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These scientists are working to extend the life span of pet dogs—and their owners

Anti-aging drugs are being trialed in companion dogs—but the goal is to find ways to have people, as well as beloved pets, live longer, healthier lives.

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Matt Kaeberlein is what you might call a dog person. He has grown up with dogs and describes his German shepherd, Dobby, as “really special.” But Dobby is 14 years old—around 98 in dog years. “I’m very much seeing the aging process in him,” says Kaeberlein, who studies aging at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Kaeberlein is co-director of the Dog Aging Project , an ambitious research effort to track the aging process of tens of thousands of companion dogs across the US. He is one of a handful of scientists on a mission to improve, delay, and possibly reverse that process to help them live longer, healthier lives. 

The Dog Aging Project is just one of several groups seeking to understand and improve dog aging. Biotech company Loyal has plans to offer life extension for dogs. And a third group, running a project called Vaika, is looking for ways to lengthen life span through a study on retired sled dogs.

But dogs are just the beginning. Because they are a great model for humans, anti-aging or life-span-extending drugs that work for dogs could eventually benefit people, too. In the meantime, attempts to prolong the life of pet dogs can help people get onboard with the idea of life extension in humans, say researchers behind the work. “It will go a long way to convincing people that this is possible [in humans],” says Kaeberlein. “Aging is modifiable.”

For the love of dog

“I love dogs,” says Kate Creevy, who studies dog aging and infectious disease in animals at Texas A&M University in College Station. “You’re not motivated to do this work if you don’t love dogs.” Creevy, who is also chief veterinary officer of the Dog Aging Project, is one of around 40,000 people with a dog enrolled in the study.

All participants provide their pet dog’s medical history and complete detailed surveys on an annual basis. “It takes about three hours,” says Creevy. A subset of around 8,500 dogs will have their genomes sequenced, and some of these will have their hair, blood, and urine studied as well.

Smaller groups of dogs are being more closely studied for specific disorders. The team will assess 200 dogs with a form of dementia known as canine cognitive dysfunction, or CCD, for example.

The idea is to find biological clues that might help identify which dogs might be at risk of developing such diseases in the future—and eventually aid the discovery of drugs that might prevent or treat them. The team also hopes to find out which aspects of a dog’s lifestyle might help extend its “health span,” the number of years lived in good health.

“We expect to learn which types of diets, which types of exercise regimes, and which types of husbandry are associated with better long-term outcomes,” says Creevy, “so that we can do things that help them have a better quality of life into their later years.”

“I was like, man, I would love if I could slow aging in my dog.” Matt Kaeberlein, co-director of the Dog Aging Project

But the research has another goal. Kaeberlein says his “lightbulb moment” occurred around 10 years ago, when he suddenly realized that not only would such research reveal how dogs age—it might identify ways to slow the process. “I was like, man, I would love if I could slow aging in my dog,” he recalls.

The Dog Aging Project will trial potential anti-aging drugs among groups of pets. The first being studied is rapamycin , a drug that has been found to extend the lives of flies, worms, and mice in the lab. Rapamycin is thought to mimic the effects of caloric restriction, which has been shown to help multiple species live longer . The drug works by blocking a molecule called mTOR, which controls cell growth and metabolism and responds to nutrient intake. “I’m convinced that some of the interventions that we know extend life span and health span in mice will work in dogs,” says Kaeberlein. “It’s really just a matter of showing it through clinical trials.”

Kaeberlein and his colleagues are currently trialing the drug in dogs age seven or older. So far, they have only run a couple of small trials designed to test its safety. In the latest—a six-month study involving around 17 dogs that has not yet been published—the drug appeared to be safe, says Kaeberlein.

Neither trial was large enough to test the effects of the drug. But the owners of dogs given rapamycin tended to report that the dogs became more active. These owners didn’t know whether their pet was being given the drug or a placebo. “So we think that’s probably a real effect,” says Kaeberlein. But he doesn’t know exactly what the effect might be. “It could be a decrease in pain or arthritis, or it could be that the drugs make dogs hyperactive,” he says.

To get a better idea, the team is currently enrolling 580 dogs in a larger clinical trial. For one year, half the dogs will get the drug, and half will be given a placebo. The team will then follow the health of the animals for another two years. They aim to find out whether the drug can extend the animals’ life span, but they will also look at the animals’ overall health—whether they develop cancer or heart disease, for example.

Saving sled dogs

Creevy, Kaeberlein, and their colleagues aren’t the only ones seeking to extend the life span of humans’ closest furry friend. Andrei Gudkov and his colleagues are taking a different approach.

Gudkov, a professor of oncology at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, New York, has long been interested in understanding aging. “Studying this in humans is … very impractical, because usually your own life is not long enough to see the fruits of your work,” he says. “A dog’s life is sufficiently shorter than a human life, and allows us to do reasonable experiments and see the results.”

He, Katerina Adrianova, and Daria Fleyshman are the founders of Vaika, a project to study aging—and attempt to slow or reverse it—in a group of dogs that have retired from sled racing. For the last four years or so, the team has collected dogs between eight and 11 years old from kennels in northern US states and Canada. The dogs are cared for at a site in Ithaca, New York, and carefully monitored until the end of their lives.

Gudkov’s focus is on DNA damage, which accumulates in an animal with age. This damage can provide a signal to the immune system to destroy affected cells, resulting in damage to tissues. Some of this DNA damage is caused by what Gudkov calls the retrobiome—fragments of ancient viruses that have been incorporated into our DNA over millions of years of evolution.

The parts of an animal’s DNA that contain these fragments are usually kept “silent” by epigenetic markers, says Gudkov, but the system seems to break down with age. Gudkov believes that these ancient virus fragments are a major cause of age-related decline in humans and other animals, including dogs.

His team is trialing an experimental anti-aging drug that he believes will stifle the activity of the retrobiome in the 103 dogs collected so far. If the drug can prevent DNA damage, it should allow the animals to live longer, healthier lives, says Gudkov. As part of the trial, half the dogs will receive the drug, while the other half will be given a placebo, and the team will look for signs of aging in all of them. Gudkov says he has some preliminary results but doesn’t want to make them public yet.

The Vaika study is a not-for-profit endeavor, and Gudkov describes it as a “hobby.” But Celine Halioua plans to make a business out of life extension in pet dogs. Halioua, another avowed “animal person,” founded the biotech startup Loyal to “explicitly develop drugs intended to increase life span and health span.”

Like the members of the Dog Aging Project and Vaika, Halioua’s team at Loyal is looking for biological clues that might hint at which animals are prone to faster aging and which are likely to enjoy a longer, healthier life.

As well as searching for markers in blood, saliva, and urine, Halioua’s team will look at epigenetic markers—chemical groups that attach to DNA and control how genes make proteins. These patterns appear to change over a lifetime, and some scientists have developed “aging clocks” to guess an organism’s biological age from that information.  

The team at Loyal will soon be launching clinical trials of two drugs, which the company refers to as LOY-001 and LOY-002. Halioua won’t give much away about either one but says that the first is an implant aimed at larger dogs, which tend to have shorter life spans, while the second, a pill, will be trialed in older dogs of various breeds. The second drug works in a similar way to rapamycin, says Halioua.

Model behavior

If either drug works in dogs, it could also be tested in people—an eventual goal for Halioua. Dogs are an excellent model for studying human aging and any drugs that might slow or reverse it, say researchers contacted by MIT Technology Review .

Until fairly recently, most aging research has focused on yeast, worms, and mice in a lab. The work has revealed plenty of fascinating insights into how these organisms age —but the relevance of the findings to humans is up for debate.

Dogs provide a much better model for studying human aging. They are unique in sharing our environment. Pet dogs live in our homes with us, breathe the same air we do, and often share our exercise routines, to some degree. “They’re eating our food, they’re walking on our lawns with pesticide, they’re drinking whatever is in our water,” says Elaine Ostrander, who leads a team studying human and dog genetics at the National Human Genome Research Institute of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.

They also develop many of the same age-related diseases that we do. Technically, most pet dogs die as a result of euthanasia. But in most of these cases, the animals have cancer, says Kaeberlein. Dogs can also develop heart disease in later life, just like humans. There are some differences—dog brains aren’t the same as human ones, although the animals do seem to develop a form of dementia. And dogs don’t tend to develop vascular diseases as humans do.

But there are plenty of similarities. Both dogs and people experience aging of the immune system and an increased risk of kidney disease as they get older, says Kaeberlein. “It seems like at the level of individual age-related diseases, it’s very, very similar,” he says.

One main difference is that aging is a much quicker process in dogs—it happens around seven times faster than in humans, though small dogs generally live longer than larger ones. (It’s not quite the case that one year of dog life is equivalent to seven human years, however. Dogs seem to age more rapidly than humans do in their first years of life, and the pace slows as they get older.)

While this can be devastating for devoted owners, it is useful for researchers, who are able to study the effects of potential anti-aging drugs over the entire life span—something that is much more difficult to achieve in people.

Another unique feature of dogs is their incredible diversity. Only in dogs do we see such extreme differences in size and appearance within a single species. A Great Dane is around 20 times heavier than a Chihuahua, for example. A Pomeranian looks nothing like a Staffordshire bull terrier.

This variation makes the animals particularly fascinating to geneticists like Ostrander. “Dogs were only domesticated around 30,000 years ago, and most breeds have only been around since the Victorian times,” she says. It was around the mid-1800s that modern dog breeding took off, and owners bred dogs for aspects of their appearance, such as a curly coat or a flat face. Breeders essentially selected dogs with genes for these features.

Because many such modifications only occurred in the last hundred or so years, genetic differences between today’s dog breeds are likely to have a significant impact on these traits—and on the risks of certain diseases that vary between breeds.

This makes it much easier to identify genes of interest in dogs than in humans, says Ostrander. “For me as a geneticist, it’s kind of like being a kid in a candy shop,” she says. “I can figure out the main players [among genes] … then we can look at human health and human biology.”

Ostrander studies cancer, which affects different dog breeds differently. To learn more about bladder cancer, for example, she and her colleagues will study Scottish terriers and West Highland white terriers, which appear particularly prone to developing the disease. Her team will then compare the genomes of these dogs with those of other breeds that don’t get bladder cancer. “It becomes much, much easier to find those genes [linked to bladder cancer],” she says. “We don’t have a way to do that very efficiently in humans.”

Once the team has identified genes linked to a particular cancer, they inform other scientists who are working on human disease. “We can say … ‘These are the genes you want to look for [in humans] to see if you can develop targeted therapeutics,’” she says.

Researchers hope the same is true of aging—that in discovering genes linked to long, healthy life in dogs, we might also learn what might help humans live longer.

They also hope that any successful attempts at life extension in pet dogs will make human life extension more palatable. Halioua feels the field has “suffered from a branding issue” owing to outlandish claims made in the 1990s and 2000s. “Big names in the field were yelling about 1,000-year life spans and immortality,” she says. “To be clear, we’re not creating 1,000-year-old dogs.”

Not only were these claims unfounded, but they also led to concerns about economic equality. Who would get to live such a long life? And how would they be supported? “There is no societal strife caused by your dog living a few extra healthy years,” says Halioua. “It’s a nonthreatening way to introduce what is otherwise a very foreign idea.”

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• Published: 02 February 2022

An open science study of ageing in companion dogs

• Kate E. Creevy   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4169-374X 1 ,
• Joshua M. Akey   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4411-1330 2 ,
• Matt Kaeberlein   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1311-3421 3 ,
• Daniel E. L. Promislow   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7088-4495 3 , 4 &

The Dog Aging Project Consortium

Nature volume  602 ,  pages 51–57 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

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An Author Correction to this article was published on 08 August 2022

This article has been updated

The Dog Aging Project is a long-term longitudinal study of ageing in tens of thousands of companion dogs. The domestic dog is among the most variable mammal species in terms of morphology, behaviour, risk of age-related disease and life expectancy. Given that dogs share the human environment and have a sophisticated healthcare system but are much shorter-lived than people, they offer a unique opportunity to identify the genetic, environmental and lifestyle factors associated with healthy lifespan. To take advantage of this opportunity, the Dog Aging Project will collect extensive survey data, environmental information, electronic veterinary medical records, genome-wide sequence information, clinicopathology and molecular phenotypes derived from blood cells, plasma and faecal samples. Here, we describe the specific goals and design of the Dog Aging Project and discuss the potential for this open-data, community science study to greatly enhance understanding of ageing in a genetically variable, socially relevant species living in a complex environment.

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The data used to generate Fig. 1b, c are freely available for download at https://data.dogagingproject.org .

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A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05179-x

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Acknowledgements

All dog research described here, including informed owner consent, is approved by the Texas A&M University Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, under AUPs 2018-0401 CAM and 2018-0368 CAM. The DAP is supported by grant U19AG057377 from the National Institute on Aging, a part of the National Institutes of Health, and by private donations. We thank S. Moon for help in preparing figures.

