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Dog volunteers needed to understand canine motion and domestication
Your dog could have its day as part of a new scientific study.
The project wants to investigate how the growth and movement of dogs affects their health, and is looking for canine volunteers to get involved.
Researchers are about to em-bark on a new canine study.
From compact chihuahuas to immense Irish wolfhounds, dogs have the greatest range of body shapes and sizes of any species. This makes man’s best friend a paw-sitively ideal subject for understanding how selective breeding affects their development.
Scientists from the Natural History Museum and the University of Liverpool are about to dig into these topics as part of their new investigation, and they need a posse of pooches to do so. It’s hoped their research could help to develop new technologies and treatments that will keep more pets from being as sick as a dog.
Professor Anjali Goswami, who is leading the Natural History Museum’s side of the project, says, ‘Not only will this data help us to answer interesting evolutionary questions, but during the course of the project will achieve better outcomes and diagnoses for dogs.’
‘We will be better able to identify which dogs might suffer from limb issues in their lives, which can feed into the development of limb implants for different breeds.’
For now, the team are looking for healthy German shepherds, Labradors, cocker spaniels, springer spaniels, dachshunds, west highland white terriers, French bulldogs, border collies and beagles aged between one and eight years old.
As long as your dog is able to walk between 30-90 minutes a day, is happy to be handled and can walk or trot in a straight line, then the team want to hear from you. More information on how to get involved can be found here.
All dogs are descended from ancient wolves, but how this happened is currently unclear. Image © Pat-s pictures/Shutterstock.
How were dogs domesticated?
Dogs are thought to be the earliest animal domesticated by humans. While their exact origins remain obscure, it’s generally agreed that they descend from a now extinct group of ancient wolves which began to associate with humans roughly 30,000 years ago.
How this happened is also something of a mystery. Some theories suggest that some wolves began feeding on the waste of human populations as an easy meal, diverging from their wild relatives as they began to spend more time around us.
Others suggest that humans could have captured tamer animals and used them to help with hunting.
Regardless of how it happened, by at least 14,500 years ago bones of the first recognisable dogs start to be found in archaeological sites around the world. While there are some older skeletons that might be early dogs, their identity is not completely certain.
Part of the problem is that most of the diversity of these first dogs no longer survives, with one study suggesting that almost all of Europe’s dogs alive today are descended from only one population that lived 5,000 years ago.
This demonstrates the remarkable impact humans have had on the dog. Over the intervening millennia, dogs have been bred for everything from hunting to showing off. In Medieval England, dogs were even bred to run in a wheel that turned meat on a spit, helping to cook it evenly.
While different dog breeds all look very different from one another, they're all the same species. Image © Daria Shvetcova/Shutterstock.
However, the most significant dog breeding has occurred within the past 200 years. Many dog breeds can be traced to the Victorian era, as they applied extensive selection for certain attributes, behaviours or appearances.
Their actions led to the development of many unique characteristics, but may have also affected how dogs’ bones, joints and muscles grow. The research team hope their new project will start to dig into these questions.
Professor Eithne Comerford, a researcher on the team from the University of Liverpool, says, ‘Selective breeding is a practice that has existed for more than 100 years, and this project will help us understand its impact on canine anatomy and musculoskeletal health.’
‘By tracking how different breeds grow, we hope to shed light on potential links between specific growth patterns and the development of musculoskeletal health issues in dogs.’
The Natural History Museum's dog collections contain many specimens from the Victorian era, allowing scientists to see how selective breeding changed the appearance of different breeds. Image © The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London.
What could the project discover?
The different aspects of the study are split across the two institutions, with the Natural History Museum investigating the changing shape of the limb bones in different dog breeds as they grow. This will be quite a change for the team, whose studies are often much broader.
‘Our research tends to look at evolutionary patterns across large groups of species, like the dinosaurs or arthropods,’ Anjali says. ‘Dogs are just one species, but despite this they have an insane amount of variation because of their domestication.’
‘If I just found the bones of a pug and a greyhound as fossils, for instance, I wouldn’t say they were closely related, let alone the same species. This variation is partly due to the flexibility in their development, which breeders have used to select for different attributes.’
While there has been a lot of research on how dog faces and skulls have changed over time, the same isn’t true of the rest of their bodies. To look into this, the team will be combining the new data from the project with veterinary scans.
Dr Lucy Roberts, a researcher on the project with the Natural History Museum, says, ‘We’ll be working with a database from the Liverpool Veterinary School, which contains data on thousands of different dogs.’
‘This provides us with valuable information about the shape and size of dogs, but it doesn’t provide the biomechanical data about how dogs move.’
By analysing how a dog's bones move as it does, the researchers hope to identify health conditions that might affect certain breeds. Image © University of Liverpool.
This is where the University of Liverpool comes in. They have a state-of-the-art Gait Lab, which is used to study how humans and other animals move at different speeds and under changing conditions.
Dogs in the study will be tracked as they move by 3D camera systems and x-ray imaging technology, allowing the scientists to see what happens to the bones under the skin.
The University of Liverpool’s Dr Karl Bates explains, ‘In combination with biomechanical computer models to evaluate the demands placed on the musculoskeletal system of dogs, this data will identify any conditions that might contribute to musculoskeletal health issues in particular breeds.’
‘In the future, we hope this valuable data can be integrated into easily accessible guides and tools that pet owners and vets could use to better understand a dog’s health.’
The project could also be the basis for answering broader evolutionary questions, using specimens from the Natural History Museum’s collections.
‘It’s not strictly a part of this project, but in the future we’d like to use historic dog specimens to see how breeds have changed over time,’ Anjali adds. ‘We could combine this with similar carnivorans to gain insights into their development, and find out more about the nature of evolution.’
