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.

The thing about shelter consulting

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about shelter consulting over the last few weeks. The thing is, shelters need help. There is a massive amount of work to do to make things better for the animals who are unlucky enough to end up in the American shelter system. Some shelters do things pretty well, some not so much, but they can all do better, and they can all benefit from the work being done by shelter medicine specialists. We have learned so much in the past decade about how to get animals out of shelters faster and how to keep them healthy while they are in there, and that information is percolating into the shelter system at an upsettingly low rate.

But how can the specialists work with the shelters to get these changes implemented? I have seen specialists offer to help shelters for free, because they are paid by animal welfare organizations and by universities to offer free consulting and extension work. The shelters accept in theory, but when the time comes for the director or the board to commit to real change, they push back. No, we’ve always done it this way. No, what you’re saying doesn't make sense to us. No, we don't think this is the right thing to do.

And why shouldn’t they? The consultants have years of expertise, but it’s hard to believe that someone who’s giving you advice really knows what they’re talking about unless you’ve seen them in action. And the staff at these shelters don’t get to see the consultants successfully helping other shelters. They just see the consultants coming in from the outside, not having worked at their shelter, not understanding their specific history, with no close personal ties to shelter staff. (Some of the shelters where these stories have played out are in small communities where everyone knows everyone and always has.) They often don’t even understand the consultants’ credentials. This one is a “doctor” but apparently not a veterinarian — what does someone with a PhD know about shelters? This one is just a "consultant" and not a veterinarian — what’s her actual experience? This one is a veterinarian, but veterinarians aren’t shelter staff, and in the staff's past experience, most veterinarians don’t know much about how shelters operate. She says she has advanced training in shelter medicine, but what does that really mean? How is it relevant to this shelter?

The consultants almost inevitably get impatient. It is hard to take the time to get to know a shelter, build ties with the staff, and introduce change at the rate at which staff can accept it. It’s hard to do that with one shelter when there are dozens more that need your help too, and you just want this one fixed so you can move on to the next one. It’s hard to take the time and accept the slow rate of change when you see animals being neglected and even abused in a shelter, with the staff not understanding that the level of animal care is unacceptable. When you truly feel that the situation in a shelter is an emergency, how can you take the time to do things right? How can you stop yourself from barging in and just getting it done? But if you do those things, you will lose the trust of the shelter staff. When is that worth losing?

Sometimes shelters actually go out of their way to invite big consultations with multiple specialists. I have seen this in universities. A shelter sends a request, and often pays for the service. A dozen or so veterinary shelter medicine specialists spend a week crawling all over the shelter. They often antagonize the staff, simply by watching and photographing them at work. The staff feel that they are being graded and judged — and they are; there's really not a way around it with this "learn everything about the shelter in one week" approach. At the end, the consultants give their findings. I have seen staff cry at the final presentation. I have seen consultants deliver massive documents, hundreds of pages long, with recommendations. No one should be surprised that these recommendations are not followed. The experience isn’t pleasant. But is there a better way?

Shelter consultants are actively seeking better ways, and while I was at a shelter medicine program, I saw the consultation procedure evolve rapidly. But I think the essential dilemma remains: how can consultants give a single shelter the time that it needs to digest change, when their job is to help many shelters? Is the process simply too labor-intensive?

One shelter director told me recently that she didn’t feel the need to work with consultants because there is so much information available directly to her now, online at Maddie's Fund and ASPCAPro and at shelter conferences like Expo. Why should she let outsiders tell her what to do when she can learn herself? There is a lot to be said for this approach. I am absolutely a fan of education, and of providing new findings to everyone who’s interested. I think that if shelter staff really own their own education, they will accept new procedures much more quickly. Personally, I’d always rather make my own decisions after understanding the problem space, rather than being told what to do by someone else. (Flashbacks to being a teenager!)