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Kate E. Creevy, Brian G. Barnett, Lucy Chou, Jeremy Evans, Jonathan M. Levine, Kellyn E. McNulty, Amanda K. Tinkle & M. Katherine Tolbert

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K.E.C., M.K. and D.E.L.P. conceived of the DAP; J.M.A., K.E.C., M.K. and D.E.L.P. wrote the initial draft of this paper. All authors, including consortium authors, have been involved in the design and implementation of DAP goals, infrastructure and activities, and they have had the opportunity to participate in editing both form and content of this paper and have approved the final version.

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Correspondence to Daniel E. L. Promislow .

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Creevy, K.E., Akey, J.M., Kaeberlein, M. et al. An open science study of ageing in companion dogs. Nature 602 , 51–57 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04282-9

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The Dog Aging Project

The Dog Aging Project is an innovative project that brings together a community of dogs, owners, veterinarians, researchers, and volunteers to carry out the most ambitious canine science health study in the world. Our work is centered on two fundamental goals: understanding how biology, lifestyle, and environment influence aging and intervening to increase healthspan, the period of life spent free from disease. 

The DAP team of 40+ researchers is led by HALO Faculty Member Dr. Daniel Promislow and Former HALO Director Dr. Matt Kaeberlein at the University of Washington and Dr. Kate Creevy at Texas A&M. They have built a collaborative, open data research platform that harnesses the power of citizen science, allowing dog owners to participate in our research efforts. This culture of collaboration fosters creative partnerships, which include experts from diverse disciplines and top research institutions around the world.  Major sources of funding include the Donner Foundation, the Irish Wolfhound Association of New England (IWANE), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH grant U19AG057377).  

Currently there are four major research components:

Project 1. Defining frailty and successful aging in dogs. Unlike in humans, there are no clearly defined metrics to determine how well a dog is aging, no canine equivalent of the chair stand test or grip strength , nor predefined age-specific ranges for clinical chemistry measures. To fill this gap, we will develop new metrics of canine aging. 

Project 2. Genetic analysis of aging in dogs. Genome sequence data for >10,000 canine participants will be integrated with health measures and behavioral traits to carry out comprehensive genome-wide association studies.

Project 3. Systems biology of healthy aging in dogs. We will identify molecular biological predictors of disease and longevity and develop an epigenetic clock that predicts biological age in dogs.

Project 4. TRIAD—Rapamycin Intervention Study. We will conduct a large-scale trial of FDA-approved rapamycin , a drug shown to increase lifespan and delay the negative effects of aging in mice. We will test the effects of the drug on cognitive function, heart function, immunity, and cancer incidence in 500 middle-aged dogs.

To learn more, please visit the Dog Aging Project website .

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Scientists Scramble to Keep Dog Aging Project Alive

The National Institute on Aging may let funding lapse for a yearslong study of nearly 50,000 pet dogs, which could also offer insight into human health.

By Emily Anthes

In late 2019, scientists began searching for 10,000 Americans willing to enroll their pets in an ambitious new study of health and longevity in dogs. The researchers planned to track the dogs over the course of their lives, collecting detailed information about their bodies, lifestyles and home environments. Over time, the scientists hoped to identify the biological and environmental factors that kept some dogs healthy in their golden years — and uncover insights about aging that could help both dogs and humans lead longer, healthier lives.

Today, the Dog Aging Project has enrolled 47,000 canines and counting, and the data are starting to stream in. The scientists say that they are just getting started.

“We think of the Dog Aging Project as a forever project, so recruitment is ongoing,” said Daniel Promislow, a biogerontologist at the University of Washington and a co-director of the project. “There will always be new questions to ask. We want to always have dogs of all ages participating.”

But Dr. Promislow and his colleagues are now facing the prospect that the Dog Aging Project might have its own life cut short. About 90 percent of the study’s funding comes from the National Institute on Aging, a part of the National Institutes of Health, which has provided more than $28 million since 2018. But that money will run out in June, and the institute does not seem likely to approve the researchers’ recent application for a five-year grant renewal, the scientists say.

“We have been told informally that the grant is not going to be funded,” said Matt Kaeberlein, the other director of the Dog Aging Project and a former biogerontology researcher at the University of Washington. (Dr. Kaeberlein is now the chief executive of Optispan, a health technology company.)

A spokeswoman for the National Institute on Aging said that the N.I.H. does not comment on the decision-making process for individual grant applications.

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September 1, 2015

15 Citizen Science Projects for Dog Lovers

You can help to advance studies of dog behavior

By Julie Hecht

Over the past few years public participation in science projects has surged, and research involving dogs is no exception. Often the work consists of online activities, but sometimes it requires participants to go into the world, do something and report back. Here's a list of online dog science projects that will be active through 2015 and that, in most cases, anyone in the world can join. All are in English at a minimum; a few are also bilingual.

Canid Howl Project

University of Tennessee and numerous institutions

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http://howlcoder.appspot.com/HowlCoder.html

This project is trying to understand the range of canid vocalizations, involving primarily wolves, dogs and coyotes. Participants help by listening to vocalizations and analyzing the recordings. Ultimately the investigators hope to understand more about the social behavior of the entire range of canid species and breeds.

Canine Microbiome and Behavior Project

Human-Animal Interaction Lab, Oregon State University

www.thehumananimalbond.com/Microbiome.html

Did you know that the thing your dog does at least once a day can help researchers learn more about the relations among gut bacteria, health and behavior? The Oregon study aims to identify microbiome behavior that could help improve the life of dogs with certain physical or behavioral disorders. Researchers are seeking samples of your dog's stool, along with information on the dog's health and behavior.

Cross-Cultural Comparison of the Attachment Bond between Humans and Pet Dogs

www.thehumananimalbond.com/KutzlerAttachment

You may be able to help reveal similarities and differences in the attachments between pet dogs and their owners across cultures and environments. Researchers are seeking participants who are Latinos or non-Latinos living in the U.S. and Latinos living in Mexico.

Long-Term Dog Owners Survey

Animal Behaviour Cognition and Welfare Group, University of Lincoln, England

http://bit.do/longtermdog ownerssurvey

Have you lived with your dog for at least three years? Your answers to the survey will offer insight into the factors that lead people and dogs to stay companions over many years.

Dog Relinquishment Survey

http://bit.dodogrelinquishersurvey

Scientists lack a solid grasp of the factors that contribute to the reasons people sometimes give up their dogs. This judgment-free study aims to better understand the motivation. If you have voluntarily given up a dog for any reason to another individual, party or organization, this project would like to hear from you.

Dog Personality Survey

http://uoldogtemperament.co.uk/dogpersonality

The questions investigators have about dog personality are endless. This Web site features projects aiming to identify robust personality traits in dogs and to trace their biology from the level of genes through the brain to their behavior. By exploring common core traits in dogs, researchers can work to manage problems relating to these traits.

Dog Personality and Vocalization Project

Family Dog Project, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest

http://goo.gl/forms/ZDIXfDsr1M

Are there links among dog genetic profiles, personality and vocal behaviors? Help researchers by completing a short questionnaire about your dog's environment, personality and vocalizations. You can also elect to provide two additional pieces of information: conduct a short behavior test with your dog and report back on the result; send in a sample of your dog's saliva for DNA analysis.

Project: Your Dog, Inside and Out

http://goo.gl/forms/hGKC8tczcZ

Food hound? Activity seeker? Help researchers investigate the relation among activity level, feeding and body condition in dogs. If you like, you can add to the study of trait inheritance by (as with the previous project) providing a sample of your dog's saliva for DNA analysis.

Jealousy in Dogs

http://goo.gl/forms/3IWCBZguCe

You may have thought your dog is sometimes happy or angry, but how about jealous? The Family Dog Project questionnaire aims to gather details about jealousy in dogs, including the context in which it appears and the behaviors that express it. You can also choose to share a video in which you believe your dog is showing jealous behavior.

Is Your Dog Loud?

English: http://goo.gl/forms/1FzM07wpsR

German: http://goo.gl/forms/ye7wZnIEkD

Dutch: http://goo.gl/forms/hdCxW5GkxV

Italian: http://goo.gl/forms/6JKgpwMNzH

Spanish: http://goo.gl/forms/mlXoMre3ZH

Hungarian: http://goo.gl/forms/w1blAU2Pah

Does your dog growl, whine, bark, woof, cough or howl? Your dog's vocalizations are meaningful, and researchers want to hear all about them.

Emotional Content of Sounds

www.inflab.bme.hu/∼viktor/soundrating/index.html

What do you hear in these sounds? The project, with instructions in English and Hungarian, asks participants to listen to and rate different vocalizations on how arousing they think the vocalization is and whether it seems positive or negative.

Acoustic Engineering, University of Salford, England

www.sound101.org/woof/index.php

This project explores how people respond to dog barks. Scientists are trying to better understand how we react to everyday sounds.

Canine Behavior Assessment & Research Questionnaire (C-BARQ)

Center for the Interaction of Animals and Society, University of Pennsylvania

http://vetapps.vet.upenn.edu/cbarq

C-BARQ is a questionnaire designed to provide dog owners and professionals with standardized evaluations of canine temperament and behavior. It has been extensively tested for reliability and validity on large samples of dogs of many breeds. C-BARQ data are used by numerous researchers around the world to investigate a variety of dog-related questions, such as those related to aggression, fear and trainability, among others. Live with a dog? Add to the dataset by telling C-BARQ.

Canines, Inc.

www.dognition.com

Participants can engage in different science-based games created by scientists, trainers and behavioral specialists. Dognition members can play the games with their dog and compare their dog's performance with that of other Dognition players. Membership requires a fee.

Co-Sleeping with Dogs

Clever Dog Lab, University of Veterinary Medicine, Messerli Research Institute, Vienna

English: https://goo.gl/5JPOzv

German: https://goo.gl/PFjaTK

Hungarian: https://goo.gl/3X8MHh

General Web site in German: www.iswf.at/de/projekte-publikationen

Whom do you hunker down with at night? The aim of this study is to find out more about the sleeping habits of owners and their pets, especially if you share the same bed or room (co-sleeping). Before you go to sleep tonight, consider completing this questionnaire.

Did you know that participants in dog studies tend to be women? Men should consider participating in such research, too. You could say that many canine studies are “looking for a few good men.”

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• Front Vet Sci

Dogs Supporting Human Health and Well-Being: A Biopsychosocial Approach

Nancy r. gee.

1 Department of Psychiatry, Center for Human Animal Interaction, School of Medicine, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, United States

Kerri E. Rodriguez

2 Human-Animal Bond in Colorado, School of Social Work, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, United States

Aubrey H. Fine

3 Department of Education, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, CA, United States

Janet P. Trammell

4 Division of Social Sciences and Natural Sciences, Seaver College, Pepperdine University, Malibu, CA, United States

Humans have long realized that dogs can be helpful, in a number of ways, to achieving important goals. This is evident from our earliest interactions involving the shared goal of avoiding predators and acquiring food, to our more recent inclusion of dogs in a variety of contexts including therapeutic and educational settings. This paper utilizes a longstanding theoretical framework- the biopsychosocial model- to contextualize the existing research on a broad spectrum of settings and populations in which dogs have been included as an adjunct or complementary therapy to improve some aspect of human health and well-being. A wide variety of evidence is considered within key topical areas including cognition, learning disorders, neurotypical and neurodiverse populations, mental and physical health, and disabilities. A dynamic version of the biopsychosocial model is used to organize and discuss the findings, to consider how possible mechanisms of action may impact overall human health and well-being, and to frame and guide future research questions and investigations.

Introduction – A Historical Perspective on Dog-Human Relationships

The modern relationship between humans and dogs is undoubtedly unique. With a shared evolutionary history spanning tens of thousands of years ( 1 ), dogs have filled a unique niche in our lives as man's best friend. Through the processes of domestication and natural selection, dogs have become adept at socializing with humans. For example, research suggests dogs are sensitive to our emotional states ( 2 ) as well as our social gestures ( 3 ), and they also can communicate with us using complex cues such as gaze alternation ( 4 ). In addition, dogs can form complex attachment relationships with humans that mirror that of infant-caregiver relationships ( 5 ).

In today's society, dog companionship is widely prevalent worldwide. In the United States, 63 million households have a pet dog, a majority of which consider their dog a member of their family ( 6 ). In addition to living in our homes, dogs have also become increasingly widespread in applications to assist individuals with disabilities as assistance dogs. During and following World War I, formal training of dogs as assistance animals began particularly for individuals with visual impairments in Germany and the United States ( 7 ). Following World War II, formal training for other roles, such as mobility and hearing assistance, started to increase in prevalence. Over the decades, the roles of assistance dogs have expanded to assist numerous disabilities and conditions including medical conditions such as epilepsy and diabetes and mental health disorders such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). At the same time, society has also seen increasing applications of dogs incorporated into working roles including detection, hunting, herding, and protection ( 8 , 9 ).

