Do you ever wonder how sensitive your dog is to pain?
Turns out, a dog’s breed can make a difference, but the perceived pain sensitivity doesn’t always match what people think, including vets!
Researchers at North Carolina State University discovered this in their new study, and they also found that a dog’s behavior around strangers might affect how vets view their pain sensitivity.
Margaret Gruen, an associate professor of behavioral medicine at NC State, says, “Vets have fairly strong beliefs about how sensitive different dog breeds are to pain.
Yet, their views often disagree with what ordinary people think.
We were curious – is any of this true? We wanted to know if these views are based on the dog’s actual sensitivity to pain or possibly on the dog’s behavior while interacting with a vet.”
To find out, the researchers studied healthy adult male and female dogs from 10 different breeds.
These breeds were previously ranked by vets as having high (like chihuahuas and German shepherds), average (like border collies and Boston terriers), or low (like golden retrievers and Labrador retrievers) pain sensitivity. In total, 149 dogs took part in the study.
To test pain sensitivity, they borrowed some techniques from human medicine.
They used a tool that applies pressure and a warm thermal probe on the dog’s back paw and watched for when the dog moved its paw away. They did each test five times.
They also did two other tests to check how dogs reacted to unfamiliar things or people and to copy some of the stressful aspects of a vet visit.
These tests involved a noisy moving toy and a stranger who seemed angry before calling the dog over.
After analyzing the results, they found that there are indeed real differences in pain sensitivity among breeds. However, these differences don’t always match what vets thought.
For instance, Maltese dogs reacted quickly to the pain tests, aligning with vets’ views. But Siberian huskies, which vets thought were highly sensitive, fell in the mid-range of the tests.
Interestingly, the researchers found that dogs who were less curious about the toy or the stranger were often rated as having a lower pain tolerance.
This led them to wonder if a dog’s stress level and emotional reactivity during a vet visit could influence a vet’s judgement about the breed’s pain sensitivity.
“These behavioral differences might be why vets think certain breeds are more sensitive to pain, but it’s not the whole story,” says Duncan Lascelles, another researcher involved in the study.
“This study is cool because it shows us that there are biological differences in pain sensitivity between breeds. Now we can start searching for biological reasons behind these differences, which can help us treat different breeds more effectively.”
Gruen also emphasized the need to consider a dog’s anxiety during vet visits, not just pain. “These findings can help explain why veterinarians may think about certain breeds’ sensitivity the way they do.”
This intriguing research was published in Frontiers in Pain Research and received support from the American Kennel Club Canine Health Foundation.
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