But I think that if all these available resources lead shelter staff to feel that they can do it all themselves without consultants, they are missing a valuable resource. Consultants are experts. They are immersed in this stuff. And, perhaps even more importantly, they can take a step outside of the experience of one shelter, and draw on experiences from multiple shelters, something that can be extremely difficult for staff to do. They can focus staff on their primary problem -- something staff may not even be able to recognize, due to having lived with it for so long. I visited one shelter with dogs who had been on site for years. The shelter was full of behavioral emergencies, dogs who were engaged in full blown stereotypical behavior, dogs who were terrified constantly, dogs who were aggressive to all strangers. The shelter staff couldn’t see it. The dogs were great with them.

So, does it ever work? I am going to close this pessimistic post with a video about one time when it did work. Here, the two leaders of the Maddie's Shelter Medicine Program at the University of Florida accept recognition from the city council of a nearby community for their help with that community's municipal shelter. Watching this video made my heart warm. The councillor presenting the award listed accomplishments I never would have expected a politician to recognize as important. Maybe it is all possible. May we all find a way to work with shelters, not against them. And may shelters find a way to work with us.

Designing stress studies, part 3: how do you get the pee?

Having discussed how to choose what substance to test for cortisol (blood, saliva, urine, feces, hair), and how to get the blood or saliva, I now move on to how to collect the —

Urine

I don’t have any personal experience with collecting urine for stress studies. How hard can it be, though, right? I certainly was sent to collect urine from patients fairly frequently as a vet student, and have fond memories of chasing male dogs around a yard with a cup while they would spray just two or three drops at a time. The best vet clinics have long-handled soup ladles which you can use to collect the pee. I have certainly never used my own soup ladle to collect pee from my own dogs to take in for analysis when they were doing poorly.

One of my professors this past semester analyzed estrogen in baboon urine. Apparently one waits on the ground while the baboon is in a tree and watches. Eventually the baboon pees out of the tree. It falls on the ground and voila. Confused, I asked, “But doesn’t it soak into the ground? How do you collect it?” She explained that usually it fell onto a leaf and you could use a syringe to get it from there. I thought to myself: your world is not my world.

Getting pee from cats is a whole separate story. You provide them with a litter box with nonabsorbable pellets, and collect the pee from that. It sounds simple in practice, but in my experience many cats will refuse to pee on a non-absorbable surface.

Of course, if all else fails, you can extract urine directly from the bladder of a dog or cat using a needle. This procedure, called a cystocentesis, obviously requires trained personnel, who may not be available to all studies.

No post on pee would be complete without input from the queen of pee, Julie Hecht. When asked, Julie had quite a bit of advice about urine collection in dogs. She pointed out that when the study in question is being performed using laboratory animals rather than pets, you can teach the dogs to pee on command. This is super convenient, but you’re less likely to have that option with pet dogs. She listed some pitfalls that she found with colleting pee from pet dogs:

• Timing! If you need to collect pee before and after the particular event that you’re studying, it is problematic if the animal doesn’t feel the need to go at the right time.
• If you are out walking with the owner and the dog, try not to act weird. Dogs notice when you act weird. Then they don’t feel like peeing. So make casual conversation, even though all you are thinking about is collecting that lovely, lovely pee.
• Wind sucks. Wear plastic gloves.
• If a dog has a lot of fur, finding the urine stream can be hard. She says succinctly: “That stinks.”

So that is the lowdown on pee collection, and the conclusion of my series on designing stress studies!

Designing stress studies, part 2: how do you get your sample?

I recently posted about how to choose what bodily substance to use to test for cortisol in a stress study: blood, saliva, urine, feces, or hair. Once you have your substance of choice, though, you have to actually extract it from the dog. This can present more or fewer challenges, you know, depending.

Blood

When people first started measuring cortisol, they used blood to do it. Blood is where cortisol shows up first. All the other substances that we measure cortisol in have had their cortisol levels compared to blood cortisol levels, to make sure that they correlate strongly. Researchers had to do studies to prove that these other substances worked for this measurement, which cost a lot of effort and money. They did this because blood is pretty hard to get hold of, in most cases. Sticking a needle in a dog will usually stress it out, and it's hard to get the blood extracted before the stress of the restraint starts changing the blood cortisol levels.