In addition to these working roles, dogs have also been instrumental in supporting humans in other therapeutic ways. In the early 1960s, animal-assisted interventions (AAI) began to evolve with the pioneering work of Boris Levinson, Elizabeth O'Leary Corson, and Samuel Corson. Levinson, a child psychologist practicing since the 1950s, noticed a child who was nonverbal and withdrawn during therapy began interacting with his dog, Jingles, in an unplanned interaction. This experience caused Levinson to begin his pioneering work in creating the foundations for AAI as an adjunct to treatment ( 10 ). In the 1970s, Samuel Corson and Elizabeth O'Leary Corson were some of the first researchers to empirically study canine-assisted interventions. Like Levinson, they inadvertently discovered that some of their patients with psychiatric disorders were interested in the dogs and that their patients with psychiatric disorders communicated more easily with each other and the staff when in the company of the dogs ( 11 , 12 ). Over the following decades, therapy dogs have been increasingly found to provide support for individuals with diverse needs in a wide array of settings ( 13 ).

Theoretical Framework for Dog Interaction Benefits

For over 40 years, the biopsychosocial model ( 14 ) has been widely used to conceptualize how biological, psychological, and social influences combine to determine human health and well-being. Biological influences refer to physiological changes such as blood pressure, cortisol, and heart rate, among others; psychological influences include personality, mood, and emotions, among others; and social influences refer to cultural, socio-economic, social relationships with others, family dynamics, and related matters. Figure 1 presents a graphical illustration of the relationship among these three influences in determining overall health and well-being. Although the model has dominated research and theory in health psychology for decades, more recently, it was re-envisioned as a more dynamic system ( 15 ) that construes human health as the result of the reciprocal influences of biological, psychological and social factors that unfold over personal and historical time. For example, if a person breaks his/her arm, there will be a biological impact in that immune and muscle systems respond and compensate. Social, or interpersonal, changes may occur when support or assistance is offered by others. Psychological changes will occur as a result of adjusting to and coping with the injury. Thus, the injury represents a dynamic influence initiated at one point in time and extending forward in time with diminishing impact as healing occurs.

A biopsychosocial perspective of how biological, psychological, and social influences may impact one another (solid lined arrows) and influence human health and well-being (represented here by the large thick circular shape).

This dynamic biopsychosocial approach to understanding health and well-being is appealing to the field of human-animal interaction (HAI) because of the dynamic nature of the relationship between humans and animals. For example, a person may acquire many dogs over his/her lifetime, perhaps from childhood to old age, and each of those dogs may sequentially develop from puppyhood to old age in that time. Behaviorally, the way the human and the dog interact is likely to be different across the lifespans of both species. From a biopsychosocial model perspective, the dynamic nature of the human-canine relationship may differentially interact with each of the three influencers (biological, psychological, and social) of human health and well-being over the trajectories of both beings. Notably, these influencers are not fixed, but rather have an interactional effect with each other over time.

While a person's biological, psychological, and social health may affect the relationship between that person and dogs with whom interactions occur, the focus of this manuscript is on the reverse: how owning or interacting with a dog may impact each of the psychological, biological, and social influencers of human health. We will also present relevant research and discuss potential mechanisms by which dogs may, or may not, contribute to human health and well-being according to the biopsychosocial model. Finally, we will emphasize how the biopsychosocial theory can be easily utilized to provide firmer theoretical foundations for future HAI research and applications to therapeutic practice and daily life.

Psychological Influences

Much research has been conducted on the impact of dog ownership and dog interactions on human psychological health and functioning. Frequent interactions with a dog, either through ownership or through long-term interventions, have been associated with positive psychological outcomes across the lifespan [for a systematic review of this evidence see ( 16 )]. One psychological aspect of interest to many HAI researchers is depression, especially among older adults. However, the relationship of pet dog ownership and depression over the lifespan continues to have inconsistent and inconclusive findings ( 16 ). Nevertheless, there are examples in the literature highlighting the beneficial role of dog ownership in reducing depression. As is frequently the case in HAI, the evidence from intervention studies is stronger than that of pet ownership studies ( 16 ), with the preponderance of this evidence linking animal-assisted interventions to a decrease in depression, as measured by self-report indices. Among the mechanisms for this reduction in depression are biological and social influences. For example, one such study found that an attachment relationship with a pet dog may serve as a coping resource for older women by buffering the relationship between loneliness (also measured by self-report indices) and depression, such that the presence of the pet dog appears to ameliorate the potential for loneliness to exacerbate depression ( 17 ). A causal relationship between dog ownership and mental health is difficult to determine. Not only may owning a pet dog increase stress, but those who are already suffering from loneliness or depression may be more inclined to have a pet dog than those who do not.

Another psychological outcome related to dog interaction that receives considerable research attention is anxiety. Studies have found that short-term, unstructured interactions with a therapy dog can significantly reduce self-reported anxiety and distress levels [e.g., ( 18 )]. For example, children with their pet dog or a therapy dog present during a stressful task exhibit lower perceived stress and more positive affect compared to when alone ( 19 ), when a parent was present ( 20 ), or when a stuffed dog was present ( 21 ). In addition to psychological mechanisms, there are social and biological mechanisms at play as well. In these short-term stressful contexts, a dog may serve as both a comforting, nonjudgmental presence as well as a positive tactile and sensory distraction. Dog interaction might also reduce anxiety and distress by influencing emotion regulation while coping with a stressor ( 22 ). During animal-assisted therapy, having a dog present during psychotherapy such as cognitive behavioral therapy can aid in decreasing self-reported anxious arousal and distress for patients who have experienced trauma, making the therapeutic treatment process more effective ( 23 ).

In addition to the negative aspects of psychological functioning, HAI research has also aimed to quantify the effects of dog interaction and ownership on positive psychological experiences such as happiness and well-being. Some studies have found that dog ownership is associated with higher life satisfaction and greater well-being ( 24 ), while other studies show that this is the case only when the dog provided social support ( 25 ) or satisfied the owner's needs ( 26 ). However, other large-scale surveys have found no significant differences in self-reported happiness between dog owners, cat owners, and non-pet owners ( 27 ), contributing to mixed findings. Recent discussions argue that too much focus has been placed on the relationship between mental health and the simple variable of dog ownership, when the specific activities that owners engage in with their dogs (e.g., walking, tactile interaction, and shared activities,) may be more important in explaining positive well-being ( 28 ). Further, many other factors may be driving these inconsistent findings in depression, anxiety, and well-being, including the owner's personality ( 24 ), gender and marital status ( 29 ), and attachment to the dog ( 30 ).

Dogs may also provide a source of motivation; for example, people with dogs are more likely to comply with the rigors of their daily life ( 31 ). The relationship with a pet dog may provide motivation to do things that may be less desirable. For example, for older adults who own pets, it is not uncommon for them to be more involved in daily life activities because of the need to take care of their animals ( 32 ). Likewise, children also complete less desired activities due to their relationship with the dog [for a discussion of this topic see ( 33 )].

An accumulation of research also suggests that dog interaction may have specific psychological benefits for individuals with physical disabilities and chronic conditions. Cohabitating with a specially trained assistance dog, including guide, hearing, and service dogs, can be associated with increased psychological and emotional functioning among individuals with disabilities ( 34 ). For individuals with mental disorders such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), recent research has also found that having a psychiatric service dog is associated with fewer PTSD symptoms, less depression and anxiety, and better quality of life [For a review see ( 35 )]. These benefits appear to be due to a combination of the service dog's specific trained tasks and aspects inherent to cohabitating with a pet dog, including having a source of love, nonjudgmental social support, and companionship ( 36 ).

Similar research has also highlighted the value of dogs for children with disorders of executive functioning and self-regulation, especially autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). For some children with ASD, dogs may provide a calming and positive presence ( 37 ) and may both reduce anxiety ( 38 ) and improve problematic behaviors ( 39 ). Parents report that both pet dogs and service dogs can provide certain benefits for children with ASD, including benefits to children's moods, sleep, and behavior ( 40 , 41 ). Therapy dogs have also been found to be impactful in supporting children with ADHD in their emotional regulation ( 42 ) and aspects of character development ( 43 ). Nevertheless, the outcome of dog interactions may not be positive for all individuals with ASD and ADHD; despite evidence of psychological benefits of dog interaction for some children, others may be fearful or become over-stimulated by dogs ( 44 ).

In addition to impacts on psychological health, dog interaction can also impact psychological functioning, cognition, and learning. Among children, emerging research suggests short-term interactions with a therapy dog may lead to improvements in specific aspects of learning and cognition. A recent systematic review of research on therapy dog reading programs indicated that reading to a dog has a number of beneficial effects including improved reading performance ( 45 ). Studies suggest that interacting with a therapy dog may also improve speed and accuracy on cognitive (e.g., memory, categorization, adherence to instructions) and motor skills tasks among preschool-aged children compared to interacting with a stuffed dog or human ( 46 ). Similarly, a recent study showed that 10–14-year-old children had greater frontal lobe activity in the presence of a real dog as compared to a robotic dog, indicating a higher level of neuropsychological attention ( 47 ).

Among young adults, similar effects on cognition and learning have been found. Numerous colleges and universities now offer interactions with therapy dogs, typically during high stress times (such as before exams). In this sense, a biological mechanism through which dog interaction may positively impact cognition and learning is via stress reduction and improvement in positive affect. Even such short and infrequent interactions with therapy dogs may decrease perceived stress and increase perceived happiness in college students [e.g., ( 48 , 49 )]. Further, some institutions have permanent resident therapy dogs and/or long-term intervention programs; one such program showed that students who interacted with therapy dogs for 8 weeks reported significantly less homesickness and greater satisfaction with life than wait-listed controls ( 50 ). These effects may translate to additional effects on students' academic success, learning, and cognition. For instance, a recent randomized controlled trial ( 51 ) paired a standard academic stress management program with therapy dog interaction; the pairing produced significantly higher levels of self-reported enjoyment, usefulness, self-regulation, and behavior change than the stress management program or dog interaction alone. However, when therapy dog interaction is closely paired with more specific learning experiences, beneficial effects on stress remain, but benefits to academic performance may not manifest. For example, a recent study showed that interacting with a therapy dog resulted in significant improvements in students' perceived stress and mood, but not in actual exam scores ( 52 ). Similarly, interacting with a therapy dog during the learning and recall phase of a memory test did not improve memory compared to a control group ( 53 ). Taken together, dog interaction may improve stress and affect among college-aged adults as well as dimensions important for academic success and learning, but these results may or may not translate to cognitive performance benefits.

Biological Influences

The psychological and biological effects of HAI are often closely interwoven, as seen in the Psychological Influences section above and as demonstrated by the frequency with which psychological effects are evaluated using biological assessments of stress, anxiety, and arousal ( 54 ). For example, a plethora of studies have examined how short-term interactions with dogs can influence stress by measuring physiological biomarkers. Studies have found that dog interaction can influence parameters such as blood pressure, heart rate, and electrodermal activity ( 55 ) as well as neurochemical indicators of affiliative behavior [e.g., beta-endorphins, prolactin, and dopamine; ( 56 )].

However, one of the most popular physiological measures in HAI research is the stress hormone cortisol ( 57 ). Studies have found that short-term interactions with a dog can decrease both subjective stress and circulating cortisol concentrations [e.g., ( 58 )]. Cohabitating with a dog has also been found to impact circulating cortisol after waking among children with ASD ( 39 ) and military veterans with PTSD ( 59 ). Experimental studies have also examined how having a dog present may modulate the stress response and cortisol secretion among individuals undergoing a stressful situation. Among adults, studies have found that having a dog present during a socially stressful paradigm can attenuate cortisol compared to when alone or with a human friend ( 60 ). A recent randomized controlled trial similarly found that interacting with a therapy dog, for 20 min, two times per week, over a 4-week period resulted in reduced cortisol (basal and diurnal measurement) among typically developing and special needs school children compared to the same duration and length of delivery for a yoga relaxation or a classroom as usual control group ( 61 ). However, it is of note that many methodologically rigorous studies have not found significant effects of interacting with a dog on physiological parameters, including salivary cortisol ( 21 , 62 , 63 ). A recent review of salivary bioscience research in human-animal interaction concluded that significant variation exists with regards to sampling paradigms, storage and assaying methods, and analytic strategies, contributing to variation in findings across the field ( 57 ).

As research quantifying the physiological outcomes from dog interaction continues to increase, so does research attempting to understand the underlying mechanisms of action leading to stress reduction. One theoretical rationale for dogs' stress-reducing benefits consists of the dog's ability to provide non-judgmental social support ( 60 ), improve positive affect ( 64 ), and provide a calming presence ( 22 ). Dogs may also contribute to a feeling of perceived safety and provide a tactile and grounding comfort ( 65 ). For these reasons, dogs are often incorporated into treatment and recovery for individuals who have experienced a traumatic event ( 66 ). Another mechanism contributing to these stress reducing benefits may be tactile stimulation and distraction derived from petting or stroking a dog. For example, Beetz et al. ( 67 ) found that the more time a child spent stroking the dog before a stressful task, the larger the magnitude of cortisol decrease. In fact, calming tactile interactions such as stroking, touching, and petting may be a key mechanism explaining animal-specific benefits to stress physiology, as touch is more socially appropriate in interactions with animals than as with other people ( 22 ). While there are many hypothesized mechanisms underlying positive psychophysiological change following human-dog interaction, more research is needed to determine how individual differences in humans, animals, and the human-animal relationship affects outcomes ( 21 , 57 , 62 , 63 ).

