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Dogs go through stages in their life, just like people, as is obvious to anyone who has seen their stiff-legged, white-nosed companion get up for one more walk.
Poets from Homer to Pablo Neruda have taken notice. Like popular singers and storytellers. Now science is taking a turn, in the hope that research on how dogs grow and age will help us understand how humans age. And, like the poets before them, scientists are finding parallels between the two species.
His research so far shows that dogs are similar to us in important ways, such as how they act during adolescence and old age, and what happens in their DNA as they age. They may be what scientists call a “blueprint” for human aging, a species that we can study to learn more about how we age and perhaps how to age better.
More recently, researchers from Vienna have discovered that the personality of dogs changes over time. They seem to soften in the same way that most humans do. The most intriguing part of this study is that, like people, some dogs are simply born old, that is, relatively stable and mature, the kind of puppy that seems ready for a Mr. Rogers cardigan. “That’s Professor Spot, to you, thank you, could we be a little cleaner when we put croquettes on my plate?”
Mind you, the dogs in the Vienna study were all border collies, so I’m a bit surprised that some of them were mature. That would suggest a certain calm, a willingness to bow his head, and a muse that doesn’t seem to fit the breed, with his desperate desire to be constantly chasing sheep, geese, children, or Frisbees.
A border collie at the 144th Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show in New York. Researchers in Vienna have found that dog personalities change over time and appear to soften in the same way that most humans do. Photograph: Brittainy Newman / The New York Times.
Years of dog
Another recent article came to the disturbing conclusion that the calculation of seven canine years for every human year is not exact. To calculate the years of the dogs, you must now multiply the natural logarithm of a dog’s age in human years by 16 and then add 31. Is that clear? It’s not actually as difficult as it sounds, as long as you have a calculator or access to the internet. For example, the natural logarithm of 6 is approximately 1.8, which multiplied by 16 is approximately 29, which, plus 31, is 60. Well, it’s not that easy, even with the Internet.
To drive the comparisons home, the researchers compared an aged Labrador Retriever to an aged Tom Hanks. They used a lab because that’s the type of dog they studied. And they used Tom Hanks, because, well, everyone knows Tom Hanks. For most of us, of course, it is not a pleasure to watch a dog grow old, but to see even a beloved celebrity subject to the irresistible march of time is somewhat comforting. At some point in the future, the A-list may buy immortality, but not yet.
Scientists also recently reported that adolescent dogs share some of the characteristics of adolescent humans, such as “reduced trainability and responsiveness to commands.” Not your children, of course, but those of other parents. However, adolescent dogs do not torment their actual mothers. They complain to their humans. That means a double whammy for some pet owners. If you have teenage human children, as well as teenage dogs, and they are all trapped at home in close proximity due to a global coronavirus pandemic, then all I can say is that more research is required.
Methylation
Perhaps you shouldn’t be frivolous with these research projects. They involve groundbreaking work and could have potentially important conclusions. Take that paper with natural logarithms, for example. To reach those conclusions, the researchers looked for patterns of chemical changes in DNA, a process called methylation that does not alter the content of genes, but does change their activity.
Laboratory tests can determine the age of a human being only by the methylation pattern. Thanks to this research, the same can be done with dogs. The results will help researchers studying aging in dogs translate the findings into humans. None of these investigations were conducted on dogs kept in a laboratory. All of the dogs in the aging comparison study were Labradors and the owners gave permission to obtain blood samples.
The Clever Dog Lab of the Vienna University of Veterinary Medicine. Photograph: The Clever Dog Lab / University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna / The New York Times.
Scientists are not sure whether the physical decline observed in aging in dogs and humans, indeed in all mammals, is related to the developmental process in previous life or if the decline is a completely different process. The researchers found that the methylation pattern suggested that the same genes may be involved in both processes.
Good methods for comparing the ages of dogs and humans are important. Dogs are increasingly seen as good role models for human aging because they experience aging in many of the same ways that humans do. As the Dog Aging Project, which is collecting genetic and other information from a large number of dogs, puts it on its website, the goal of the research is “longer and healthier lives for all dogs and their loved ones. humans”.
The DNA of dogs
As an aging human being, I cannot fault that approach. In 2018 the co-director of the project, Daniel. EL Promislow from the University of Washington, Seattle, laid out the reasons why dogs are a good animal to study aging and get results that will help people. In essence, they suffer from many similar ailments, such as “obesity, arthritis, hypothyroidism, and diabetes.” That’s not all, of course, but when we imagine that an old dog walks weird for the same reasons we do (it hurts), we are not being anthropomorphic.
Elinor Karlsson, from the Broad Institute, described her research in genomics and dogs: “One of the things that really interests us is to find out, in the first place, if there are things in the DNA of dogs that you can find that really explain why they live remarkably long. ”Those findings could be helpful in extending healthy aging in people.
The study on changes in the personality of dogs 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 become calmer, more stable, and personable as they age. We can all think of exceptions, probably in our own family, but general statistics cannot predict the behavior of outliers like Uncle Rasputin or Aunt Ratchet.
How is the dog’s personality tested? Border collies went through many different tests. In one, a stranger walks into a room and pats the dog. In another, owners dress their dogs in human shirts. A fifth of dog owners admitted to doing this before, on their own, not for research purposes. In another test, owners hold a hot dog in front of their dogs out of reach for a minute or so. Rest assured, this was approved by an ethics board, and the dogs were fed hot dogs once the time was up.
Mature
The researchers found that dogs change as they age, just like people. They become less active and less anxious. But one of the study’s authors, Borbalu Turcsan, from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, noted that some dogs don’t change as much over time. “People with more mature personality profiles change less as they get older,” he said. “And we find exactly the same in the case of dogs.”
The end of aging is, of course, the same in dogs and humans. Dogs arrive faster. This is something that makes the dog a “good model for human aging and mortality,” as Promislow wrote. “Dogs age much faster than people,” explained Karlsson of the Broad Institute. “So if you want to study aging with the idea that you want to help the people in our lives, then you want to be able to study something that ages much faster than we do. You can learn faster than waiting 80 years for someone to die. “
At this point, of course, what is a benefit to science is a great sadness for dog lovers. Dogs die too soon. And it’s up to us to witness it over and over again. It is never easy. As a cover of the popular song, “Old Blue,” says, “Old Blue died and died so hard, it shook the ground in my backyard.”
Here, where the consolations of science fail us, poetry can remind us of what dogs have that make us face the brevity of their lives. In “A dog is dead”, Pablo Neruda describes his dog, in his youth, on the beach: Cheerful, cheerful, cheerful, as only dogs know how to be happy with only the autonomy of their shameless spirit.
– New York Times
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