Addictive-like behavioural traits in pet dogs with extreme motivation for toys
nature.com119 points by wallflower 5 hours ago
119 points by wallflower 5 hours ago
Perhaps not surprising, working breeds – many of which are known to have been artificially selected for high toy or predatory motivation – were overrepresented in the sample.
I grew up with a cocker spaniel obsessed with tennis balls to the point of covering his food with them and letting it rot. Looking into his eyes conveyed no emotion and he didn't seem to care much for affection. He was a tennis ball tracking machine.
There was nothing you could do to satiate his desire. If you gave in to a catch session, you could throw it 100 times, he would start coughing/convulsing from exhaustion, yet still drop a ball at your feet begging you to throw it. You could probably have killed him with it.
If no one was playing catch with him he would spend hours scouring the neighborhood for balls hidden in bushes. At one point I believe he had over 20 balls piling up in various places in our backyard. We would regularly take his balls away so he only had a couple, but more would magically appear.
We did have a little fun with this. My dad would use him as a tennis practice 'partner'. And we built a tennis ball cannon powered by M80s (note: this was mid-80s in the SFV when/where things like bottle rockets and blow guns were legal).
I've had to put down quite a few animals, and he was the only one were there was no sadness, only relief when his time came, esp. after 15 long years of having to pander to this obsessive behavior.
My belief is animals experience something similar to autism, and he was as far along the spectrum as possible, to the point where the only thing that defined him was his working instinct. That million years of mind-meld evolution w/ humans? Simply not there.
There’s some documentation out there suggesting the original Labrador retrievers had food obsession as a trait in common with bidability, which is why more than half of them end up chonky. Not all have the gene but odds are high.
There’s a guy who trawls dog rescues looking for retrievers who are toy obsessed and then trains them to hunt truffles. He reasons you can’t reward them with food for finding even tastier food, so you have to train them with ball time as a reward/distraction when they find a trove.
Labs in general are notorious for having insane food drive to the point where when you run into one that does not, they're certainly an exception. All dogs in general have food drive, as it is a necessity to live, but they're given basically unlimited access to it which diminishes it's value in their psyche.
Once you pull that prey drive out of a working dog and associate it with something such as a ball, there's no greater satisfaction this planet than doing the thing for that animal. It usually works better as a reward for what we're doing, is more instant, but also it can be deadly for a dog to eat food when they're at working-level activity.
From a dog's PoV, are truffles actually tastier than high quality dog treats?
Watching a dog that likes playing fetch is cathartic. I truly wish I had that level of purpose and fulfillment in my life.
Dog breeds are not real animals, they're some sort of half-artificial thing created by imperfectly writing some people's desire into another species's genetic code.
If you make an artificial thing that really wants to do some specific thing, like a computer endlessly printing "hello world" millions of times a second, it's not surprising to see it do the thing it was created to do. I wouldn't say the computer "wants" to print hello world, so I don't see the dog as doing what it truly wants to do if it's a genetic predisposition human breeders forced into it. I see the expression of a society of dog breeders and people's idea of a game called "fetch" which was relatively easy to transition a species towards step-by-step using artificial selection.
i have a Lab/Staffie mix and he has insane retriever drive when we get the tennis ball launcher out. pupils dilate and nothing else matters, to the point that we had to ban launcher because he kept loosing his thumb claws from sliding on the grass when the ground is too hard. Before we banned it his muscles were massive, rippling shoulders etc. When we had his (non-tennis) balls removed he developed insane food drive, the vet said this was common, to the point he'll raid the kitchen at night if we don't lock it down. The boy is build to do 1 of 2 things, eat or fetch!
> As in I'm obligated to throw the damn ball.
Just imagining your retriever feeling obligated to sit patiently by your side as you contribute to the pack by deconstructing your life while staring lifelessly at a flashing screen.
> As in I'm obligated to throw the damn ball.
As opposed to my Newfoundland that will tease me with the ball and then I'm obligated to chase her until she wears out, I catch her, or I bribe her with a treat.
Our kids have a Rottweiler that loves to chase a ball, Bring it back and then dare us to try to take it away from her. She can drop if convinced. Or I have a second ball that is more interesting, causing her to drop the other ball. She can hold two balls in her mouth so I have to wait for her to drop the first ball before I throw.