Another mechanism in which positive dog interaction may result in psychophysiological benefits is via the secretion of oxytocin. Oxytocin not only buffers the stress response and cortisol secretion ( 68 ) but is also involved emotion, trust, and bonding ( 69 ). The oxytocin system has been hypothesized to be a primary mechanistic pathway involved in human-dog interactions ( 70 ). Positive dog-owner interactions including stroking, petting, and talking have been shown to result in increased oxytocin levels in both dog owners and dogs, which has been related to the strength of the owner-dog relationship ( 71 ) and dog-human affiliative behaviors ( 72 , 73 ). Some studies have also found differential effects in oxytocin reactivity after dog interaction between human males and females ( 74 ), giving context to potential gender and/or hormonal differences in dog-human interactions. However, even though the oxytocin system exhibits potential as a pathway by which dogs provide psychophysiological benefits, it should be noted that mixed findings and methodological and measurement differences limit strong conclusions ( 75 ).

In regards to pet dog ownership, many studies have also sought to understand the biological effects of long-term interactions with a pet dog. Some research suggests that sharing animal-associated microbes with a pet dog can have long-term impacts on human health ( 76 ) while others have found that cohabitating with a pet dog can be beneficial for child allergies ( 77 ) and immune system development ( 78 ). However, most research on the long-term health impacts of pet dog ownership has focused on cardiovascular functioning. Epidemiological research suggests that dog ownership is linked to greater physical activity levels (presumably linked to dog-walking), and reduced risk for cardiovascular disease, stroke, and all-cause mortality [for a summary see ( 79 )]. A recent meta-analysis of ten studies amassing data from over three million participants found that pet dog ownership was associated with a 31% risk reduction for mortality due to cardiovascular disease ( 80 ). However, dog ownership research of this nature will always suffer from an important chicken and egg type question: do dogs make us healthier, or do healthy people opt to own dogs?

Social Influences

A final way in which dog companionship and interaction may contribute to human health and well-being is through the social realm. Dogs may impact social functioning by providing direct social support ( 81 ) and a source of an attachment bond ( 82 ) which in turn may contribute to better social and mental health by providing companionship. Acquiring a pet dog has been reported to reduce both short-term and long-term self-reported loneliness ( 83 ). Particularly for those who live alone, dog ownership may serve as a protective factor against loneliness in times of social isolation, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic ( 84 ). Among older adults living in long-term care facilities or who live alone, dog visitation may also decrease loneliness by providing a source of meaningful companionship and social connectedness ( 85 , 86 ). However, the literature on pet dogs and loneliness is also characterized by mixed findings, raising the possibility that dog ownership may be a response to loneliness rather than protection from loneliness. Further, there remains a lack of high quality research in this area which limits any causal conclusions ( 87 ).

Another way in which the social support from a pet dog may benefit social functioning is by facilitating social interactions with others. For example, observational studies have found that being accompanied by a dog in public increases the frequency of received social interactions ( 88 ) and social acknowledgments [e.g., friendly glances, smiles; ( 89 )]. For those who engage in dog walking, social interactions are perceived as a rewarding side effect ( 90 ). Dogs can also provide a source of social capital, defined as the glue that holds society together ( 91 ). The research of Wood and colleagues ( 92 ) suggests that dogs can function as facilitators for social contact and interaction, with pet owners reporting higher perceptions of suburb friendliness and more social interactions with neighbors compared to non-pet owners.

For children and adolescents, pet dog ownership may contribute to healthy social development. Positive child–pet dog interactions have been shown to have benefits to children's social competence, interactions, and play behavior [for a review see ( 93 )]. Not only can children form attachment relationships with dogs ( 94 ), but pet dogs may promote feelings of safety and security ( 95 ) that can facilitate childhood social development. Pet ownership may also help children develop skills to form and maintain social relationships with their peers ( 96 ). For example, cross-sectional studies found that children with a pet dog in the home have fewer peer problems and have more prosocial behavior with children without a dog [e.g., ( 97 , 98 )].

Among children with developmental disorders, dog interaction has also been similarly shown to impact social functioning. For children with ADHD, two randomized controlled trials have found that 12 weeks of visits with a therapy dog, incorporated into curricula designed to improve skills and reduce behavioral problems, can result in improved social skills, prosocial behaviors, and perceptions of social competence ( 42 , 43 ). One potential explanation for these benefits is that children may interpret the dogs' nonverbal communication as less threatening and easier to interpret than human interaction ( 99 , 100 ). A recent eye-tracking study found that children with ASD exhibit a bias in social attention to animal faces, including dogs, compared to human faces ( 101 ). The presence of a dog in clinical applications may also promote more social engagement with a therapist while reducing negative behaviors ( 102 , 103 ). Further, there is some evidence that having a pet dog in the home can have a positive impact on social interactions of children with ASD, especially among verbal children, while teaching children responsibility and empathetic behavior ( 104 , 105 ).

Potential Mechanisms of Action

We have discussed how, in the psychological realm, interacting with a dog can positively relate to depression, anxiety, and well-being as well as psychological functioning in the areas of cognition, learning, and attention. It is interesting to note that most psychological constructs are measured using self-report indices, such as the Beck Depression Inventory ( 106 ) or the UCLA Loneliness Scale ( 107 ), while a smaller group of constructs are measured using speed and accuracy to detect targets (attention) or to remember information (learning and memory). In the biological realm, we discussed how interacting with dogs can influence stress-related physiological parameters and long-term biological and cardiovascular health. Biological measures are often recorded in real-time, such as heart rate or blood pressure, or are collected at critical time points during the study (e.g., saliva, urine, or blood samples for such measures as cortisol or oxytocin). Finally, we discussed the social realm, in which interacting with a dog can provide social support, facilitate social interactions, and improve social development and social skills. Measures used to assess variables in the social realm include self-report indices (e.g., demographics such as marital status, numbers of family members and friends), real time observations of social interactions (e.g., video analyses of interactions using ethograms), and parent/teacher reports of social functioning [e.g., Social Skills Rating System; ( 108 )]. To better understand and organize these various findings, we now consider potential mechanisms of action in the context of the biopsychosocial model, and as part of this discussion we will consider the potential for different types of measurement to have their own influence.

The mechanisms that underly positive human-dog interactions are likely to be interrelated and broadly, yet differentially, impactful across the three influencers of health (biological, psychological and social). According to the biopsychosocial model, impacts on one of the influencers of health is likely to impact the others ( 14 ). Further, an underlying mechanism of change may have a larger immediate impact on one realm than on the other two ( 15 ). Although this applies to the many influences we have discussed above, we will describe a reduction in stress as a more detailed example of how the biopsychosocial model can be considered. Stress is likely to have an immediate and measurable impact on the biological system through endocrinological (e.g., changes in cortisol) and psychophysiological (e.g., changes in blood pressure) processes. This same reduction in stress is likely to impact the psychological system through changes in mood or affect, concentration, and motivation, but that impact may not be immediately measurable or may be smaller in magnitude. This conjectured delay or reduction in effect size stems at least in part, from the way these changes are typically measured and the time course for potential effects to become measurable. For example, some biological changes indicative of increased stress (e.g., heart rate) can be measured in direct correspondence with the experimental manipulations (e.g., interacting with the dog vs. experiencing a control condition), and provide real time biological indications of changes in stress levels. Psychological indications of stress may be measured by a self-report survey instrument assessing state or trait anxiety. This type of measure cannot be completed in real time during the various experimental conditions (e.g., interacting with the dog vs. experiencing a control condition), but must be completed at some point following the experimental manipulation. It is possible that psychological measures are not as immediately sensitive to changes in the constructs they measure because of the required delay between manipulation and measurement. Such a delay may underestimate the real time effect as it may fade over time. Finally, reductions in stress have the potential to impact social systems by increasing social approaches and acceptance of approaches by others, but that impact may be of a small size or require even more time to be measurable. For example, exposure to stress may have immediate physiological effects, but it could take more time (prolonged exposure to stress) for those effects to impact some measures of social influence such as number of friends.

In Figure 2 , the mechanism of stress reduction is used as one example for the purposes of this discussion to exemplify how human-dog interactions may influence human health and well-being, as explained by the biopsychosocial model. Stress reduction may have a more immediate or larger impact on the biological realm as demonstrated by the larger arrow, while having a smaller (or perhaps delayed) impact on the psychological realm and an even smaller (or potentially more delayed) impact on the social realm.

An example of the potential for differential impact (represented by the different arrow thickness) of one mechanism of action (stress reduction) on the three realms of influence of overall health and well-being (depicted by the larger encompassing circle).

Based on the research described earlier, we have seen that interacting with a dog can have stress reducing impacts in the biological realm such as decreased cortisol, heart rate, and blood pressure, and increases in oxytocin. In the psychological realm, stress reduction can be a driver of immediate improvements in self-report measures of stress, mood, and anxiety and more delayed improvements in overall mental health and quality of life. The social realm is also likely to be directly and indirectly impacted by this stress reduction from both immediate and delayed psychophysiological changes as well as more long-term improvements in social support, social networks, social development, and overall social health. Therefore, it is important to consider the dynamic nature of these three realms in that there may be a strong immediate effect of dog interaction on one realm, but a lesser, delayed impact in the other two realms. Similar to our more detailed example of stress above, other influences we have discussed (e.g., social support, positive affect, etc.) are likewise mechanisms that operate in a similar reciprocal biopsychosocial framework. Further, although it likely that the three influences are interrelated, it is not known from the current evidence the degree to which they may be interrelated and thus have shared and overlapping effects on one another and on overall health and well-being. Therefore, a consideration of mechanisms that influence human-dog interactions from a dynamic and flexible biopsychosocial perspective, instead of from a single realm, is an important addition to the study of human-animal interaction.

Conclusion and Future Directions

In conclusion, the biopsychosocial model is a promising theoretical model to be applied to human-animal interaction research for several reasons. First, the field of HAI has been plagued by mixed findings in which some research suggests that dogs have beneficial effects on human health and well-being and others suggest no effect or even a negative effect [for a discussion see ( 109 )]. This variability in HAI research outcomes caused by differing methodologies, measurement, populations, and interventions is described in detail by Rodriguez et al. ( 110 ). However, we also argue that some of the variability seen in HAI research may be explained by the potential for differential immediate and delayed impacts within each of the three biopsychosocial model realms. For example, if dog interaction shows immediate reduction in physiological measures of stress, how long does that reduction last, and do we see corresponding immediate and/or delayed responses in the psychological and social realms? Therefore, more information about differential impacts of dog interactions on each of the three influencers at various points in time is needed. In addition, it may be necessary to apply a variety of measures (at least one measure per influencer realm) over time to fully disentangle the existing mixed results in the field of HAI.

Secondly, due to the flexibility that this dynamic biopsychosocial model offers in explaining HAI research outcomes, we propose this model as an effective avenue to promote future theoretically grounded research in our field. Saleh ( 111 ) stresses that practice, research, and theory are the corner stones of any field, HAI is not exempt from this consideration. The field of HAI will benefit from applying an accepted model, like the biopsychosocial model, because it provides a useful framework for understanding and predicting how interactions between humans and animals impacts human health and well-being. As Saleh ( 111 ) explains, “it is the result of the relationship between the process of inquiry (research) and the product of knowledge (theory)” that our understanding of a process may become clearer. Therefore, current research should continue to modify and impact a present theory, which should act as a guide for researchers to constantly generate and test the basis of a theory ( 111 ). The findings from such theory-driven research could then help practitioners, as well as health care policy makers, in how to effectively incorporate dogs in therapeutic settings and in homes.

Lastly, the reciprocal relationship of the psychological, biological, and social domains can be used to elucidate the mechanisms that both impact and are impacted by interactions between humans and animals. Theory-driven science (for which we have proposed the biopsychosocial model as a useful framework) should be used to influence and inform research, practice, and policy. Thus, researchers and practitioners applying the biopsychosocial model will be instrumental not only in guiding future research in the field, but also in clarifying existing research as well people's perceptions of benefits derived from canine-human interactions.

Author Contributions

NG provided the initial organization and theoretical framework. All authors wrote and edited the document in shared collaboration and discussed and conceived the idea for the paper.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to express their appreciation to the Wallis Annenberg Petspace for supporting this theoretical framework and exploration of the Human-Canine bond.

Funding. As part of the conferment of Fellowship status to all authors, the Wallis Annenberg Petspace provided the funding for publication fees of this document.

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Calling All Canines: Companions Still Needed For Dog Aging Project Research, New Studies

Story by jennifer gauntt, cvmbs communications.

There are almost 90 million dogs living in the United States. 

So when the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences (CVMBS) and University of Washington (UW) School of Medicine launched the Dog Aging Project (DAP) in November 2019 seeking canine participants, the research team knew owners across the country would answer the call. 

And answer they did. 

Nearly 30,000 dog owners have volunteered for this community science research project dedicated to understanding the biological and environmental determinants of canine aging.

Now, more than a year later, the Dog Aging Project is looking for additional canine participants for this research and affiliated study opportunities. 

