Researchers were sequencing DNA from a collection of hundreds of bones excavated years before in Southeast Alaska by researchers including Timothy Heaton, PhD, professor of earth sciences at the University of South Dakota when they discovered a dog bone. Charlotte Lindqvist, an evolutionary biologist from University at Buffalo, was studying how Ice Age climatic changes impacted animals’ survival and movements in Southeast Alaska.
Lindqvist originally thought that the bone was from a bear but quickly realized that it was a dog bone. This gave them evidence about early human migration through that area and possibly how dogs first arrived in America.
Researchers analyzed the dog’s mitochondrial genome and concluded that the animal belonged to a lineage of dogs whose evolutionary history diverged from that of Siberian dogs as early as 16,700 years ago.
This discovery showed the the dog had a marine diet and supports the hypothesis that the first dog and human migration occurred through the Northwest Pacific coastal route.
Journal Reference:
Flavio Augusto da Silva Coelho, Stephanie Gill, Crystal M. Tomlin, Timothy H. Heaton, Charlotte Lindqvist. An early dog from southeast Alaska supports a coastal route for the first dog migration into the Americas. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2021; 288 (1945): 20203103 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2020.3103
Cite This Page:
University at Buffalo. “How did dogs get to the Americas? An ancient bone fragment holds clues.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 23 February 2021. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/02/210223192442.htm>.
As a Christian and an animal behavior consultant, I am always asked questions about God’s relationship with animals. Does God care about them? Does God talk to them? Can they be evil? Surprisingly, the Bible gives us the answers to these and many more questions. Often people are surprised to learn that animals have been part of Biblical miracles. God’s Creatures covers fifteen different topics that involve animals, all questions that I have been asked.
Everything in this book is backed by Scripture and has been reviewed by two theologians for accuracy. When I wrote this book, I compared critical English words with the original Greek to ensure that the translation was accurate to the English meaning. And of course, the most often and the most controversial question that I have been asked is, do animals go to Heaven? This question is covered in the book. Even if you are not a Christian, I am sure you will find the references to scientific studies and the topics in God’s Creatures interesting. God’s Creatures is a great Bible study for churches or Sunday school. It is written so that children can read and understand what it says. Offering a Bible study about animals is a good way to reach out to the members of your community. You can order the book from my website, www.sbulanda.com, on Amazon or from the publisher, www.Caladach.com.
Researchers at the University of South Korea have studied the benefits people have from interacting with dogs. Although is this not new information, they researched further to see if different activities produced a different reaction in people. They had people play, walk, groom and massage dogs while studying their brainwaves. They found that the people who walked or played with dogs had an increase in relaxed wakefulness. The participants who groomed, played and massaged a dog had a heightened level of concentration. They also observed that the subjects felt a significant drop in the feeling of fatigue, depression and stress after interacting with dogs.
Sue’s Note: I would think that the same results would be found when people interact with other animals that they enjoy. This study supports the use of therapy animals in all situations.
Journal Reference:
Onyoo Yoo, YuTong Wu, Jin Soo Han, Sin-Ae Park. Psychophysiological and emotional effects of human–Dog interactions by activity type: An electroencephalogram study. PLOS ONE, 2024; 19 (3): e0298384 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0298384
Cite This Page:
PLOS. “Interactions with dogs can increase brainwaves associated with stress relief and heightened concentration.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 13 March 2024. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/03/240313185025.htm>.
Researchers at the University of South Korea have studied the benefits people have from interacting with dogs. They had people play, walk, groom and massage dogs while studying their brainwaves. They found that the people studied had an increase in relaxed wakefulness and heightened concentration. They also observed that the subjects felt a significant drop in the feeling of fatigue, depression and stress after interacting with dogs.
Sue’s Note: I would think that the same results would be found when people interact with other animals that they enjoy. This study supports the use of therapy animals in all situations.
Journal Reference:
Onyoo Yoo, YuTong Wu, Jin Soo Han, Sin-Ae Park. Psychophysiological and emotional effects of human–Dog interactions by activity type: An electroencephalogram study. PLOS ONE, 2024; 19 (3): e0298384 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0298384
Cite This Page:
PLOS. “Interactions with dogs can increase brainwaves associated with stress relief and heightened concentration.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 13 March 2024. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/03/240313185025.htm>.
This article is loaded with a lot of important information, therefore I suggest that my readers click on the link and read the whole article.
Researchers at the University of California, Riverside have found that medium sized dogs have a higher risk of getting cancer than very large or small breeds of dogs. For example, the smallest dogs, including Pomeranians, Miniature Pinschers, Shih Tzus and Chihuahuas have about a 10% chance of dying from cancer.
On the other hand, large dogs, such as Burmese Mountain dogs, have more than a 40% chance of death from cancer. Yet the largest breeds such as the Great Dane have a less chance of getting cancer.
The article points out that scientists do not understand why the life expectancy of dogs decreases with size. “For every pound increase in typical breed size you lose about two weeks of life.”
What is interesting, is that this article points out that the ratio of cancer to size only applies to the same species, in this case dogs. The same correlation does not apply to size difference between other species.