But even aside from that, sometimes a blood draw is simply out of the question. For my Master’s work, I had to cold-call hospital clients and convince them to let me enroll their dog (already in the hospital for some procedure or other, in other words, already having a bad day) in my study. If I had told them that the dog would need a blood draw too, I guarantee that most of them would have said no.

In a comment on the previous post in this series, Tegan pointed out that animals can be trained to submit calmly to blood draws. For some studies, this approach would be invaluable. For my study, again, it wouldn’t have worked. Training an animal to accept a needle is an arduous process, and I had access to those dogs once, on one night. For most shelter dog studies, this would also be an impossible hurdle. But it’s a pretty cool thing to do, if you can do it.

I wish I had a video of another approach to stress-free blood draws. I have seen other vets slide a needle into the lateral saphenous vein, the vein that bulges out of the side of a dog’s hind leg just above the hock. If the dog is distracted (say by someone feeding it), a competent venipuncturist can get it done using this vein with little to no stress. I have seen this technique used in shelter dogs who would not allow restraint for a more traditional draw. But it takes a dog with short, smooth fur and a particularly lovely bulgey vein. It does not work in little dogs. And it definitely requires a competent person to do the draw. After a few years of practice in blood draws, I was just getting to the point during my internship where I could do this one. There can’t be too much poking around to find the vein, or the game is up.

(I did find a video of a technician drawing from the lateral saphenous of a dog who is lying on his side, with an assistant holding off. This is the same vein as the one I am talking about, but in the procedure I’ve seen, the dog can be standing and you actually don’t need someone else to hold off the vein. You come at the vein from above, not below, in a standing dog. Just in case any of you blood-drawers out there want to try this yourself.)

Since blood was such a pain to get, people started trying other substances, figuring anything had to be easier than a blood draw.

Saliva

Saliva is now used much more often than blood in human cortisol studies. You hand a person a cup and they drool into it. No needles, no added stress. Dogs are not so easy. You can’t ask a dog to drool into a cup; you have to get the drool out yourself.

For my study, I used Sorbettes, also known as eye sponges. The instructions say to put one Sorbette into the dog’s mouth for 30-60 seconds, and voila, it has enough saliva on it for an assay. You then put the Sorbette into a tube and spin the tube in a centrifuge to get the saliva out. You only need 25µg, which is hardly anything! What could go wrong.

Sorbettes

First of all, when you are analyzing the saliva later on, you use 25µg per well in the plate of saliva samples, and you get one cortisol value per well. But it turns out that the assay is fairly imprecise, and gets it wrong a decent percent of the time, sometimes close to 10% of the time. So it makes sense to use two wells per sample (now we are at 50 µg per dog). This way, if you get two very different answers for your two wells, you know that the assay went wrong and not to use one of the samples. Wait, which sample is good and which sample is bad? To avoid that problem, just use three wells per sample (now 75µg per dog). Then you can throw out the bad one and keep the two good ones. I had to do this maybe 4-5 times total out of my 90-odd samples. Every time, I was really glad that I had three wells. With two wells I would have had to discard that sample (and that dog) from the study. With one well I would have included bad data in my results.

So 75µg is still not all that much saliva, but it turns out that it is enough to be pretty difficult to get, especially from dogs who are stressed out in a hospital. I used three Sorbettes and rolled them around in the dogs’ mouths for up to four minutes, at which point I had to stop in case the stress of restraint was affecting the cortisol levels. Even then, I had a lot of dry sponges. It was incredibly disheartening. In the end, we saved most of my samples by a) diluting them and changing our calculations, and b) showing the dogs cans of cat food to make them salivate.

I am currently engaged in an email exchange with other researchers who are having similar problems, particularly in small breed dogs and puppies. These days, the new tech to use to get saliva out of dogs is a small rope which the dog can chew on. I like that better than the little sponge-on-a-stick, which dogs could possibly break off and swallow (I had one come perilously close to doing just that). But even so, the problem of getting enough spit remains.

Could you give the dogs food? There is a study suggesting that cheese will not interfere with the cortisol assay, and would be safe to give. [1] It makes me nervous, though.