While all kinds of dogs are still welcome to join, DAP researchers are specifically seeking dogs, both purebred and mixed breed, in the following categories:

• Large breed dogs weighing between 70-100 lbs., especially breeds other than Labradors, retrievers, and German shepherds (the most common breeds in the U.S.)
• Giant breed dogs weighing more than 100 lbs., such as Great Danes, Wolfhounds, and Mastiffs
• Hound dogs, spaniels, pointers, terriers, bulldogs, and pit bulls, including mixes
• Working dogs, such as herding, K9, service, agility, and mushing dogs, etc.

Geographical regions

• Dogs living in rural areas, small towns and large cities, in particular
• University of Georgia
• Colorado State
• Oregon State
• Washington State
• North Carolina State

“Healthy aging is the result of both genetics and the environment. It’s really important for us to study dogs who live in all kinds of environments, from farm dogs to city dogs,” said Dr. Daniel Promislow, DAP principal investigator and co-director and professor of pathology and biology at UW. “Right now, we are specifically recruiting dogs from areas where we don’t have as many participants as we’d like to.”

Because the DAP is a 10-year study, puppies are especially beneficial to the project because enrolled puppies can participate throughout their entire lives.

“Better understanding the health effects of the presence and timing of spaying and neutering your dogs is of particular interest to the veterinary community,” said Dr. Kate Creevy , DAP chief veterinary officer and CVMBS associate professor of veterinary internal medicine. “Following puppies through the process of spaying or neutering or through reproductive activity will tell us a lot about how these events influence healthy aging.”

As the largest research data-gathering program of its kind, the DAP offers numerous opportunities to glean important information on canine lifespan, but also canine healthspan, which refers to the period of life spent free from disease.

Because the nature of the project is collaborative, all data collected by the DAP are available to researchers worldwide through Terra, a cloud-based computing platform, located at the Broad Institute of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. 

The DAP research team includes more than 40 experts from a variety of fields and institutions, who use the information submitted by DAP participants and stored in Terra to investigate many aspects of canine health and longevity. These study areas include:

• Genetics 
• Microbiology
• Toxicology 
• Canine cognition
• Age-related mobility
• A clinical drug trial of rapamycin

“Aging is a complex phenomenon. By combining insights from many areas of veterinary research, the Dog Aging Project aims to develop the field of veterinary geroscience and ultimately develop interventions that will help dogs live longer, healthier lives,” said Dr. Matt Kaeberlein, DAP co-director and UW professor of pathology. 

Joining the Pack

To participate in the Dog Aging Project, owners may nominate one dog per household at the project website, DogAgingProject.org ; they are then invited to set up a personal research portal where they answer scientific surveys about their dog and upload veterinary records.

As a member of the DAP Pack, participants will be asked to complete an annual health survey about their dog, which takes two to three hours, and other, shorter surveys (estimated at 10-30 minutes each) throughout the year.

Once a dog is a member of the DAP Pack, the dog may become eligible for a variety of other research activities, all of which are voluntary; these could include genetic analyses, the collection of biological samples, or even participation in a clinical trial. 

“By summer 2021, we’re hoping to have 60,000 Pack members eligible for additional studies,” Creevy said. “These animals bring so much to our lives. Our entire team is dedicated to extending quality of life into advanced age for dogs and their humans.”

About the DAP

The DAP is a 10-year, $23-million project funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA), a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

“The Dog Aging Project came in as an innovative approach to understand the process of aging,” said Dr. Francesca Macchiarini, chief of the biological resources branch in NIA’s Division of Aging Biology. “This is because of the remarkable similarities between humans and their canine companions. They share the same environment, have similar lifestyles and, when it comes to aging, both species develop the same types of diseases.

“We’re going to learn in a relatively shorter period of time than we would to study the human population a lot about how biology, lifestyle, and environment can affect healthy aging in dogs, and then have that be applicable to humans,” Macchiarini said. 

For more information, or to nominate your dog, visit dogagingproject.org .

For more information about the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences, please visit our website at  vetmed.tamu.edu  or join us on  Facebook ,  Instagram , and  Twitter .

Contact Information:  Jennifer Gauntt, Director of CVMBS Communications, Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences,  [email protected] , 979-862-4216 ; Leila Gray, UW media relations, [email protected] , (206) 475-9809

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Dog Aging Project goal is to help both dogs and humans live longer, healthier lives

Aging Biology Geroscience Health Care Research Longevity

There is still much to learn about the mechanisms underlying individual aging. Most of what is known about the biology of aging comes from laboratory studies of mammals such as mice and rats, and invertebrates like fruit flies and nematodes. To better understand how genes and environment affect aging in animals outside of a lab and closer to our own life-course experiences, and to generate knowledge that could more readily translate to human aging, the DAP has turned to the companion dog.

The companion dog is an ideal animal to study biological aging. Dogs are one of the most variable animal species in terms of size, shape, and behavior. Like humans, dogs vary in life expectancy and the spectrum of diseases they are likely to encounter. Companion dogs experience nearly every functional decline and disease of aging that people do, and these diseases are diagnosed and treated within a health care system that parallels human health care in many ways. Dogs also share the human environment, and given that they age more rapidly than humans, they enable unique opportunities for longitudinal and interventional studies.

DAP-targeted study populations consist of dogs of all breeds (purebred and mixed breed), ages, sizes, and sexes. Participation in the DAP is open to all geographic regions in the United States, including urban, suburban, and rural areas. DAP scientists are collecting a wide range of information — electronic veterinary medical records, environmental data, and genome-wide sequencing — as well as blood, urine, hair, and feces.

The key outcomes expected include:

• Data that will provide veterinarians and scientists with tools to assess how well a specific dog is aging and set the stage for studies on factors that influence normal aging. DAP researchers have already begun collecting and analyzing the data that lay the groundwork for canine-specific aging processes.
• Whole-genome sequencing data that will help identify genetic variants, environmental and lifestyle factors, and the interactions that are associated with diverse measures of aging. The DAP is on track to complete sequencing of the genomes of 10,000 dogs by the end of 2022.
• The creation of a systems biology model of aging in dogs through the annual measurement of the animals’ physiological status — from the whole organism via physical measurements, to the molecular level through the collection and analysis of biological specimens. These data will generate predictive and prognostic biomarkers of aging and will point to causal factors that explain the mechanisms by which specific genetic or environmental factors influence aging. These should also be useful biomarkers for clinical studies to develop anti-aging therapies.

The DAP also includes a clinical trial in dogs using a one-year course of weekly low-dose rapamycin, which has been shown to extend lifespan and improve health in mice. The intent is to test the hypothesis that this compound can increase lifespan, improve heart and cognitive function, and reduce age-related disease incidence in middle-aged, large-breed dogs. This represents the first clinical trial of a drug with lifespan and healthspan metrics as endpoints in any species outside of a laboratory.

In addition to making important contributions to veterinary medicine, the ambitious goals set by the DAP research initiative hold the potential of transforming the field of aging research. Like other longitudinal studies, the success of the DAP depends on strong and enduring relationships with many stakeholders, including participating dog owners, veterinarians, and researchers. DAP researchers continue to devote considerable effort to participant retention and capturing the diversity of U.S. dog owners that is yet to be fully represented in the study population. Through these efforts, they aim to establish the foundation for an innovative, community science approach to aging research in dogs. Dog owners interested in participating are encouraged to nominate their dog at dogagingproject.org .

This research was supported by NIA grant U19AG057377 .

References: Creevy KE, et al. An open science study of ageing in companion dogs . Nature . 2022;602, 51–57. doi:10.1038/s41586-021-04282-9

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Riney Canine Health Center

The potential for advancements in canine research is greater than ever, and cornell has a legacy of transformative contributions upon which we can build..

Cornell offers expertise from the very beginning of the research continuum — working from molecular-level discoveries to showing how these findings translate into real-world impact. By covering the full research process, we can test how our research applies to clinical settings — empowering our clinicians to perform cutting-edge medical advancements in our hospitals and clinics.

Explore how the Cornell Richard P. Riney Canine Health Center is investing in critical, innovative and collaborative research that will help dogs live longer, healthier, happier  lives.

2023- 2024 Funded Research Projects:

Protecting puppies from pathogens - understanding how puppies receive antibodies from their mother may help us boost their immune systems

Puppies are born with an immature immune system and so are especially vulnerable to infection. They receive some immune protection in the form of maternal antibodies, delivered from the mother’s blood stream via the placenta during pregnancy and in the colostrum of breast milk. Intestinal absorption of maternal antibodies by the pup seems to be limited to the first 1-2 days after birth. Without adequate levels of these antibodies, puppies are more likely to die young.

This project aims to better understand the mechanisms by which the maternal antibodies are passed on from mother to puppy. The study will develop a new panel of canine-specific antibody tests to compare the antibodies found in the mother’s blood with those available to their offspring.

The results may answer the question whether selective antibody transfer – a phenomenon recently discovered in humans, in which the most effective maternal antibodies are delivered to the infant with a higher efficiency than others – occurs in dogs as well. If it does, this insight could open up research opportunities to boost delivery of the best maternal antibodies to pups and improve their survival.

Principal Investigator: Sarah Caddy , assistant professor of microbiology and immunology

Evaluating a promising new treatment option for dogs with oral cancer

Oral cancer occurs commonly in dogs, accounting for six percent or more of all tumors, but treatment options are limited. The current standard of care typically involves surgical removal of the cancerous tissues and radiation therapy when complete removal is not possible. Given the aggressive nature of oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC), one of the most common cancers in dogs, this can mean cutting out large portions of the jaw – a treatment that many owners reject because it can lead to additional medical issues and reduce their dog’s quality of life.

This study is pursuing an alternative treatment with fewer negative side effects. Extensive genomic profiling from canine OSCCs showed that these tumors grow when an important cellular mechanism known as RAS signaling becomes abnormally activated. The project builds on previous work by the researchers that found trametinib (Tra-met-a-nib) – a therapeutic that inhibits the RAS-related enzyme MEK – to effectively block the growth of cancer cells derived from canine OSCC tumor samples.

Now they hope that the drug, which is FDA-approved for treatment of certain types of cancer in humans, will work similarly well for canine patients. Monitoring tumor progress and health in dogs treated with trametinib and performing genetic and molecular profiling of select patient tumors will help identify which patients responded best to the therapies, and why, and provide a better understanding of the disease.

Principal Investigator: Santiago Peralta , associate professor of clinical sciences

Co-PI: William Katt, senior research associate in molecular medicine

Genetic investigation of gingival enlargement in Boxers

Gingival enlargement (GE) – overgrown gum tissue – can occur in any canine breed but is most often found in Boxers. It can lead to periodontal disease, difficulty eating and chewing, and mouth ulcers. Even after surgical removal of excess tissue, followed by painful recovery, the condition may recur.

Because dogs are typically diagnosed only after the overgrown tissues have started to interfere with function and quality of life – usually after sexual maturity and often as late as five to eight years of age or older – it is difficult to eliminate the disease through selective breeding practices.

Given GE’s notably higher incidence in Boxers, genetic risk factors are likely involved. But currently nothing is known about the locations within the genome associated with the disease or the molecular mechanisms driving its initiation and progression.

This project will identify genes that are important in the development of GE by comparing gene expression levels between affected and healthy gum tissues from at least 20 dogs. Understanding the genes and pathways underlying how GE develops will lead to improved diagnosis and therapeutic options.

Principal investigator: Jacquelyn Evans , assistant professor of biomedical sciences

Co-PI: Santiago Peralta , associate professor of clinical sciences

Evaluation of fluorescent cholangiography with direct injection of indocyanine green (ICG)

Biliary disease – related to the gallbladder – is one of the most common illnesses in dogs and is difficult to treat with medicine alone. Surgery is often required, but mortality rates can reach 30 percent if the procedure is not performed in a a timely fashion.

Minimally invasive surgery, while available, is not always recommended because of concerns about potential biliary tract obstructions that cannot be seen during the procedure. Noninvasive diagnostic imaging tests, used before laparoscopic surgery in humans, would require long anesthesia in already weakened veterinary patients.

This study will work with 30 canine patients with biliary disease to explore an alternative technique that is commonly applied for a variety of purposes in human medicine but has not yet been evaluated for determining obstructions in the biliary tract. Near infrared (NIR) imaging uses a safe injection of a dye – Indocyanine Green (ICG) – which can be seen with a special camera in an open or laparoscopic procedure.

The ability to assess the biliary tract without needing to open the intestine or bile duct would improve safety and increase surgical options for affected canines and add to the uses of NIR imaging in veterinary and human patients.

Principal Investigator: Nicole Buote , associate professor of clinical sciences

Using DNA and RNA to better understand, diagnose and treat acute myeloid leukemia (AML), a devastating disease in dogs

Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is a devastating tumor of blood cells in dogs, who become ill suddenly. Available drugs do not work well, leading to the animals’ death or euthanasia soon after diagnosis.

There are different types of AML, which may vary in their prognosis and potential treatment. While in humans these types are now mostly identified by genetic analysis of the tumor and newly developed drugs are helping to prolong people’s lives, similar strides in genetic analysis of AML have not been made for dogs.

