What do you think of this?

Yeah, I started reading up on this...are there any breeders here that do neurological stim like this on their puppies? Any interested in trying for the sake of doing so? It didn't look to be really burdensom, would be neat to have some "case studies" to observe on here on the boards....

Thunder is a product of this form of stim. Having no control model to compare it to, I don't know how much it influenced him. I do know that he is a very stable dog.

Really offtopic, species-wise, but I'm interacting with these folks on a similar project..for humans...kind of. :wink:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4987880.stm

Dr. Roy is basically taping everything in his house as his baby grows up to see how environmental stimuli affect speech development. Pretty neat. Thousands of GBs of video--they have 12 cameras or so set up in the ceilings of their rooms in their home that record all sights and sounds. It's still running (he's had the cameras going for 14 months or so) as a project, no findings yet.

I should probably say specifically that they are not purposely stimulating the baby! They're just passively recording the environment to see if anything affects/cultivates speech, i.e., what was happening the first time my baby said "Daddy" kind of stuff.

Anywho, back to doggies.

Having no research experience with dogs, but having 4 years of research experience with mice (like they cite in the article), it is indeed true with mice. However, mice are a bit more high strung than rats and even a change in temperature can make the moms go nuts and scatter their pups, kill them, start spinning, not nurse, etc, so when we do experiments like one I'm currently working on, we have to be very careful how we handle the pups. Before we touch them, we take the mom out of the cage, put her in a different, handle the pups as needed, and then put them back exactly where they were before we put the mom back in the cage. I'm not a breeder, but I would probably put the momma dog in another room before doing this. Not sure if it says to do that or not. Other than that, sounds like an interesting protocol.

Maren Bell said:

However, mice are a bit more high strung than rats and even a change in temperature can make the moms go nuts and scatter their pups, kill them, start spinning, not nurse, etc, so when we do experiments like one I'm currently working on, we have to be very careful how we handle the pups. Before we touch them, we take the mom out of the cage, put her in a different, handle the pups as needed, and then put them back exactly where they were before we put the mom back in the cage. I'm not a breeder, but I would probably put the momma dog in another room before doing this. Not sure if it says to do that or not. Other than that, sounds like an interesting protocol.

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Hamsters are horrible about this...I used to raise them when I was a kid. One bad look at a mother hamster and she'd happily scoot over to the corner and munch away. It sucked. Hamsters suck. They are mean bastards.

Guinea pigs are really tolerant of having their litters handled. We used to have a few dozen babies per year of those. Not so much with the Texas Chainsaw Massacre crap. Guinea pigs and me are A-OK.

Will bitches react to negative stimuli and act out on pups? I have no idea.

So seriously, if there is a dog breeder here that doesn't do this currently that might entertain doing this with a few of their litter...that would be pretty fascinating.

I haven't done specifically this purposeful stimulation, but I have always handled any pups I have had from day one. Just picking them up, looking them over, touching them all over, feet and ears, ect. My Dobie bitch had three litters and I kept up with almost all of the pups over their lives. Most of them I got to see at least once a month or so, some more often. A lot of them went to clients of the vet clinic I worked for at the time. (We kept two ourselves from 2 different litters.) They were all very well-adjusted and stable puppies/dogs. They were all house-raised with exposure to cats, birds, children (had to borrow those ). I'd give anything to have another Dobe like Cato. (Our 13 year old that we lost this past winter.) He was just the most fearless, do-anything-you-ask dog I've EVER owned. Don't know how much influence that early human-intensive contact had to do with their personality development, but there wasn't an unstable dog in the bunch.