Journal Reference:
Leonard Nunney. The effect of body size and inbreeding on cancer mortality in breeds of the domestic dog: a test of the multi-stage model of carcinogenesis. Royal Society Open Science, 2024; 11 (1) DOI: 10.1098/rsos.231356
Cite This Page:
University of California – Riverside. “Study reveals cancer vulnerabilities in popular dog breeds.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 29 April 2024. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/04/240429103104.htm>.
Researchers at the Queen Mary University of London successfully taught bumble bees to solve a two-step problem. What was interesting was that when they allowed untrained bees to watch the trained bees, the untrained bees learned how to solve the problem by watching the trained bees.
This experiment demonstrated that bees could learn by social learning which scientists previously thought was only something that humans could do.
Free Google image
In this case the bees shared experience and taught other bees to solve a two-step problem that was beyond their individual ability.
Sue’s Note: In many cases other animals learn from each other. However, this was previously unknown for bees.
Journal Reference:
Alice D. Bridges, Amanda Royka, Tara Wilson, Charlotte Lockwood, Jasmin Richter, Mikko Juusola, Lars Chittka. Bumblebees socially learn behaviour too complex to innovate alone. Nature, 2024; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07126-4
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Queen Mary University of London. “Bee-2-Bee influencing: Bees master complex tasks through social interaction.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 6 March 2024. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/03/240306150557.htm>.
Researchers at Mexico’s National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics (INAOE) along with the researchers at the University of Michigan, have devised a program using AI to begin the process of understanding dog vocalizations.
They found that AI models used for human speech can be used as a starting point to develop new systems that understand animal vocalizations. The human voice models can encode the very complex patterns of human languages and speech, so the researchers have started to develop similar programs to decode canine barks.
If they are successful, they feel that it will benefit biologists as well as animal behaviorists and other people who work with animals. Of course, it will benefit dogs as well. Such a system could enhance the care of dogs by letting people interpret their emotional and physical needs. This information could prevent potentially dangerous situations.
Sue’s Note: While this is very good, understanding dogs and any other animal depends heavily on their body language. Will this program take that into consideration? To the best of our knowledge, animals do not have a word by word vocal communication system.
Journal Reference:
Artem Abzaliev, Humberto Pérez Espinosa, Rada Mihalcea. Towards Dog Bark Decoding: Leveraging Human Speech Processing for Automated Bark Classification. Submited to arXiv, 2024 DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2404.18739
Cite This Page:
University of Michigan. “Using AI to decode dog vocalizations.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 4 June 2024. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/06/240604132204.htm>.
A very important study has illustrated that dogs understand instructional words as well as well as object words. An instructional word is what people commonly referred to as a command, such as sit. Object words are when a dog knows that the word represents an object. They can visualize the object when it is named whether the object is present or not. What this means is that dogs understand the meaning of some words the same as people do. Now researchers want to learn if other animals have the same capability. For an interesting video that shows a Border Collie named Chaser who illustrates this ability by identifying an object that he was told to fetch but was not taught the name of. He was able to identify all the other objects and pick out the one he was not taught the name of.
Sue’s Note: Consider people who cannot speak, such as infants, who illustrate that they recognize objects even though they cannot say the name of the object.
Marianna Boros, Lilla Magyari, Boglárka Morvai, Raúl Hernández-Pérez, Shany Dror, Attila Andics. Neural evidence for referential understanding of object words in dogs. Current Biology, 2024; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.02.029
Cite This Page:
Cell Press. “Your dog understands that some words ‘stand for’ objects.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 22 March 2024. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/03/240322145438.htm>.
This article is based on my personal experience, opinion, and research.
A new syndrome has affected several breeds of dogs, and it is still being researched. It is most likely genetically based as are many other health issues. All dogs are susceptible to genetically based health issues because all dog breeds have a limited gene pool. That is what makes a Golden Retriever a Golden Retriever. A limited gene pool concentrates the inherited qualities of the breed. When breeders create a line of dogs, it further limits the gene pool by concentrating the genetic quality of the line. In certain breeds when breeders continue to breed dogs with a health issue, the problem can spread throughout the breed. Examples of this is deafness which is common in some breeds. It has been scientifically shown that the merle, harlequin, and piebald-colored dogs carry the gene for deafness. For example, about 30% of all Dalmatians are deaf.
Over the years because of breeding practices, many dog breeds have changed. For example, I had the honor of owning and training the first Border Collie, Ness, to do SAR work in the United States. He was the grandson of a very famous international herding dog champion named Spot. Because so many Border Collies had the same name, the breeder’s name proceeded the name of the dog on registration papers, thus my dog’s grandfather’s name was Gilchrist’s Spot.
Ness
At the time few people heard of or even saw a Border Collie and all Border Collies were working dogs. Fast forward to today. Many people own Border Collies, they are a familiar breed in search and rescue (SAR) as well as sports and as pets.