The proposed study will build on current research that aims to identify some of the genetic abnormalities in dogs with AML by sequencing their tumor genes or DNA. But DNA tells only part of the story. Also looking at RNA – the products that the genes make – can show whether different genes are fused together, if genes are producing abnormal RNA, and how the RNA is making the cells function incorrectly. We will also see how the tumor cells from dogs with AML function differently from those with another type of blood leukemia, called acute lymphoblastic leukemia (also known as ALL).

Together, results from the ongoing DNA study and this new RNA project will offer a more complete picture of the genetic basis of AML in dogs and may yield new tests to better diagnose, classify, and treat AML in dogs.

Principal Investigator: Tracy Stokol , professor of population medicine and diagnostic sciences

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Research on aging a natural fit for One Health approach

Updated January 3, 2024

Getting old is not for the weak, which is true not only for humans, but also dogs. They often share similar medical conditions as they age.

For example, approximately 1 in 4 dogs will, at some stage in their life, develop neoplasia, with almost half of dogs over the age of 10 developing cancer. Meanwhile, cancer is the second most common cause of death in people in the U.S., after heart disease.

Canine cognitive decline (CCD) is present in 28% of dogs aged 11 to 12 years, with a prevalence that increases to 68% around 15 to 16 years old. CCD mirrors many of the physiological and behavioral changes observed in humans with dementia and Alzheimer's disease (AD), including disorientation, memory problems, changes in activity levels, and pathologies, such as brain atrophy. AD is the seventh leading cause of death in humans.

With today’s technological advancements, researchers are calling for a concerted effort to gather big data on aging dogs in the hopes of benefitting not only veterinary care, but also to inform human medicine.

Lifetimes of data

A few long-term, large-scale studies are making progress in this area already, including the Dog Aging Project (see sidebar) and Golden Retriever Lifetime Study from the Morris Animal Foundation (MAF).

Launched in 2012, the primary goal of the latter is to identify nutritional, environmental, lifestyle, and genetic risk factors for cancer and other diseases in Golden Retrievers. One major finding from the study’s data is that hemangiosarcoma (HSA) appears to be the leading cause of cancer deaths. For all enrolled dog to date, 75% of deaths are cancer-related; of those cancer deaths, almost 70% are HSA.

In response, the Foundation launched its Hemangiosarcoma Initiative this year, which dedicates funding and resources to advance the prevention, detection and treatment of, and potentially cures for, this cancer in dogs. 

A study that appeared in PLoS One in March 2020 , suggested that HSA, a metastatic disease that progresses rapidly despite chemotherapy, shares genetic similarities with angiosarcoma (AS) in humans. Because it is rare and has limited treatment options and a poor survival rate, developing therapies has been difficult; however, HSA in dogs could serve as a model to test experimental therapies in clinical trials.

The initial group of 3,044 dogs in the Golden Retriever Lifetime Study has now decreased to 1,653, but prospective data and samples are available to researchers by request and at no charge, to help spur more studies seeking to address canine cancer and other health challenges in dogs.

For example, beginning in March 2021, an additional questionnaire was offered to participants specifically focused on CCD. Its questions address behaviors related to learning and memory, disorientation, social interactions, sleep-wake cycles, house soiling, activity, and anxiety. By collecting these data, MAF and the Purina Institute are working to improve understanding of incidence, prevalence, and risk factors.

The MAF is also partnering with Dr. John Fryer of the Mayo Clinic in Arizona to study CCD by evaluating donated brain tissue from study dogs that have died.

“The data they find on microscopic examination of these tissues will be compared to the behavior data collected to see if there is a correlation between observed brain abnormalities and behavior abnormalities,” said Dr. Kelly Diehl, senior director of science communications at MAF. “Our hope is that more researchers will use our data and samples to answer other questions associated with aging.”

Dogs and dementias

Canine cognitive disorder shares similarities with human dementia, including a substantial vascular component, says Dr. Atticus Hainsworth, a neuroscientist based at St. George’s, University of London. His research focuses on vascular contributions to cognitive impairment and dementia (VCID).

One study, published in the journal Stroke in June 2016 , looked at animal models and which ones had the best potential to increase understanding of specific vessel pathologies, how these pathologies cause parenchymal lesions, how risk factors influence vessel and parenchymal lesion changes, and the mechanisms that link them all to VCID.

When it comes to how aging dogs might be used as models for human diseases, “We are just beginning to find that out,” he said. “They are clever animals, with a large brain, good memory, and complex behaviors. Like humans, they have extensive white matter,” and have longer lifespans than some other animal models.

Based on his laboratory research, he performed a clinical trial in older people with small vessel disease. He wanted to know if the widely prescribed drug tadalafil had beneficial brain effects. The trial wasn’t successful, but it suggested additional, follow-up experiments that would be sensible to do.

“The message from studies in humans is that physical exercise, even into late life, is the best strategy for dementia prevention,” he said.

According to Dr. Hainsworth, the future of translation research looks, “really exciting, and larger animal species, including dogs, will be a big part of that.”

No shortage of aging dogs

Dr. Joel Ehrenzweig is another researcher looking at the connection between disease in aging dogs and that in humans. He was in private practice for 25 years before founding Veterinary Health Research Centers, a contract research organization. He said given the fact that dogs are living longer than they did 20 or 30 years ago, they’re going to be experiencing cognitive decline for longer.

Reports of his recent studies including one he co-authored with Dr. Robert P. Hunter in the November 2023 issue of AJVR , and another as lead author in the same month's issue of JAVMA , highlight the importance of using client-owned animals with naturally occurring CCD as disease-relevant surrogates for translational AD research.

In one of the reports, Dr. Ehrenzweig and his fellow authors introduced the Dogs Overcoming Geriatric Memory and Aging (DOGMA) initiative. They called for a study to be conducted in veterinary practices that would analyze the relationship between blood biomarkers and biometric behavior in older dogs to establish benchmark CCD data.

“The fact that we now have wearable technology (collars) that can very accurately record and track movements of animals makes potential clinical signs, on the behavioral side, easier to find,” Dr. Ehrenzweig said.

The neurodegenerative decline in dogs starts years before clinical signs are evident, he explained. With the help of wearable technology, it’s possible to pair up physical observations with blood biomarkers to see if and when a particular dog is on the cusp of neurodegenerative decline.

Once an affected dog is identified, Dr. Ehrenzweig and others with the DOGMA initiative can reach out to veterinary and human medical researchers, with the dog owner’s permission, to discuss the possible use of early interventions for CCD.

“The ability for practitioners … we are empowering them to not only help themselves and their practices but really do something very significant in the realm of One Health and medical care for populations with four legs and two,” Dr. Ehrenzweig said.

A version of this story appears in the March 2024 print issue of JAVMA

Discussing a patient’s cognitive changes with their owners can be challenging. Using a survey instrument, such as the Canine Cognitive Dysfunction Rating (CCDR) Scale or DISHAA tool from the Purina Institute, can help.

The AVMA also offers answers to frequently asked questions from pet owners about the care of senior pets.

Better end-of-life information for pets could help researchers, veterinarians

The Dog Aging Project (DAP), funded by the National Institute on Aging, has enrolled more than 45,000 dogs since it started in 2019.

Taking a page from human medicine, DAP researchers—which included veterinary health professionals and human gerontology experts—created an End of Life Survey (EOLS) to gather owner-reported mortality data about companion dogs.

“Before factors that influence healthy life span can be discovered, aging studies must first obtain the end points necessary to make meaningful conclusions,” the authors wrote in a study published in the September 2023 issue of JAVMA . “To accurately capture this mortality data in humans, studies must contend with underreported or incorrectly reported information on cause of death and/or manner of death when individuals die at home, when death certificates are improperly completed, when individuals have several comorbidities at the time of death, and when autopsies are not performed. Veterinary studies investigating the cause and manner of death in companion dogs face similar obstacles as well as additional unique challenges,” including the fact that there is no standardized system for reporting dog deaths.

The EOLS collects information on cause of death, reason for euthanasia, and perimortem quality of life in a standardized format. It will be used to build the DAP’s companion dog mortality information and perhaps other research projects.

“We anticipate that the EOLS data will provide new insights into companion dogs’ end-of-life experiences that will empower veterinarians to better care for their terminally ill and geriatric patients,” the authors wrote.

Related content

Setting the stage for owners when senior pets develop behavior problems

New research on Alzheimer's disease

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Dogs needed for aging research project

The Dog Aging Project seeks to understand determinants of canine aging

Dr. Kate Creevy was just beginning her career as a small animal veterinary faculty member at the University of Georgia College of Veterinary Medicine when she was approached by Daniel Promislow. Promislow, a faculty member in the Department of Genetics in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences at UGA, had been running a lab studying fruit flies and was intrigued by an article on the genetics of size in dogs. He wondered, why do smaller dogs live longer lives than their larger counterparts?

Together, the two began to form the basis of what has become the Dog Aging Project. And as a partner institution alongside six other colleges of veterinary medicine around the country, researchers at the University of Georgia are looking for new participants in the study.

There are almost 90 million dogs living in the United States, and to date, nearly 30,000 dog owners from around the country have volunteered for this community science research project dedicated to understanding the biological and environmental determinants of canine aging as part of a five-year, $23 million project funded by the National Institute on Aging, a part of the National Institutes of Health.

“By summer 2021, we’re hoping to have 60,000 pack members eligible for additional studies. These animals bring so much to our lives. Our entire team is dedicated to extending quality of life into advanced age for dogs and their humans,” said Creevy, DAP chief veterinary officer and, now, associate professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Science at Texas A&M University.

A select number of enrollees will also be eligible to participate in a clinical trial of the drug rapamycin. UGA cardiologist and associate professor of small animal medicine and surgery Dr. Mandy Coleman is helping to lead the trial nationwide.

Rapamycin is an immunosuppressant used in humans to combat transplanted organ rejection and some types of cancer. But scientists at the Dog Aging Project believe that it can be beneficial in prolonging healthy heart functions in dogs—effectively increasing their “healthspan,” or the time in life that a patient is most active, healthy and free of disease.

“This trial is truly unique in its goal and its breadth, and it’s mutually beneficial for dogs and human beings,” said Coleman. “As veterinarians, testing the effects of rapamycin in dogs is attractive, because the findings will be directly applicable to our patients and represent an opportunity to have healthier, happier patients for longer than we do today. However, this work can also impact human health. People and companion dogs share a common environment, so they experience many of the same environmental aging factors daily. Our findings could have a major impact on how we view and approach aging in both species.”

All kinds of dogs are welcome to join, but researchers are specifically seeking dogs, both purebred and mixed breed, in the following categories:

• Large breed dogs weighing between 70-100 pounds, especially breeds other than Labradors, golden retrievers and German shepherds (the most common breeds in the U.S.)
• Giant breed dogs weighing more than 100 pounds, such as Great Danes, wolfhounds and mastiffs
• Hound dogs, spaniels, pointers, terriers, bulldogs and pit bulls (purebred and mixed breed)
• Working dogs, such as herding, K9 and service dogs

Geographical regions

• Dogs living in rural areas, small towns and large cities
• Dogs in the Athens area will be considered for an upcoming clinical trial

“Healthy aging is the result of both genetics and the environment. It’s really important for us to study dogs who live in all kinds of environments from farm dogs to city dogs. Right now, we are specifically recruiting dogs from areas where we don’t have as many participants as we’d like to—like this one!” explained Promislow, DAP principal investigator and co-director, now a professor at the University of Washington

Because the DAP is a long-term study, puppy participants are especially beneficial to the project. The research team wants to follow dogs through their entire lives.

“Better understanding the health effects of the presence and timing of spaying and neutering your dogs is of particular interest to the veterinary community,” explained Creevey. “Following puppies through the process of spaying or neutering or through reproductive activity will tell us a lot about how these events influence healthy aging.”

Joining the pack

To participate in the Dog Aging Project, owners nominate a dog (one per household) at the project website, DogAgingProject.org . After this, they are invited to set up a personal research portal where they answer scientific surveys about their dog and upload veterinary records.

As a member of the Dog Aging Project Pack, participants will be asked to complete an annual health survey about their dog, which will take two to three hours, and several other shorter surveys (estimated 10-30 minutes each) spread throughout the year.

Once a dog is a member of the Dog Aging Project Pack, they may be eligible for a variety of other research activities (all voluntary), which could include genetic analyses, the collection of biological samples, or even participation in a clinical trial.

The Dog Aging Project is supported by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Aging, grant 5U19AG057377-03.

For more information, or to nominate your dog, visit dogagingproject.org.

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Welcome to the ManyDogs project!

Photo credit: Eddie Galaxy

ManyDogs is an international consortium of researchers interested in Canine Science. Our primary goal is to foster global collaboration and open science practices (i.e., transparency and reproducibility) through multi-site projects. Read our Mission Statement for a detailed explanation of our purpose.

By forming the ManyDogs consortium, we are establishing a collegial platform for addressing new questions and replicating historical findings on a greater scale than has been possible for any single research unit to date. Collectively, we will have the power to address questions such as breed or individual differences, or the impact of culture on behaviour, both of which have important implications for dog-human interaction and general dog welfare.

We have collaborators from all over the world:

Hover over dots to see lab names, and zoom and drag map to explore lab locations more closely.

