Abstract
In dogs, the social and spatial restriction associated with living in a kennel environment could lead to chronic stress and the development of abnormal behaviors (“kennel-dog syndrome”). However, little is known about how kenneled dogs differ from their conspecifics living as pets in human families. In the current study, using a test battery exposing the dogs to novel stimuli, we compared the behavior of three groups of beagles: (1) kenneled dogs living in a restricted environment with limited human contact (N = 78), (2) family dogs living in human families as pets (N = 37), and (3) adopted dogs born in the kenneled population but raised in human families (N = 13). We found one factor comprising most of the test behaviors, labeled as Responsiveness. Family dogs and adopted dogs scored higher in Responsiveness than kenneled dogs. However, 23% of the kenneled dogs were comparable to family and adopted dogs based on a cluster analysis, indicating a similar (positive) reaction to novel stimuli, while 77% of the kenneled dogs were unresponsive (mostly immobile) in at least part of the test. To assess if the behavioral difference between the family and kenneled dogs could be due to genetic divergence of these two populations and/or to lower genetic diversity of the kenneled dogs, we analyzed their genetic structure using 11 microsatellite markers. We found no significant difference between the populations in their genetic diversity (i.e., heterozygosity, level of inbreeding), nor any evidence that the family and kenneled populations originated from different genetic pools. Thus, the behavior difference between the groups more likely reflects a G × E interaction, that is, the influence of specific genetic variants manifesting under specific environmental conditions (kennel life). Nevertheless, some kenneled individuals were (genetically) more resistant to social and environmental deprivation. Selecting for such animals could strongly improve the welfare of kenneled dog populations. Moreover, exploring the genetic background of their higher resilience could also help to better understand the genetics behind stress- and fear-related behaviors.
Highlights
In the last two decades the social competence of the domestic dog has received wide attention both from theoretical and empirical perspectives [see review in [1, 2]]
We found a large behavioral variability within the uniformly kept and
Identifying these animals could help to improve the general welfare of kenneled dogs, as future generations could be selectively bred for higher resilience to the stress caused by standard experimental procedures
Summary
In the last two decades the social competence of the domestic dog has received wide attention both from theoretical and empirical perspectives [see review in [1, 2]]. Dogs bred and kept solely for breeding or research purposes (“kenneled dogs”) are kept and handled under standardized conditions, and are usually of the same breed, the effects of environmental and breed-specific genetic variability on their individual behavioral variability is small. Most of these dogs are raised and live in intraspecific groups, and their interaction with humans is mostly limited to feeding, cleaning their enclosure, and research procedures. Kenneled dogs are often used in research on cognition, such as the effect of age on different cognitive functions [7,8,9,10], or the effect of different training schedules on the acquisition of a task [11]
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