By Karin Brulliard
Yonder, 11 weeks old and 6.8kg, had two choices. In a white-walled room at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina, the wiggly Labrador mix faced a neon green squeaky squid toy and an upturned bowl topped with a piece of kibble.
“Okay!” a researcher said perkily, and the puppy didn’t hesitate - she scurried straight toward the treat.
Yonder was bred for an exceptionally difficult job: to become a service dog for a human who needs her - by alerting to a doorbell or pulling a wheelchair while remaining composed and quiet, in crowds or on trails, and never chasing squirrels. Whether she’s capable was being gleaned in this room, with tests aimed at measuring her problem-solving, self-control and communications with people.
That was the hope, at least, for Yonder and her six furry cohorts. Early this year, they were the newest subjects of a $1.6 million (R28m) study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, to help untangle the question: what makes a successful service dog - and can it be predicted in a puppy? At stake is a lot of money and a lot of dogs. Our understanding of canines’ unique skills has fuelled interest in service dogs among people with disabilities and the military, but it has also spawned scammers and years-long waiting-lists. Although large organisations have honed the use of breeding and training to produce calm and obedient dogs, only about 50% make the cut, taking up to about two years and thousands in costs on each dog.
That is where another booming field - canine science - is coming in. Over two decades, the study of dog minds, genetics and behaviour has given rise to laboratories at universities around the world. And in service dog organisations, with their controlled breeding and noble missions, canine researchers see ideal study populations.
“We’re trying to understand the dog side of the leash and how we get more dogs helping more people,” said Brian Hare, an evolutionary anthropologist who is co-director of the Duke Canine Cognition Centre, which is studying puppies bred by the California- based Canine Companions for Independence (CCI).
Some discoveries have been made. Hare and a colleague found that successful service dogs more often make eye contact with a person when facing an unsolvable task and use inferential reasoning to find a hidden reward. Another study concluded that puppies with “helicopter moms” are more likely to fail as guide dogs, while young dogs that quickly solve a multistep problem are more likely to succeed.
One canine geneticist is collecting thousands of DNA samples in a bid to pinpoint the genetic markers of star service and working dogs.
Brenda Kennedy, CCI’s director of canine health and research, said of the impact the research could have on a donor-funded group like hers, which provides dogs at no cost.
“It really comes down to numbers. Every time we increase the percentage of dogs that succeed in our programme, the more we’re going to be able to have an impact.”
That is why Yonder and her peers were enrolled in a sort of boarding school for future service dogs on the campus at Duke, which calls it “puppy kindergarten”. Pups that wash out often become pets.
The spread of Covid-19 forced Duke to close, and Yonder’s cohort was sent to live in private homes. But the research has continued with puppies being raised off-campus. In normal times, a new group of puppies arrives each semester and bunks, for 12 weeks at the Canine Cognition Centre or in dorms with students. During the day, all romp together around a puppy day care room. Outdoors is an artificial turf play area. The puppies are cared for and cuddled by student volunteers, who were given a five-hour online course about dog cognition.
The pups face 14 cognitive tests every two weeks from the time they are 8 weeks to 20 weeks old, the most rapid period of brain development. At 16 weeks, Hare said, their brains are the equivalent of a 6-year-old child’s.
Hare described a test to gauge a dog’s tendency to rely on its memory or a human’s gesture: a person hides a reward under a box as a dog watches. Then the human points to a second box, and the dog makes its choice.
“There is no right answer. And what you find is some dogs really rely on their memory, and they completely ignore you, and other dogs really listen to you. So it’s not one dog is smarter than the other,” Hare said.
When testing service dog candidates, he said: “Our challenge now is even more specific, which is, can we figure out which outcome is best for you, given your cognitive profile?”
Innate skills are not everything. To an unknown degree, environment matters, too, and another side of puppy kindergarten is a socialisation experiment. Before starting training at 18 months, most service dogs are raised in homes by individual or family “puppy raisers”. The Duke puppies are being raised around one another and a stream of humans. Any student can visit the nursery and cavort with puppies. The puppies visit paediatric patients at Duke University Hospital. Medical students perform exams on the pups, as practice for interacting with nonverbal young children.
Service dog providers have used behaviour and temperament tests - to measure fearfulness, say, or aggression - during puppyhood and training. But there’s been little large-scale data collection or consistency, researchers say.
Some providers that breed puppies also use genetics, analysing pedigrees to estimate the likelihood that a breeding pair will pass along certain traits, such as hip dysplasia or fear of thunder. By collecting this information over three decades, the New York-based Guiding Eyes for the Blind, which provides seeing-eye dogs, has raised its success rate from about 20% of puppies born to nearly 40%, said Jane Russenberger, its senior director for breeding and genetics.
But each year, about 170 puppies graduate from the programme, and about 400 applications for dogs come in, she said. Its waiting list is about 150 people long. That is why Guiding Eyes is working with Elinor Karlsson, a geneticist at the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard.
Karlsson studies the genetics of dog behaviour, and she sees working dogs - a group that includes service dogs and those that do jobs like drug detection - as key subjects, because they are mostly selected for behaviour, not looks. She hopes to discover patterns that correlate with success. She figures she needs samples from 10000 dogs to make this work; she has about 1600.
Russenberger’s bar is lower. Her hope is that Karlsson’s work will help Guiding Eyes hone its selection of breeding dogs, leading to higher graduation rates.
“I’m not out to breed couch potatoes, even though they’re lovely pets. It’s really that we want as many guide dogs as possible,” she said. “Just think of the years of savings by being able to serve more people who are blind and visually impaired.”
Washington Post