We have just wrapped up our first study, ManyDogs 1, on dog-human social communication. The aim of ManyDogs 1 was to take a closer look at the long-debated question of whether dogs understand pointing as an informative gesture or as a command. We investigated this by running a single study with standardized methodology in a large number of labs in North America, South America, and Europe. For more information on this study, please see the ManyDogs 1 section of this website.

Next for ManyDogs

We are currently developing methods for ManyDogs 2. Stay tuned for more information!

Rescue Beagles: A Life Away From The Lab

Many research labs across the country use animals for testing products such as make-up or medicines. For the past decade, advocates have pushed to get more of these animals — especially research dogs — adopted after they are no longer needed. Just a handful of states have policies in place. Illinois just recently joined that list.

Lucy is a three-year-old beagle who grew up in a research laboratory. Last year, she was rescued by the California-based organization the Beagle Freedom Project who paired her up with Lauren and Scott Knudsen of Winnetka, Illinois.

Lauren says the labs agree to release research dogs that are no longer needed as long as no information is linked back to the facility. “For almost all of the dogs that get adopted, you’re not told anything. You don’t even know what they were being used for, what they were tested for, you have no idea,” she says.

The secrecy also means some dogs come out with medical issues that can’t be traced to their source. Lucy, for example, arrived with seizures and damaged vocal cords. The rescue beagle can’t bark like her family’s two other beagles, Wendy and Tanner, and she must take seizure medication. Lauren and Scott say they believe Lucy was hurt during her time in the lab.

But these “medical surprises” did not stop them from keeping Lucy after they agreed to foster her.

According to the Beagle Freedom Project, about 65,000 dogs are used in U.S. laboratories each year. Most of these dogs are beagles, used extensively in research for their docile nature. Some 2,000 cats are also used each year but not many make it out alive after each procedure. When the dogs or cats are no longer needed, it’s difficult to track their whereabouts: many are euthanized and not many given up for adoption. That’s where the group comes in to talk labs out of euthanizing the animals.

While these “rescue events” help place these former research animals into homes, advocates say policies are needed to further encourage labs into giving their animals up for adoption on their own. This is what happened in Illinois.

For two years, the Beagle Freedom Project pushed to garner support from lawmakers in Springfield. Democratic Rep. Linda Holmes of Aurora became the “Beagle Freedom Bill” chief sponsor. The measure called for labs using any tax-payer funding to reach out to animal rescue organizations and place cats or dogs into appropriate care.

But Kevin Chase, the Beagle Freedom Project’s vice-president, says many research labs opposed the legislation and slowed down the measure’s progress in the General Assembly. He says the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign was a strong opposing voice.

Robin Kaler, the university’s spokesperson, says the university always had an adoption policy in place and the law wouldn’t apply to them. But she does agree the measure’s original language may have exceeded authority by asking for all types of animals to be released, as well as not allowing each facility to set its own adoption policy guidelines.

Chase says the final measure limits the animals to cats and dogs and allows facilities to write-up their own adoption policies. The university then removed its opposition. “That’s the reason why the bill passed,” Chase says. The law went into effect earlier this year, making Illinois the sixth state in the country with such policies.

Lauren and Scott made sure to include Lucy in their trips to Springfield last May to meet with lawmakers, just as the final round of voting was due to take place. Other beagles across the state also made the trip.

“Unless you actually see the beagles, meet the beagles— it’s hard to really understand what this is all about. Definitely more powerful if the different politicians we’re meeting with actually get to see the dog,” Scott says.

Almost a year after Lucy joined their family, Scott and Lauren say all that remain are the physical reminders of her time in the lab — such as the identification number tattooed on her right ear, the seizures that have become less frequent over the last few months, as well as her small size.

“She’s a little smaller than most beagles, she’s a little bit more petite. We kind of say she still looks like a puppy,” Scott says.

“She’s very high energy, she’s very curious, friendly and outgoing. But she has this darker, this mysterious side to her you can’t quite put your finger on — that occasionally shows up and always reminds us of the lab. But she is a really, really sweet dog.”

Original Article: NPR Illinois

EmoCtrl-TTS

Controlling Time-Varying Emotional States of Flow-Matching-Based Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech

EmoCtrl-TTS is an emotion-controllable zero-shot TTS that can generate highly emotional speech with non-verbal vocalizations such as laughter and crying for any speaker. EmoCtrl-TTS is purely a research project. Currently, we have no plans to incorporate EmoCtrl-TTS into a product or expand access to the public.

Controlling time-varying emotional states of zero-shot text-to-speech

EmoCtrl-TTS utilizes embeddings that represent emotion and non-verbal vocalizations to condition the flow-matching-based zero-shot TTS. In order to generate high-quality emotional speech, EmoCtrl-TTS is trained with over 27,000 hours of expressive data, curated using pseudo-labeling.

EmoCtrl-TTS can generate a voice of any speaker with non-verbal vocalizations like laughter and crying.

Generated speech samples

EmoCtrl-TTS is specifically designed to capture the time-varying emotional states found in the audio prompt.

Audio prompt (Angry → Calm)

Generate speech by Voicebox (prior work)

Generated speech by EmoCtrl-TTS (our work)

Audio samples

Below, we included audio samples demonstrating how EmoCtrl-TTS performs. The speech samples were taken from JVNV dataset, DiariST-AliMeeting dataset, and RAVDESS dataset. The speech samples below are provided for the sole purpose of illustrating EmoCtrl-TTS.

Capturing the time-varying emotional states

EmoCtrl-TTS can generate a speech that closely mimics the time-varying emotional states found in the audio prompt. In these demo samples, the audio prompt is created by concatenating two audio samples from RAVDESS data set. The text prompt is “dogs are sitting by the door dogs are sitting by the door” for all generated speech samples.

Generating non-verbal vocalization

EmoCtrl-TTS can generate non-verbal vocalizations, such as laughter and crying, that closely match the audio prompt.

Laughing speech generation

(Audio prompt from AliMeeting-DiariST dataset; real conversational speech in Chinese)

Crying speech generation

(Audio prompt from JVNV dataset; staged speech in Japanese)

Emotional speech-to-speech translation

EmoCtrl-TTS can be applied to speech-to-speech translation, transferring not only the voice characteristic but also the precise nuance of the source audio. The source audios were sampled from the JNVN dataset, which is a Japanese staged emotional speech corpus.

(*) We used Seamless Expressive for a pure research purpose. Seamless Expressive was used based on the Seamless Licensing Agreement. Copyright © Meta Platforms, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (**) We used Whisper to transcribe the speech, and then applied GPT-4 to translate the transcription to English.

Ethics statement

EmoCtrl-TTS is purely a research project. Currently, we have no plans to incorporate EmoCtrl-TTS into a product or expand access to the public. EmoCtrl-TTS could synthesize speech that maintains speaker identity and could be used for educational learning, entertainment, journalistic, self-authored content, accessibility features, interactive voice response systems, translation, chatbot, and so on. While EmoCtrl-TTS can speak in a voice like the voice talent, the similarity, and naturalness depend on the length and quality of the speech prompt, the background noise, as well as other factors. It may carry potential risks in the misuse of the model, such as spoofing voice identification or impersonating a specific speaker. We conducted the experiments under the assumption that the user agrees to be the target speaker in speech synthesis. If the model is generalized to unseen speakers in the real world, it should include a protocol to ensure that the speaker approves the use of their voice and a synthesized speech detection model. If you suspect that EmoCtrl-TTS is being used in a manner that is abusive or illegal or infringes on your rights or the rights of other people, you can report it at the Report Abuse Portal.

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Research: Using AI at Work Makes Us Lonelier and Less Healthy

• David De Cremer
• Joel Koopman

Employees who use AI as a core part of their jobs report feeling more isolated, drinking more, and sleeping less than employees who don’t.

The promise of AI is alluring — optimized productivity, lightning-fast data analysis, and freedom from mundane tasks — and both companies and workers alike are fascinated (and more than a little dumbfounded) by how these tools allow them to do more and better work faster than ever before. Yet in fervor to keep pace with competitors and reap the efficiency gains associated with deploying AI, many organizations have lost sight of their most important asset: the humans whose jobs are being fragmented into tasks that are increasingly becoming automated. Across four studies, employees who use it as a core part of their jobs reported feeling lonelier, drinking more, and suffering from insomnia more than employees who don’t.

Imagine this: Jia, a marketing analyst, arrives at work, logs into her computer, and is greeted by an AI assistant that has already sorted through her emails, prioritized her tasks for the day, and generated first drafts of reports that used to take hours to write. Jia (like everyone who has spent time working with these tools) marvels at how much time she can save by using AI. Inspired by the efficiency-enhancing effects of AI, Jia feels that she can be so much more productive than before. As a result, she gets focused on completing as many tasks as possible in conjunction with her AI assistant.

• David De Cremer is a professor of management and technology at Northeastern University and the Dunton Family Dean of its D’Amore-McKim School of Business. His website is daviddecremer.com .
• JK Joel Koopman is the TJ Barlow Professor of Business Administration at the Mays Business School of Texas A&M University. His research interests include prosocial behavior, organizational justice, motivational processes, and research methodology. He has won multiple awards from Academy of Management’s HR Division (Early Career Achievement Award and David P. Lepak Service Award) along with the 2022 SIOP Distinguished Early Career Contributions award, and currently serves on the Leadership Committee for the HR Division of the Academy of Management .

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PERSPECTIVE article

The new era of canine science: reshaping our relationships with dogs.

• 1 School of Anthropology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, United States
• 2 College of Veterinary Medicine, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, United States
• 3 Cognitive Science, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, United States
• 4 California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, CA, United States
• 5 Department of Psychology, Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, NC, United States
• 6 Center for Urban Resilience, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA, United States
• 7 Animal Welfare Science Centre, Faculty of Veterinary and Agricultural Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Canine science is rapidly maturing into an interdisciplinary and highly impactful field with great potential for both basic and translational research. The articles in this Frontiers Research Topic, Our Canine Connection: The History, Benefits and Future of Human-Dog Interactions , arise from two meetings sponsored by the Wallis Annenberg PetSpace Leadership Institute, which convened experts from diverse areas of canine science to assess the state of the field and challenges and opportunities for its future. In this final Perspective paper, we identify a set of overarching themes that will be critical for a productive and sustainable future in canine science. We explore the roles of dog welfare, science communication, and research funding, with an emphasis on developing approaches that benefit people and dogs, alike.

Dogs have played important roles in the lives of humans for millennia ( 1 , 2 ). However, throughout much of scientific history they have been dismissed as an artificial species with little to contribute to our understanding of the natural world, or our place within it. During the last two decades, this sentiment has changed dramatically; canine science is rapidly maturing into an established, impactful, and highly interdisciplinary field ( Figure 1 ). Canine scientists, who previously occupied relatively marginalized roles in academic research, are increasingly being hired at major research universities, and centers devoted to the study of dogs and their interactions with humans are proliferating around the world. The factors underlying dogs' newfound popularity in science are diverse and include (1) increased interest in understanding dog origins, behavior, and cognition; (2) diversification in our approaches to research with non-human animals; (3) recognition of dogs' value as a unique biological model with relevance for humans; and (4) growth in research on the nature and consequences of dog-human interactions, in their myriad forms, from working dog performance to displaced canines living in shelters.

Figure 1 . Canine science is an interdisciplinary field with connections to other traditional and emerging areas of research. The specific fields shown overlap in ways not depicted here and are not an exhaustive list of disciplines contributing to canine science. Rather, they are included as examples of the diversity of scholarship in canine science.

This Perspective represents the final article in a collection of manuscripts arising from two workshops sponsored by the Wallis Annenberg PetSpace Leadership Institute. Leadership Fellows from around the world gathered in 2017 and 2020 to discuss the state of research and future directions in canine science. The individual articles in this collection provide a detailed treatment of key topics discussed at these events. In this final article, we identify a set of overarching challenges that emerge from this work and identify priorities and opportunities for the future of canine science.

The rise of canine science has benefited substantially from public interest and participation in the research process. Unlike many research studies, which unfold quietly in the ivory towers of research universities, the new era of canine science is intentionally public facing. The dogs being studied are not laboratory animals, bred and housed for research purposes, but rather are companions living in private homes, or assisting humans in capacities ranging from assistance for people with disabilities, to medical and explosives detection. Campus-based research laboratories have opened their doors to members of the public who bring their dogs to participate in problem-solving tasks, social interactions, and sometimes even non-invasive neuroimaging studies. Increasingly, dog owners themselves play a significant role in the scientific process, serving as community scientists who contribute to the systematic gathering of data from the convenience of their homes.

This new research model in conjunction with emerging technologies, makes canine science a highly visible field that engages public stakeholders in unprecedented ways. From a scientific perspective, society has become the new laboratory, and in doing so, has facilitated research with dogs of a scope and scale that was heretofore unthinkable. As tens of thousands of dogs contribute to research on topics ranging from cognition and genetics ( 3 , 4 ) to aging and human loneliness ( 5 ), canine science is entering the realm of “big data” and eclipsing many traditional research approaches. Importantly, these advances are occurring simultaneously across diverse fields of science, creating powerful new opportunities for consilience that will make canine science even more valuable in the years ahead. However, maturing this model toward a sustainable future that serves its diverse stakeholders—who include scientists, research funders, members of the public, and dogs themselves—will require careful navigation of key challenges related to dog welfare, science communication, and financial support ( Figure 2 ).