Could you condition the dogs to salivate when you present the little rope? This is currently under discussion, but some of us are concerned that messing around with the dog’s experience of sampling would invalidate the sample. It’s worth a small study to test it out, though, for sure. I hope someone does it.

By the way: I heard a story, which may be apocryphal, but I will repeat it anyways (and maybe someone out there can corroborate): supposedly a rhino salivary cortisol study used the procedure of collecting saliva with a very long-handled spoon. If true, it is awesome.

To come: urine, feces, and hair, oh my.

References

[1] Ligout S., Wright H., van Driel K., Gladwell F., Mills D.S. & Cooper J.J. (2010). Reliability of salivary cortisol measures in dogs in training context, Journal of Veterinary Behavior: Clinical Applications and Research, 5 (1) 49. DOI: 10.1016/j.jveb.2009.09.027

Designing stress studies, part 1: what do you sample?

Apparently I am an expert in designing stress studies in dogs using cortisol, because I have published one paper about it. Here are some of the words of wisdom I have to share from my extensive experience. You may also be interested in my previous post from several years ago, Why cortisol sucks as a measurement of stress. As I have so many words of wisdom to share, I am going to start with a post just on what you should sample in order to get some cortisol levels. (I intend more posts to follow. But you know how these things go.)

You can measure cortisol in blood, saliva, urine, feces, or hair. We consider the blood (plasma) measurement to be the gold standard: when the adrenals release cortisol, they release it into the blood. This is the hardest to get (you have to stick a needle into the dog) and the fastest to change. Blood cortisol starts increasing only 3 minutes after the onset of a stressor. Practically, this means that since sticking a needle into a dog is likely to stress the dog, you have to complete the blood draw (probably including catching and restraining the dog, unless it is a very mellow dog) in under 3 minutes! [1] This can be possible to do with some dogs and impossible with others. Either way, it requires someone who is very competent at blood draws.

After cortisol is released into the blood, it diffuses into the saliva. This process takes about a minute, so you should collect the saliva less than 4 minutes after you stress the dog by restraining it. [1] If the dog really doesn’t mind the restraint, you can take longer, but I found that sticking things in a dog’s mouth to collect saliva tended to get them excited. In a hospital, just walking into the dog’s run got most dogs excited!

Blood and saliva are the best ways to measure the immediate response to a stressor: take a baseline measurement (in under 3-4 minutes), stress the dog, wait some period of time, then take the post-stress measurement (in under 3-4 minutes, in order to be sure you’re measuring the correct stressor). Taking a single measurement of blood or saliva is not going to tell you as much: there is no known baseline of cortisol for any species, including dogs. It varies too much hour to hour, not to mention that some individuals just start at a different level when they are unstressed. [2]

So take one sample before the stressor starts. After the stressor starts, how long do you wait to sample again? Definitely the same amount of time for each dog. Studies have mapped the time course of cortisol’s rise and fall after a stressor: it seems to go up for an hour or so and then come back down [3]. This is almost certainly dependent on the stressor, of course. My personal rule of thumb is that 20 minutes is a good amount of time to wait to make sure that the cortisol levels have come up enough to be a good reflection of the dog’s reaction to the stressor you’re measuring. (So, just to be super clear: the 3-4 minute rule is just about the beginning of the rise in cortisol levels. The rise will continue for a while.)

If you are interested in how an animal is responding to a chronic stressor, like a few days or weeks in a shelter environment, you’ll be more interested in some measurement of cortisol which covers a longer time period than 20 minutes. Saliva and blood are awful for this kind of study, because their cortisol levels change so fast that you aren’t getting a good overall picture of daily cortisol level; you’re getting more of a snapshot. You could take hourly samples, but that would be difficult in terms of collection and expensive in terms of analysis.

