Borderline Collies and Lab Labs

 

I came across this wonderful article in the NYT the other day. It's rather long so I have abridged it quite a bit but haven't touched it apart from adding a short introduction.

I can still remember my first brush with logic when, as a young boy, I was dumbstruck by the Jesuits when they explained that, while all men were human beings all human beings were not necessarily men. I was reminded of this when reading the article below, for the writer fails to distinguish between female dogs and male dogs, for while all bitches are dogs not all dogs are bitches, any more than in human life.

A new study using border collies instead of the sempiternal Sprague-Dawley rat shows that dogs are similar to us in important ways, like how they act during adolescence and old age, and what happens in their DNA as they get older. 

They (the collies) seem to mellow in the same way that most humans do. The study reveals that some dogs are just born old, which is to say, relatively steady and mature. I see that all were all Border collies, so I’m a little surprised that any of them were mature. That would suggest a certain calm, a willingness to tilt the head and muse that doesn’t seem to fit the breed, with its desperate desire to be constantly chasing sheep, geese, children or Frisbees.

To bring the comparisons home, another set of researchers compared an aging Labrador (a lab lab) retriever to an aging Tom Hanks. They used a lab lab because that’s the kind of dog they studied. And they used Tom Hanks, because, well, everybody knows Tom Hanks. For most of us, of course, there is no pleasure in seeing a dog get older, but seeing even a beloved celebrity subject to the irresistible march of time is somehow reassuring. Sometime in the future the A-list may be able to purchase immortality, but not yet.

Scientists also reported recently that adolescent humans and border collies share many personality traits, like, say, reduced trainability and responsiveness to commands. Not your children, of course, but those of other parents. However, teenage dogs don’t torment their actual mothers. They complain to their humans. That means a double whammy for some pet owners. If you happen to have adolescent human children as well as adolescent dogs and you all are stuck at home in close proximity because of a worldwide coronavirus pandemic, then all I can say is more research is required.

 

None of this research was done on dogs kept in a laboratory. All of the dogs in the aging comparison study were pet Labrador retrievers or border collies and the owners gave permission for blood samples.

Good methods of comparing dog and human ages are important. Dogs are increasingly seen as good models for human aging because they suffer from it in many of the same ways humans do. The goal of the research is “Longer, healthier lives for all dogs … and their humans.”

As an aging human, I can’t fault that approach.

 The study on the changes in dog personality over time used Border collies that were part of the Clever Dog Project at the University of Vienna. The Border collies were all companions, volunteered by their human owners. Humans are said to grow more easygoing, stable and agreeable as they age. We can all think of exceptions, probably in our own family, but overall statistics cannot predict the behavior of outliers like Uncle Rasputin or Aunt Ratchet.

How do you test dog personality? The Border collies were put through many different tests. In one, a stranger walks into a room and pets the dog. In another, the owners dress up their dogs in human T-shirts. One-fifth of the dog owners admitted to having done this before, on their own, not for research purposes. In another test, the owners dangle a sausage in front of their dogs just out of reach for a minute or so. Be assured this was approved by an ethics board, and the dogs were fed the sausages once the time was up.The researchers found that dogs do change as they grow older just as people do. They become less active and less anxious. But one of the authors of the study, Borbalu Turcsan, of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, noted that some dogs don’t change as much over time. “People with more mature personality profiles change less as they age,” she said. “And we found exactly the same in the case of dogs.”

The end of aging is of course the same in dog and human. Dogs just get there more quickly. This is one thing that makes the dog a “good model for human aging and mortality,” as Dr. Promislow wrote.

“Dogs age a lot faster than people do,” Dr. Karlsson of the Broad Institute explained. “And so if you want to study aging with the idea that you want to help people within our life span, then you want to be able to study something that’s aging much faster than us. You can learn about it more quickly than waiting eighty years until somebody dies.”On this point, of course, what is a benefit for science is a great sadness for dog lovers.