Figure 2 . Visual summary of the key issues identified in this Perspective . A sustainable future in canine science will require (1) research approaches that prioritize and monitor the welfare of dogs, (2) improved science communication to avoid incorrect reporting of study results, and to translate research findings to meaningful change in practices relating to dogs, and (3) availability of research funding that is not tied exclusively to studying the possible benefits of dogs for humans.

Dog Welfare

Globally, animal welfare has been linked to the public acceptability that underpins sustainable animal interactions and partnerships ( 6 ). Where human-animal interactions have failed to meet community expectations, practices and in some case entire industries, have been disrupted or ceased. Recent examples include whaling for profit and greyhound racing ( 6 , 7 ). Science is not exempt from this necessity to meet with public expectations and the new era of canine science must place canine welfare at the forefront. Considering dogs as individuals and co-workers, rather than tools for work or subjects, reflects a community moral and ethical paradigm shift that is currently underway. Reimagining our relationship with domestic dogs in research will also help inform our treatment of other animals. In this way, studies of dogs and our interactions with them can serve as a pioneering new model for many areas of science.

As scientists advocate for the revision of community and industry practices with dogs in light of new evidence, we must apply the same criteria to the conduct of our research. This includes adjusting canine research and training methods to acknowledge the sentience of dogs, and the importance of the affective experience for dogs in both research and community settings ( 8 – 11 ). The discipline of animal welfare science has progressed rapidly over the last two decades, and we have many animal-based, welfare-outcome measures available to us ( 6 , 11 ). Ensuring the well-being of the dogs we study will be as critical to ongoing social license to operate (i.e., community approval) for canine science as it is for working dog interests ( 12 ). Being transparent about the issues of animal consent and vulnerability, as well as offering animals agency with regard to their participation in science are valuable suggestions offered within this special issue. We encourage our colleagues to not just consider this paradigm shift, but to effect it through prioritizing and representing the dog's perspective and welfare in their research.

Although increasingly, researchers may include a single or limited set of canine stress measures in studies exploring dogs' potential benefits to humans, this approach alone does not fill the need for studies that prioritize an understanding of canine welfare as their central focus. Canine welfare should be considered not just as an emergent population-level measure ( 13 ) but rather with respect to the way in which it is experienced: from the perspectives of individual dogs. Commonly used statistical methods from human research, such as group-based trajectory analysis ( 14 ) may offer proven techniques that allow meaningful reporting on populations while reflecting the nuance of shared, sub-group patterns. Such approaches will better reflect individual differences, for example variations in canine personality, social support and relationship styles, as well as other significant factors. One impediment to robust measurement of animal welfare in canine science has been limited funding.

We believe that all granting bodies who fund exploration of the possible benefits to people from dogs should also fund and require the canine perspective to be robustly monitored and reported. Impediments to this work arise not from lack of researcher interest or access to dogs, but rather from challenges to securing funding that is independent from a focus on human health outcomes, or other tangible outcomes of work that dogs perform. To be able to optimize canine welfare, there is an urgent need for increased funding specifically to study the welfare of dogs, in all their diversity. The new era of canine science will identify what dogs need to thrive, propelling us toward a mutually sustainable partnership between people and dogs.

Communication

One area that has not received much attention in relation to canine science is the way in which research findings are communicated outside the empirical literature. Fueled by media reports, interest in canine science and the impact of dogs on human health and well-being has grown substantially in the last 10 years. A survey by the Human-Animal Bond Research Institute found that 71% of pet owners were aware of studies demonstrating that pets improve mental and physical health. Some of these claims are justified. For example, many studies have found that interacting with therapy dogs reduces stress and anxiety and increases positive emotional states in a variety of settings including hospitals, schools and nursing homes ( 15 , 16 ). In other cases, high public expectations about the healing power of pets are not matched by the results of empirical studies. For instance, while the Human-Animal Bond Research Institute survey found that 86% of pet owners believe pets relieve depression, the majority of studies on pet-ownership and depression do not support these conclusions ( 17 ).

Because so many people have extensive personal experiences with dogs, investigators face unique challenges in sharing research results with the public. In their hearts, dog owners believe that their canine companions make them feel less depressed, or that dogs feel guilty when they've eliminated indoors or explored the kitchen garbage—even though research might suggest otherwise. In addition, when it comes to animal companions, people much prefer to read a news article in which visits with a therapy dog improved the well-being of a child undergoing chemotherapy than an article about a randomized clinical trial which found no differences between the well-being of children in a therapy dog group and a control group ( 18 ). Nor is there likely to be much press coverage devoted to methodological issues such as small effect sizes and inappropriate attributions of causality to the results of correlational studies.

Canine scientists and scholars of human-animal interactions (anthrozoologists) are fortunate that the public is intrinsically interested in our research. We feel that it is critical for investigators to make efforts to communicate the findings of important studies to the public. We caution however, that researchers should not overstate the implications of their findings in press releases and conversations with journalists, despite frequent pressure to do so. These distortions could have a negative impact on misleading the public and misrepresenting the actual findings, a problem that is particularly acute in canine science where well-intentioned pet owners may eagerly adopt practices based on media coverage of scientific studies. The now-established discipline of science communication offers guidance for how best to engage with community and research stakeholders in meaningful ways.

Traditionally, science communication has relied on the knowledge deficit model of communication ( 19 ). Directionally one-way, the deficit model operates on the assumption that ignorance is the reason for a lack of community support and application of scientific evidence. Examples where practices have not been updated in response to research findings include dog training methodology ( 9 ) and breeding selection for extreme body types, such as brachycephaly in pugs and bulldogs, even though the health and welfare impacts are scientifically well understood ( 20 ). Scientists who share their research results thinking that knowledge disseminated—to “educate” the public—is enough to result in different dog care decisions, industry practices or legislation, will generally find this to be ineffective ( 21 ). This is because the deficit model overlooks the underlying beliefs, existing attitudes and motivations for current practices. We now recognize that the deficit model is not the most effective way to communicate, engage stakeholders and effect change ( 22 , 23 ).

Further exploration of the effect of targeted and intentional science communication, informed by human behavior change research, will improve the translation of canine science to meaningful outcomes for dogs and people alike ( 12 ). This is important, as many studies in canine science have applied aims designed to inform global policies and the creation of best practices ( 24 , 25 ). Applied research from the livestock and farming sector suggests that coordinating human behavior change strategies from social and psychological sciences can influence beliefs and attitudes to motivate changes in the ways people behave toward animals, resulting in improved animal welfare ( 26 – 28 ). In the era of attention economics, where scientists are competing for public attention alongside other diverse media, it is vital that the communication of our work is honest, relevant, and effective, to ensure that our field stays on the radar of key stakeholders, funding bodies and change agents.

A third key challenge in the future of canine science concerns research funding and a careful balancing of the priorities of scientists and funding agencies. In the last decade, canine science has received considerable support from the pet care sector, as well as human health and defense agencies [e.g., ( 29 )]. Fine and Andersen ( 30 ) stress that although funding is still a challenge in human-animal interaction research, there are now more options to be found. In 2008, the Waltham Petcare Science Institute initiated a public-private partnership with the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Over the past decade, this partnership has provided funding for research aimed at measuring the impact of specific Animal-assisted interventions. Since 2014, the Human Animal Bond Research Institute has funded a total of 35 academic research grants investigating the health outcomes of pet ownership and/or human-animal interaction, both for the people and non-human animals involved. Despite clear benefits for enabling research, there remains a limited group of agencies responsible for funding this work. This has potential to constrain the range of topics being studied. In addition, scientists may feel compelled to support the agendas of industry groups, such as those in the pet sector, who often encourage research that will demonstrate the benefits of pets and human-animal interactions.

These constraints were recognized by Wallis Annenberg PetSpace in 2017 when they envisioned their Leadership Institute Program with a mission to promote interdisciplinary scholarship and convene meetings to accelerate research and policy development ( https://www.annenbergpetspace.org/about/leadership ). This model for engagement inspired the organization to offer two invited retreats (2017, 2020) for a total of 33 experts in the field that provided opportunities for open ended and frank discussion about the nature of human-animal interaction research, and the maturing field of canine science. By providing the space and financial support, plus the opportunity to work together and publish, Annenberg PetSpace provided a way to both illuminate current limitations, and to identify priorities for the future, free of constraints from outside interest groups. These intellectual salons have no specific agenda other than to consider the future of the field and what kinds of questions need to be asked based on what we already know. The results of these two retreats include 14 published refereed papers, plus a suite of collaborations that might otherwise not have happened. We hope that these fellowships and retreats continue and inspire others to support similar initiatives so that scholars across multiple disciplines have the opportunity to experience the transformational exchanges that occur during these programs. The new era of canine science will require diverse funding that is not limited to how dogs can benefit humans, from health, safety and economic perspectives. This change will enable researchers the freedom to further our understanding of dogs and their needs for optimized welfare. In turn, this will allow us to identify how dogs and people can thrive together.

Looking Ahead

We hope that the publications emerging from these retreats will reach a diverse community of stakeholders, including students, early career researchers, animal welfare and advocacy groups, legislators and policy makers, philanthropies, and traditional agency funders. The goal of these papers is to spark imagination for projects not yet engaged and to help set the agenda for future research that can enhance our understanding of human-dog interactions and identify paths to ensure a future of symbiotic relationships between these species.

The vision of this collective group of scholars includes the goal of establishing studies with dogs as a sustainable and broad-reaching research focus. Although dogs provide many advantages as a “model species” —including their phenotypic diversity, and shared environments and evolutionary history with humans—a research model centered around dogs has many additional benefits. Dogs provide a rich, interactive and sentient model with deep implications for the way scientists approach animal research, and animal welfare. Dogs also increase the accessibility of research, both literally, due to their ubiquity and opportunities for large-scale public participation in research ( 31 , 32 ), and figuratively, through a body of work with appeal to the broader public.

The field of canine science has much in common with a similar emerging science, that of urban ecology. Humans are historically at the core of the subject material, but non-human elements are often the focus of the study. As such, the work is always culturally embedded, relevant to a variety of stakeholders, and ultimately expected to improve quality of life. The urban ecologists coined a term Use-Inspired Research ( 33 ) from modifying the existing idea of Pasteur's Quadrant which organizes research questions across the axes of fundamental understanding and considerations of use ( 34 ). Both canine research and urban ecology seek fundamental understanding, but also expect to directly apply the knowledge gained to improve outcomes for their subjects and stakeholders.

By including the public in canine science we not only increase the quantity of the data that we can gather, we serve as ambassadors for a new model of responsible animal research. The result increases the value of human-animal interaction research and creates opportunities for the next generation of interdisciplinary scientists. The goal of this collection has been both to highlight specific recent advances in canine science as well as to identify emerging and overarching issues that will shape the future of this field. The multidisciplinary nature of our work with dogs allows scientists to contribute to a robust research agenda, enhancing our understanding of canines and their impact on society. Ultimately, the nexus of our discoveries should have profound effects on reshaping and enriching our relationships with dogs.

Data Availability Statement

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author/s.

Author Contributions

All authors listed have made a substantial, direct and intellectual contribution to the work, and approved it for publication.

We thank Wallis Annenberg PetSpace for supporting the open-access publishing fees associated with this manuscript.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Keywords: canine science, dog, animal welfare, human-animal interaction, science communication, funding, sustainability

Citation: MacLean EL, Fine A, Herzog H, Strauss E and Cobb ML (2021) The New Era of Canine Science: Reshaping Our Relationships With Dogs. Front. Vet. Sci. 8:675782. doi: 10.3389/fvets.2021.675782

Received: 03 March 2021; Accepted: 11 June 2021; Published: 15 July 2021.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2021 MacLean, Fine, Herzog, Strauss and Cobb. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Evan L. MacLean, evanmaclean@arizona.edu

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Public safety officer adopts dog rescued from hot car in hotel parking lot

INDIANAPOLIS (Gray News) - Police say a dog left in a hot car has a second chance at happiness after a public safety officer who helped rescue her decided to adopt her.

Indianapolis Police say Public Safety Officer S. Poe was among those on scene when a German shepherd named Abby, a cat and another dog were left inside a locked car in 90-degree heat.

The three animals were found last Thursday in a hotel parking lot by the manager, who said he was alerted to the situation when Abby honked the car’s horn, WISH reports .

Officers rescued Abby and the cat, but sadly, the second dog in the car died. It’s believed the animals were in the car for about three hours.

Police announced Saturday that Poe reached out to Indianapolis Animal Care Services after the incident and adopted Abby, giving her a new forever home.

“I switched her collar, and it was like Abby knew she was home for good,” Poe said.

Two people – 53-year-old Charles Thomas and 74-year-old Norma Light – are facing charges in relation to the incident, according to WISH. Light allegedly said she left the animals in the car because the hotel was not pet-friendly.

Copyright 2024 Gray Media Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

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