A Preliminary Study toward a Rapid Assessment of Age-Related Behavioral Differences in Family Dogs
2020
Eniko Kubinyi | Ivaylo B. Iotchev
Over the last few years, several efforts have been undertaken to characterize the aging process in dogs. In the present study, we evaluate a short protocol measuring dogs&rsquo: cognitive, social, and physical capacities. Our aim was to develop a feasible test battery, with minimal pre-training requirements, no complex devices, and which is set outdoors (i.e., a specific testing room is not needed). As ageing in dogs is usually associated with a decrease in activity, we also assessed the personality trait activity/excitability with a dog personality questionnaire. Four subtests proved sensitive to the dogs&rsquo: age. In particular, old dogs displayed less approaching and following behaviors toward an unknown but friendly human, showed both less avoidance and interest toward a novel object, looked less at the owner when faced with an unsolvable problem, and performed worse on the short-term memory task. Previous test procedures for investigating age-related changes involve expensive and/or complicated devices and extensive pre-training. The main advantage of the proposed battery is to reduce costs and efforts in veterinary assessments. Further tests in same-breed, large samples and between dogs with mild and severe cognitive impairments will be needed in order to further validate the battery.
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