Guide dog puppies to be put to the test in bid to improve breeding programme

IT HAS always been somewhat of a rhetorical question, but researchers are hoping to be able to answer “Who’s a good boy?”, at least when it comes to guide dogs.

Guide Dogs, the sight-loss charity, has launched a research project called Puppy Cognition that sees seven-week-old guide dog puppies in different scenarios and studies their responses.

The project includes a number of fun, interactive tasks so the animals’ personality and interests can be assessed.

Its aim is to help Guide Dogs get an early understanding of how individual guide dog puppies observe and react, to gauge what they may be like to raise and train later on, and to potentially examine any hereditary traits.

The puppies will be monitored over the coming years to track correlations between reactions and later behaviours.

Dr Helen Whiteside, chief scientific officer at Guide Dogs, explained problem solving is one of the abilities being looked at.

Giving an example of where a guide dog might need to solve a problem, Becky Hunt, canine science associate at the charity, said: “If they’re walking down the street and there’s a car parked on the road and there’s not enough space for both of them to fit through, the dog has to kind of solve that problem.”

She said: “Essentially, we want to improve our breeding programme, we want to improve what we do, we want to improve supporting our dogs.”

Dr Whiteside added: “What we hope to get out of it, from the breeding perspective what we might be doing is looking at which aspects of this are heritable.

“So is there any bits of this assessment that we can see come from mum and dad so we can make sure that we’re keeping those amazing traits within our breeding population. But once we discover this data, we might be able to say that these puppies really thrive in this type of environment, and we can make sure that we are setting our volunteers up to really support those puppies and help them thrive.”