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A study of 47,444 pet dogs collected between 2020 and 2023 shows how breed, size, sex and age shape canine behaviour, producing the largest behavioural data set of its kind. Coverage from Journals Plos has highlighted this story.

The research establishes a baseline that researchers say could help identify early signs of illness and guide better training and welfare strategies for companion animals.

Researchers working with the Dog Aging Project drew on owner-reported information gathered from dogs across the United States between 2020 and 2023, with Virginia Tech and the University of Washington jointly leading the effort. Courtney Sexton, a postdoctoral researcher at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine, said the scale of the data gives the team new statistical power. “When you have a data set this big, you really do have power in numbers,” Sexton said. Reporting by Vice offers additional detail on this case.

The study followed tens of thousands of pet dogs over their lifetimes to map patterns in behaviour and to create a reference for future longitudinal work. Sexton highlighted that the team will continue to track these animals as they age: “Most importantly, with these data, we’re excited to now have a starting point from which we can continue to follow changes in the behaviors of tens of thousands of dogs as they age, which will ultimately help us understand how behavior and health are linked.”

Researchers looked for how demographic factors related to differences in behaviour, and the analysis showed that breed, size, sex and age were influential. “We saw that certain factors, such as a dog’s life stage, sex, and size had some influence on their behavior,” Sexton said, summarising the study’s central finding without enumerating specific breed-level trends in this release.

The dataset also allowed for various analyses, including examining whether changes in routines during the COVID-19 pandemic years shifted dogs’ behavioural profiles. As covered by Edu, readers can explore more context around the event.

On that point the team found only modest overall change year to year through the pandemic. “Interestingly, we found that throughout the COVID-19 pandemic time period, there were not substantial changes in dogs’ overall behavioral profiles from year to year despite what we might have expected given the changes in environment and routines that many were experiencing at that time,” Sexton said. She added that reported trainability showed one of the smallest average differences between the first and last year of enrollment: “What was interesting was that the difference in reported trainability between the first year and the last year was the smallest of any in the averages.”

Investigators said the work provides a benchmark for future studies linking behaviour to health outcomes, and it creates a resource for researchers and clinicians aiming to detect early behavioural signals of disease or decline. The project team and the Dog Aging Project will use the baseline to continue monitoring dogs as they age and to deepen understanding of behaviour-health connections.

Further information about the research is available at PLOS ONE and in a university summary at Virginia Tech News.

Source

Original reporting: view the original article.

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