For this kind of study, most people use urinary cortisol. Technically this is the cortisol to creatinine ratio: what is the ratio of cortisol to a standard urine molecule, creatinine? Measuring cortisol this way standardizes your measurement so that it isn’t affected by how dilute the urine is. Urinary cortisol levels will provide something like an average cortisol measurement over however long the dog has been filling up its bladder, probably about 4-6 hours. Urinary cortisol has  been used as a measurement for chronic stress in shelter dogs [4], where you are interested in average stress levels, not an immediate stress response. (For more on measuring stress in shelter dogs using cortisol, see the excellent recent review by Hennessy. [5])

One interesting study looked at elevations in urinary cortisol after dogs had had a trip to a veterinary clinic [6]. In this case, I worry that measuring a specific stressor that has a beginning and an end prior to urine collection is difficult with this method. When did the dogs start making that urine? Before they got stressed, while they were stressed, after they stopped being stressed? When you are comparing different dogs’ urinary cortisol, are you comparing the same thing?

I rarely see studies using fecal cortisol to assess stress in dogs, beyond the proof of concept study [2]; these studies are mostly done in wild animals, because poop is the only thing you can easily collect from them. I have always thought that fecal cortisol might actually be a really good approach to stress measurement in shelter dogs, though: easier to collect than urine, and measuring a longer period of time than urine (since dogs urinate more often than they defecate), so therefore presumably getting a better average. Today as I was looking on Mendeley for some references for this post, I encountered a new study using fecal cortisol to assess stress in cats. [7] Cool.

You can actually measure cortisol in hair as well! I have not seen this done in dogs. It would be a good measurement of even longer term stress levels, over months. One fascinating study measured cortisol levels in archaeological hair, to determine cortisol levels in prehistoric humans. [8]

So, in summary: saliva or blood are good samples to take for a response to an acute stressor, usually one you have control over. Take a sample before the stressor begins and then about 20 minutes after the stressor has begun. Be careful to take your samples very promptly to make sure you are not measuring the stress of the sampling. Urine and feces are better measurements for chronic stressors, and provide a several hour summary of what the cortisol has been doing in the dog’s blood. You can take just one sample of these to compare to your control group.

References

[1] Kobelt A.J., Hemsworth P.H., Barnett J.L. & Butler K.L. (2003). Sources of sampling variation in saliva cortisol in dogs, Research in Veterinary Science, 75 (2) 157-161. DOI: 10.1016/S0034-5288(03)00080-8

[2] Schatz S. & Palme R. Measurement of faecal cortisol metabolites in cats and dogs: a non-invasive method for evaluating adrenocortical function., Veterinary research communications, PMID: 11432429

[3] Vincent I.C. & Michell A.R. (1992). Comparison of cortisol concentrations in saliva and plasma of dogs, Research in Veterinary Science, 53 (3) 342-345. DOI: 10.1016/0034-5288(92)90137-Q

[4] Stephen J.M. & Ledger R.A. (2006). A longitudinal evaluation of urinary cortisol in kennelled dogs, Canis familiaris, Physiology & Behavior, 87 (5) 911-916. DOI: 10.1016/j.physbeh.2006.02.015

[5] Hennessy M.B. (2013). Using hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal measures for assessing and reducing the stress of dogs in shelters: A review, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 149 (1-4) 1-12. DOI: 10.1016/j.applanim.2013.09.004

[6] Vonderen I.K., Kooistra H.S. & Rijnberk A. (1998). Influence of Veterinary Care on the Urinary Corticoid: Creatinine Ratio in Dogs, Journal of Veterinary Internal Medicine, 12 (6) 431-435. DOI: 10.1111/j.1939-1676.1998.tb02146.x

[7] Gourkow N., LaVoy A., Dean G.A. & Phillips C.J.C. (2014). Associations of behaviour with secretory immunoglobulin A and cortisol in domestic cats during their first week in an animal shelter, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 150 55-64. DOI: 10.1016/j.applanim.2013.11.006

[8] Webb E., Thomson S., Nelson A., White C., Koren G., Rieder M. & Van Uum S. (2010). Assessing individual systemic stress through cortisol analysis of archaeological hair, Journal of Archaeological Science, 37 (4) 807-812. DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2009.11.010

Pets as gifts: should we trust adopters?

