like a test of the scale on dogs placed in new and strange surroundings. Can a dog’s score on this scale predict how it will respond to a friendly stranger, or how much it will explore versus hide in a strange room? I am not criticizing this technique; it doesn’t claim to answer that question. But I think it’s worth keeping in mind what its limits are.

It does claim to tell us whether different people have similar perceptions, and I would love to see it tested on people of different cultural backgrounds, especially people who speak different native languages. The terms that the observers chose didn’t have to be the same in order to be grouped together, but they seemed to all choose similar concepts. Would people who were the native speakers of a variety of languages have such a strong overlap of chosen concepts?

And, as the researchers point out, the observers were all women. Is it possible that women tend to have similar perceptions about dogs, versus the perceptions men tend to have? Do women assign different levels of importance to different behavioral traits, and are they therefore more likely to choose different traits as important enough to score?

Looking more closely at the dimensions that were constructed causes me to suspect that the dimensions are indeed pulling together different traits. For example, one dimension has “alert/inquisitive/investigative” vs “attention-seeking/quiet/unsure.” Outgoing dogs on one side, insecure dogs on the other — makes sense. But the insecure dogs are also “attention-seeking.” That makes sense logically, as insecure dogs may be more likely to seek reassurance from humans. However, it is a somewhat different trait than “quiet.” In fact, I can imagine that a quiet dog might tend to be less attention-seeking, by virtue of being, well, quiet. So it’s interesting that these traits were pulled together into one dimension, even when people who labeled dogs “quiet” probably didn’t necessarily think of those same dogs as “attention-seeking.” Different behaviors, but one interpretation that pulls them together.

On the other hand, you get the “playful/nervous/boisterous” dimension. That may well be different characterizations of the same trait — high energy. Some people think high energy is good (playfulness) and some think it’s less good (boisterousness, what we call “freshness” in this house). But it’s the same thing, whether it’s something you look for in a family pet or not. So it’s also interesting that these traits were pulled together.

I’m particularly impressed that the computer was able to correctly pull positive and negative ends of dimensions together. It was able to determine that “nervous” is the opposite of “confident,” even though no human ever explicitly told it that. Good job.

On the other hand, it did less well on other terms. Looking at the table which details which terms were pulled into which dimensions, I have to say: “aloof/disinterested” is on the same end of dimension 2 with “curious/explorative”? Really, computer?

And there is significant overlap between the dimensions. “Nervous” and “unsure” each show up in two different dimensions. Lots of other terms overlap, too. If there’s so much overlap, shouldn’t the dimensions be constructed differently, more cleanly, somehow?

The investigators suggest that the resulting scale does describe real behavior, because “the dogs are distributed reasonably evenly over the three dimensions, which suggests that these dimensions effectively characterise observed variances in behavioral expression.” I’m not sure about this argument. Wouldn’t you expect to see clumping of some behaviors? Some things that aren’t desirable for customs dogs, or are unusual for beagles, but show up anyways? Why should behaviors be naturally evenly distributed?

So what does it mean? Could it just mean that computers are able to find meaning in any data set? All that semantic overlap makes me feel “nervous” and “unsure.” What are they really describing?

The investigators address this (I think) in some beautiful but very dense prose: “descriptors are not meant to designate separate, sharply delineated, causal factors, but complementary, overlapping, mutually-enhancing aspects of the whole organism. Rather than be confused by the multitude of terms, the idea is to perceive the meaning expressed through them.” That’s actually really lovely, but I am not yet sure it really works.

The future directions

So what’s next? The investigators suggest using this FCP methodology in research into dog welfare. Sounds like a good idea to me. It’s notoriously hard to really tell if an animal’s welfare is good or not, so new tools might be helpful.

However, I note that the reason it’s hard to evaluate welfare is that our prejudices get in the way. We keep thinking what we would like in a particular situation, without having any way to understand what the animal would like. Good welfare science finds ways to ask the animal. FCP seems to me to be only about asking the human. But maybe it can be used to find new axes we hadn’t considered scoring dogs on, and then we can test what those axes correlate with. Good next steps would be comparing how a dog scores on this scale to physiologic parameters, like cortisol level, immune system function, sympathetic nervous system activation, and the like.

Also, as the researchers note, this method should be tested on a variety of breeds. Although they don’t specify this, I’d like to see the method tested on a group containing a variety of breeds. Just performing multiple tests on groups each containing a single breed doesn’t tell you if this method is any good at handling increased variability. Different breeds do have their different dialects; would that change this method’s effectiveness?

This article was a really fun read. Does it tell us more about dogs, or more about humans? I’m not yet sure how the approach will be used in dog welfare, but the article has some good ideas for things to try out. Good luck to them!

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J Walker, A Dale, N Waran, N Clarke, M Farnworth, & F Wemelsfelder (2010). The assessment of emotional expression in dogs using a Free Choice Profiling methodology
Animal Welfare, 19, 75-84

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