Which pups will become service dogs?
DURHAM, N.C. — Yonder, 11 weeks old and 15 pounds, had two choices. In a white-walled room at Duke University, the wiggly Labrador retriever mix faced a neon green squeaky squid toy and an upturned bowl topped with a piece of kibble. “OK!” a researcher said perkily, and the puppy didn’t hesitate. She scurried straight toward the treat.
Yonder was bred for an exceptionally difficult job: to become a service dog that can alert to a doorbell or pull a wheelchair while remaining composed and quiet, in crowds or on trails, and never chasing squirrels. Whether she’s capable was being gleaned in this room, with tests aimed at measuring her problem-solving, self-control and communications with people.
That was the hope, at least, for Yonder and her six furry cohorts. Early this year, they were the newest subjects of a $1.6 million study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, to help untangle questions long asked by breeders and trainers and now increasingly scrutinized by scientists: What makes a successful service dog? Can it be predicted in a puppy as young as Yonder?
At stake is a lot of money and a lot of dogs. Our expanding understanding of canines’ unique skills has fueled interest in service dogs among people with disabilities and the military, but it has also spawned scammers and yearslong wait-lists. Although large organizations have honed the use of breeding and training to produce calm and obedient dogs, only about 50% make the cut. By that time, nearly two years and as much as $50,000 have been spent on one dog.
These questions were also explored in a 2018 documentary, “Pick of the Litter,” which followed five dogs from one litter to see which ones made the cut to become Guide Dogs for the Blind. It’s now a docuseries on Disney+.
Over two decades, the study of dog minds, genetics and behavior has given rise to laboratories at universities around the world. And in service dog organizations, with their controlled breeding and noble missions, canine researchers see ideal study populations.
“We’re trying to understand the dog side of the leash and how we get more dogs helping more people,” said Brian Hare, an evolutionary anthropologist who is co-director of the Duke Canine Cognition Center, which is studying puppies bred by the California-based Canine Companions for Independence.
Some discoveries have already been made. Mr. Hare and a colleague found successful service dogs more often make eye contact with a person when facing an unsolvable task and use inferential reasoning to find a hidden reward. Another study concluded puppies with “helicopter moms” are more likely to fail as guide dogs, while young dogs that quickly solve a multistep problem are more likely to succeed. A neuroscientist who scanned the brains of service dog candidates found washouts had higher activity in the area associated with excitability.
Other revelations are further off, but potentially revolutionary. One canine geneticist is collecting thousands of DNA samples in a bid to pinpoint the genetic markers of star service and working dogs.
“It’s huge — huge,” Brenda Kennedy, CCI’s director of canine health and research, said of the impact the research could have on a donor-funded group like hers, which provides dogs at no cost. “It really comes down to numbers. Every time we increase the percentage of dogs that succeed in our program, the more we’re going to be able to have an impact.”
That is why Yonder and her peers — Arthur, Aurora, Westley, Wisdom, Zindel and Zola — were enrolled in a sort of boarding school for future service dogs on the campus of one of the nation’s elite universities. Duke calls it
“puppy kindergarten.”
Pups that make it will become one of the five kinds of service dogs CCI provides, which include hearing dogs and assistance dogs for veterans with PTSD. Washouts might be “released” to another organization for a different job, but often they become pets.
In March, the spread of the
coronavirus forced Duke to close, and Yonder’s cohort was sent to live in private homes. But the research has continued with puppies being raised off-campus, and Mr. Hare said he expects the kindergarten to resume at the university in 2021.
In normal times, this is how it works: A new group of puppies arrives each semester and bunks, for 12 weeks, in the brick biological sciences building that is home to the Canine Cognition Center or in dorms with students. During the day, all romp together around a linoleum-floored room that amounts to a puppy day care, with plush dog beds, soft lighting, birch tree decals on a wall and a white noise machine playing forest sounds. Outdoors is an artificial turf play area, where the sight of tussling puppies regularly stops passersby in their tracks.
The puppies are cared for and cuddled by student volunteers, who were, unsurprisingly, eager to help. About 600 students responded to a call but were winnowed down to 150 after being required to take a fivehour online course about dog cognition and attending a meeting.
The pups face 14 cognitive tests every two weeks from ages 8-20 weeks, the most rapid period of brain development. At 16 weeks, Mr. Hare said, their brains are the equivalent of a 6-year-old child’s.
He has been working with CCI for about a decade, since he was shocked to learn at a conference that behaviorism — the idea that a person or animal’s behavior can be explained or altered by conditioning — was still canon among dog trainers. He and other canine scientists had known since the 1990s that dogs have different individual cognitive abilities.
Sitting in his office down the hall from the puppy day care in February, Mr. Hare described a test his lab gives to gauge a dog’s tendency to rely on its memory or a human’s gesture: A person hides a reward under a box as a dog watches. Then the human points to a second box, and the dog makes its choice.
“There is no right answer. And what you find is some dogs really rely on their memory, and they completely ignore you, and other dogs really listen to you. So it’s not one dog is smarter than the other,” Mr. Hare said.
“Our challenge now is even more specific, which is, can we figure out which outcome is best for you, given your cognitive profile?”
Mr. Hare said he and other scientists have already found, for a study not yet published, that puppies’ performance on some tests at 10 weeks mirrors how they do at 18 weeks. The Duke project aims to get even greater “resolution” on when these skills develop, and how early they predict later success.
Innate skills are not everything. Environment matters, too, and another side of puppy kindergarten is a socialization experiment. Might an ampedup social environment in these formative weeks provide a sort of head start?
Before starting training at 18 months, most service dogs are raised in homes by individual or family “puppy raisers.” The Duke puppies are being raised around one another and a stream of humans. Any student can visit the nursery and cavort with puppies, and 4,000 did so last fall. The puppies visit pediatric patients at Duke University Hospital. Medical students perform exams on the pups, as practice for interacting with nonverbal young children.
“When we see him starting to get frustrated, we can just re-engage him,” Margaret Gruen, an assistant professor at North Carolina State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, said as she held Zindel, a yellow Lab, on an exam table in the Duke cognition lab. Next to Ms. Gruen, who is co-directing the research at Duke, medical student Laura Noteware gently felt for Zindel’s lymph nodes.
Some providers that breed puppies also use genetics, analyzing pedigrees to estimate the likelihood that a breeding pair will pass along certain traits, such as hip dysplasia or fear of thunder. By collecting this information over three decades, the New York-based Guiding Eyes for the Blind has raised its success rate from about 20 percent of puppies born to nearly 40 percent, said Jane Russenberger, its senior director for breeding and genetics. Dogs’ most common reason for failure, she said, is not being able to bounce back into work mode after something alarming occurs.
But each year, about 170 puppies graduate from the program, and about 400 applications for dogs come in, she said. Its wait list is about 150 people long. That is why Guiding Eyes is now working with Elinor Karlsson, a geneticist at the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard.
Ms. Karlsson studies the genetics of dog behavior, and she sees working dogs — a group that includes service dogs and those that do jobs like drug detection — as key subjects, because they are mostly selected for behavior, not looks. By sequencing working dogs’ DNA, she hopes to discover patterns that correlate with success. She figures she needs samples from 10,000 dogs to make this work; she has about 1,600.