A few days ago I tweeted a link to a blog post by the ASPCA’s Dr. Emily Weiss questioning the shelter dogma that animals should not be given as gifts. In this and an earlier post, Weiss describes her research which suggests that animals given as gifts are no more likely to be given up than animals not given as gifts. That article is open access, so you can read it and judge for yourself. It is a retrospective survey, so there is room for more rigorous science about this topic, but the paper definitely opens up interesting space for discussion and further investigation.

My bosom buddy Julie Hecht posted her thoughtful response on her Dog Spies blog and then ruminated more in a letter to her blogging pen pal Mia. Julie and I got into a conversation about it on Twitter, which unfortunately led to me ranting a bit (not in a hostile way, just in a “I thought about this all so much during my shelter medicine internship and I must let you all know everything I learned!” way). I’ve been thinking since then that 140 character spurts is not the best way to get across what I was trying to say.

Here is the story we tell ourselves about animal sheltering: there are irresponsible people out there. Lots of them. And they have animals, which they don’t value as animals deserve to be valued. They bring the animals to shelters, where people who care more and know more do their best to find the animals good homes. It is the job of the shelters to place these animals in the best homes possible, and to that end they should be very careful about every placement, because animals who have been abandoned once deserve never to be abandoned again.

There is a lot that is true in this story, mainly that animals do get the short end of the stick way too often and that, once abandoned, they absolutely deserve for the rest of their lives to be catnip and sunny couches or steaks and tennis balls. What I question is whether the shelter system that we are able to provide today is equipped to manage them well for long enough to find those homes, and whether shelter workers have the information necessary to predict what kind of home a particular adopter is actually able to provide.

Many, in fact most, shelters in this country are overwhelmed and are still euthanizing adoptable animals to provide space for more animals to come in. There are shelters for which this is not true, more and more of them every year. But they are the exception, and they tend to cluster in particular parts of the country. My friends in New England were shocked when I told them that during my internship I saw shelters where euthanizing healthy kittens for space was common. So given this situation, is it better to hold on to animals until you can find them the home that you think is perfect? Or is it better to take a chance and hope that you can get that animal out of a shelter which may have a 50% kill rate?

That leads us to the question of these lovely shelters which are able to place every medically and behaviorally healthy animal, and often even some not so healthy ones. These days there are plenty of those out there too. What should they think about animals as gifts?

I think that Dr. Weiss’s article makes the point that we aren’t really sure that we have all the information necessary to judge a particular adopter. I don’t think that this particular study makes an open and shut case. But I do think it provides evidence that this is a question worth asking. What do we really know about the home any adopter is going to provide? Is it worth denying an animal a potentially loving home because you don’t trust the word of the adopter?

In her post, Julie argued that there are some cases in which animals as gifts are particularly bad ideas, giving the example of bringing a puppy home to your grandmother who does not have the energy to deal with it. I agree. My suggestion is that shelters should consider moving to more case by case evaluations of particular adoptions, rather than operating on policies alone. If an adopter makes a good case, consider the adoption, even if they are planning to do something like give the animal as a gift. Keep an open mind about what constitutes a good home. But in the case where the adoption is patently a bad idea, then yes, talk the adopter through making a better decision, and refuse the adoption if need be.

In academic shelter medicine, where we like to think about changing everything about shelters because we don’t have to actually operate shelters, there has been a lot of discussion about this kind of change. Outdoor cats? No home visit prior to adoption? No adoption fee at all? Maybe those things are all good ideas. Maybe we really don’t know much about what makes a good adoption or a good home. We guessed, for years, and that was all we could do. But there is more and more research in the shelter community these days. We are starting to apply science (SCIENCE!) to these questions. I hope we can all both keep our minds open and evaluate the incoming research rigorously. It is a fascinating time for shelter medicine and shelter research; as one academic shelter veterinary specialist said to me, when I expressed shock at the overturning of some old principle or other, “Everything is on the table.”

Happy holidays to you and your animals from me and mine!

New research on dog bite fatalities

We’ve known for a while what kinds of dogs are at risk of biting humans: not any particular breed, but dogs who are not well socialized and not well cared for. Dogs living in houses with people are much less likely to bite than dogs living outside in yards or on chains.[1, 2] So why is this new paper about dog bite fatalities important?

