Guide dogs given impossible task to see who’s a good boy

GUIDE dog puppies will be given an unsolvable task as part of a scheme hoping to find out what makes the perfect service animal.

More than 600 seven-week-old puppies will be given six tasks, to gauge their personality and find out if they will grow up to be a suitable companion for a blind person.

Sight-loss charity Guide Dogs has launched the Puppy Cognition programme, designed to give trainers better insight into the personality of individual puppies. This, they hope, will allow for quicker and more accurate assessments of puppies’ suitability as guide dogs.

Puppies enrolled in the study will be analysed for several years to see if the early indicators were accurate or not.

One of the tasks facing the dogs is impossible, and part of the assessment is to see how the animals react to a problem with no solution.

They will be presented with a sealed container with visible food inside and watched for 30 seconds to see what they do. After their response is noted, the container is opened by a human.

There is also a “human interest task”, whereby a hidden person speaks to the puppy and then walks into the room where the puppy is, to see how much it wants to interact with the stranger.

In another test, the puppy is presented with three objects: a bag filled with crumpled paper, an open umbrella, and a metal sheet. The researchers are interested in the reaction of the dog to these random stimuli.

Dr Helen Whiteside, the chief scientific officer at Guide Dogs, said: “What we’re looking at is how our dogs are able to problem solve.”

Dr Whiteside thinks in the long-term the programme may help to see if there are certain genes that make a dog more alert, obedient and trainable.

She said: “Once we discover this data, we might be able to say these puppies really thrive in this type of environment, and we can make sure we are setting our volunteers up to really support those puppies and help them thrive.

“We hope that those will be the outcomes, but it will take us another two years to find out.”