A Preliminary Study toward a Rapid Assessment of Age-Related Behavioral Differences in Family Dogs

Abstract

Over the last few years, several efforts have been undertaken to characterize the aging process in dogs. In the present study, we evaluate a short protocol measuring dogs’ cognitive, social, and physical capacities. Our aim was to develop a feasible test battery, with minimal pre-training requirements, no complex devices, and which is set outdoors (i.e., a specific testing room is not needed). As ageing in dogs is usually associated with a decrease in activity, we also assessed the personality trait activity/excitability with a dog personality questionnaire. Four subtests proved sensitive to the dogs’ age. In particular, old dogs displayed less approaching and following behaviors toward an unknown but friendly human, showed both less avoidance and interest toward a novel object, looked less at the owner when faced with an unsolvable problem, and performed worse on the short-term memory task. Previous test procedures for investigating age-related changes involve expensive and/or complicated devices and extensive pre-training. The main advantage of the proposed battery is to reduce costs and efforts in veterinary assessments. Further tests in same-breed, large samples and between dogs with mild and severe cognitive impairments will be needed in order to further validate the battery.