Patronek G.J., Sacks J.J., Delise K.M., Cleary D.V. & Marder A.R. (2013). Co-occurrence of potentially preventable factors in 256 dog bite–related fatalities in the United States (2000–2009), Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, 243 (12) 1726-1736. DOI: 10.2460/javma.243.12.1726

Unlike previous researchers, who mostly approached the question of who gets bitten and what kinds of dogs bite by combing through old records, these authors monitored current events and followed up on every dog bite related fatality that was reported, for ten years (2000-2011). They interviewed law enforcement officers who were involved with these cases. They interviewed medical examiners and coroners. They followed current news articles about cases. This is all information that becomes very difficult to find when you’re trying to learn about a dog bite fatality years after the fact. As the authors write:

In our opinion, the present study represents the most comprehensive analysis of factors...associated with dog bites to date. Personal interviews with credible investigators were successfully conducted in 221 of 256 (86.3%) cases... Law enforcement personnel provide first-hand information not reported in the media and often identified errors of fact in the media reports.

Some information was still very difficult to obtain, and the most interesting part of the paper for me may have been the description of the lengths the investigators went to in their attempts to ascertain the reliability of reports of what breed some of these dogs were. They note that “the source of breed descriptors in media reports is usually unknown” and therefore not trustworthy. Interestingly, this paper never put that comment into context, but it is hard to read it without thinking about how challenging it can be to visually identify the heritage of a mixed-breed dogs, and all the implications that this has for news stories which seem to reflexively identify aggressive mixed-breed dogs as “pit bulls.”

In the context of the debate about whether pits get disproportionately named in media reports about dog aggression, this paper provides some interesting fodder. The authors calculated how often media reports contradicted each other: 21.6% of the time in reports about incidents involving single dogs, 36.4% in incidents involving multiple dogs. How often media reports differed from the animal control officer’s report: 34.9% in incidents involving single dogs, 43.3% in incidents involving multiple dogs. In the rare cases when a pedigree or DNA testing was available, that data disagreed with media reports in 7/19 cases for single dog incidents and 7/28 cases for multiple dog incidents.

What this paper found overall was mostly a vindication of what we already believed: there is no single factor that leads a dog to bite a human. But one very important factor is whether the dog is a “family” dog or a “resident” dog. The paper provides some lovely verbiage on the difference:

A resident dog was a dog, whether confined within the dwelling or otherwise, whose owners isolated them from regular, positive human interactions. A family dog was a dog whose owners kept them in or near the home and also integrated them into the family unit, so that the dogs learned appropriate behavior through interaction with humans on a regular basis in positive and humane ways.

Later in the paper, they add:

Dogs that are deprived of human interaction or direction are denied access to accurate information about appropriate behaviors with humans. Consequently, dogs in stressful, potentially dangerous situations or when maltreated may behave in ways primarily to protect themselves.

In other words, dogs who are not given a chance to learn how to interact appropriately with humans may not act appropriately with humans.

The rest of the paper is packed with nice statistics which I am not going to try to reproduce here. Suffice to say I expect to see excerpts from it on slides in presentations about canine aggression for years to come. I do want to explicitly point out that this paper only covered dog bite fatalities, not dog bites alone; fatalities due to dog bites are extremely rare (this paper found 256 in the United States over a 10 year period), whereas dog bites alone are quite common. I think it’s easy when reading this paper to want to extrapolate all this lovely data about the causes of fatal dog bites out to the causes of non-fatal dog bites. That’s understandable but a little dangerous: it usually requires repeated bites to kill a human, so I imagine such an attack to be different from the more common single bite. But I still believe all this data is very relevant to how we keep our dogs and how to prevent bites. The message the authors give is: be responsible with dogs and they will treat you well. Don’t, and you might be on dangerous ground.

References
 
[1] Patronek, Gary J., et al. "A community approach to dog bite prevention." Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association 218.11 (2001): 1732-1749. http://avmajournals.avma.org/doi/pdf/10.2460/javma.2001.218.1732

[2] CDC. Home and recreational safety. Dog bites. http://www.cdc.gov/homeandrecreationalsafety/dog-bites/index.html