As breeds became popular, many breeders were not educated or cared about genetics and how they relate to producing a good working line of dogs. In the case of the Border Collie, there was a split in the breed. The true working dogs were not generally registered with the American Kennel Club but rather with Border Collie registries such as the North American Sheepdog Society who focus only on working dogs. When the AKC closed their registry to non-AKC Border Collies, the gene pool became limited. Thus, the non-AKC Border Collies remained working dogs and many of the AKC Border Collies became show dogs. There is a huge difference in the ethics and goals of the breeders in each registry. Other breeds have experienced a drastic change in their working ability as well, such as the American Cocker Spaniel and the Irish Setter.
In terms of genetics, it only takes three generations to alter the quality of a breed of dog. This is because the breed instincts, such as a Pointers style of pointing, is not a single gene, but a collection of genes that must be present for the dog to have its style of pointing. What this means to the dog owner is if they return to the breeder of their previous pet or working dogs, there have been more than three generations since their dog was bred. Due to changes in the line of dogs, it is important to carefully evaluate the line to see what has happened over the years. Some breeders try to keep their lines strictly working lines, others are interested in conformation or looks.
As breeds become popular, a greater number of people get involved in breeding the popular breeds, often with less concern for health and genetic issues and more concern about making money. As a result, new health issues have developed in some breeds. One health issue that is important for dog owners to be aware of is the Border Collie Collapse Syndrome, (BCC). Although it first appeared in Border Collies, they are not the only breed that suffers from this problem. So far, the Australian Cattle Dog, Australian Kelpie, Australian Shepherd, the Bearded Collie, Collie, Shetland Sheepdog, and the Whippet have also shown this syndrome. Except for the Whippet, all these breeds are distantly related.
Unlike heat stroke, dogs that collapse from BCC have no laboratory abnormalities and recover quickly. They can collapse in all types of weather which means that it is not a heat related problem. They usually recover from 5 to 30 minutes. Excitement, intensity of exercise as well as heat can trigger an episode. Sometimes a dog can collapse five minutes after exercising.
Border Collies and some of the related breeds are popular for SAR and sport use which means they experience high excitement and intense activity This makes it important to be aware of this syndrome. Who knows what other breeds may develop BCC as breeding practices and the gene pool changes.
People who own and use these breeds must be careful since a dog can collapse in an environment that could be dangerous or even lethal. It is also important to know about BCC so that the handler does not panic if it happens. If you are not sure if your dog collapsed due to BCC a quick trip to a veterinarian clinic would be wise.
Please Note: I often hear from my clients, “but my dog has papers,” or “he is not from a breeder.” For clarity’s sake, the term breeder applies to anyone who produces a litter of dogs, no matter if they are an ethical or a puppy mill breeder. As for papers, every registry can only keep a record of the breeding and ancestry of a dog as reported to them. No registry can guarantee the quality of the dog or even if the papers issued with the dog belong to that dog. I had a client who called me and told me that they had a Rottweiler. When the breeder found out that the client was going to come to me for training, he confessed that the puppy was half Rottweiler and half German Shepherd. Yet this dog had AKC registration papers that claimed it was a Rottweiler. Some independent registries such as the Jack Russell Terrier Club require a photograph of all sides of a dog, witnessed and signed by a veterinarian to be submitted with a request to register a dog (at least one year of age) before they will issue registration papers.
Susan Taylor, Cindy Shmon, Lillian Su, Tasha Epp, Katie Minor, James Mickelson, Edward Patterson, and G. Diane Shelton (2016) Evaluation of Dogs with Border Collie Collapse, Including Response to Two Standardized Strenuous Exercise Protocols. Journal of the American Animal Hospital Association In-Press.
Susan Taylor, Katie Minor, Cindy L. Shmon, G. Diane Shelton, Edward E. Patterson, and James R. Mickelson (2016) Border Collie Collapse: Owner Survey Results and Veterinary Description of Videotaped Episodes. Journal of the American Animal Hospital Association In-Press.
Researchers have found a new way to extend the life of terminally ill dogs who have cancer. This new form of chemoimmunotherapy repurposes stem cells that uses a non-viral gene delivery treatment instead of the usual virus treatment. The new method is safe has had great results.
The researchers treated 65 dogs and two cats who had either adenoma, lung metastasis or sarcoma. After three to eight weeks of treatment, 55 showed signs of positive response. Of that 14 had a full recovery. Two animals remained cancer free for at least 30 months and 46 enjoyed a good quality of life for 32 months. None of the animals treated had significant side effects.
The research team are conducting further studies and plan to research the possibility of using this treatment on humans.
Journal Reference:
Yoon Khei Ho, Kin Man Loke, Jun Yung Woo, Yee Lin Lee, Heng-Phon Too. Cryopreservation does not change the performance and characteristics of allogenic mesenchymal stem cells highly over-expressing a cytoplasmic therapeutic transgene for cancer treatment. Stem Cell Research & Therapy, 2022; 13 (1) DOI: 10.1186/s13287-022-03198-z
Cite This Page:
National University of Singapore, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine. “Novel cancer therapy extends lives of terminally ill dogs.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 30 January 2023. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/01/230130112405.htm>.
A Blog by Susan Bulanda 