She also has a large (about 1 food diameter) ball that can't possibly fit in her mouth and I can kick that at which point she'll drop the little ball and try to get the big one in her mouth.
I’m hoping this is a puppy trait. Thats what my one year old golden-doodle does
Sorry - my 9 year old golden doodle still doesn't get the concept of fetch. He's an expert at keep-away though. Throw the toy or ball, he'll chase it gleefully, then come back to just out of reach, drop the toy, and hover over it waiting for me to make a move at it. He'll lunge for the toy, back up a bit, drop it, and the cycle continues.
The dog is not reflecting on its true nature. If that is true, then it's possible there are many beings, including us, who are not reflecting on their true nature. It shows the meditative power a human actually has. For example, if a parent actually sits down and realizes they'd die for their child no matter what, it would sort of be like the dog realizing how far it would go for a tennis ball. Only a human being can reflect and change, the dog cannot (it's one of the reasons humans fall in love with dogs, they realize the thing is utterly innocent).
Is this falsifiable? I would be hesitant to claim that this is unique to humans. I'd probably agree with dogs, but the line is much blurrier with primates, for example.
I'm open to any evidence. I doubt we can find a Chimpanzee that sat, thought about it for awhile, slept on it, and then decided it's time to live like a Bonobo. I think the best evidence we have are actual metamorphosis that you see from a tadpole over to a frog, things of that sort. We're the only species that can do something to our nature actively.
If you ever get a chance to see sled dogs in Alaska or wherever, holy shit do those dogs ever want to pull a sled. I’ve never seen an animal so fixated.
What if you never trained them to pull, and they never observed that behavior? Would they still want to do it?
Just a guess but I would imagine the behavior is deeply instinctive by this point.
It's pretty hard to avoid any situations where pulling is possible. Such as on leash. You usually have to intensely train working dogs not to pull on leash.
They would still fixate on other behaviors they are trained on. And if not trained and neglected, often have destructive behaviors.
We've recently come to this conclusion with our Cockapoo. His mother was a working Cocker Spaniel.
When the weather is poor we have often tried to get shorter walks in dry spells but augment it with as much ball time as possible to make sure he's getting enough exercise (since he generally dislikes bad weather).
It's become apparent that there's no possibility of satiety through chasing the ball though. He will simply go forever, however tired he looks.
I joked that as a Labrador will seemingly eat itself sick, a Spaniel will run itself lame.
For a breed that is partly bred to flush out game, throwing a ball is incredibly adrenaline inducing and will not tire them out - they’ll just keep going till they fall down. Working cockers are one of the breeds susceptible to exercise induced collapse, albeit rare it shows how insanely motivated they are.
To get them tired, you need to chill them out and have them use their brain and/or nose.
Maybe try some sniffing games, sit down during the walk and have them just take in the environment, do some obedience that makes them think, or throw their food in the grass and have them figure it out.
My dog (Briard) isn't just addicted to play fetch with balls.. Since he knows that when another dog enters the dog park, the ball will be removed/hidden from him (to prevent the dogs clashing trying to get the ball), he becomes hostile to the dog entering the park, actively trying to prevent them from doing so! This happens only if we started to play with balls. If not, he'll be totally friendly... What an ass!
I read somewhere that domesticated dogs are to some degree bred to stay in their "childlike" state, so in a way they act like wolf puppies that never get older. Probably different breeds have different degrees of this. But anyway, I wonder if there is supposed to be some counterbalancing "maturity" or "responsibility" impulse that would cause them to decide not to do the thing, but since that has been bred out / disabled, they just run on impulse forever.
Incidentally I feel this way also: like I never fully grew up, and I easily regress to being trapped in a childlike state where I'll e.g. play video games all day. To snap out of it I have to "remember" to be an adult, like it's easily forgotten especially if my daily life doesn't ask me to have any serious responsibilities. maybe dogs don't have any responsibilities so they have no reason to stop playing.
Indeed most domestic animals exhibit some degree of neoteny, or juvenile characteristics as adults, including humans ourselves. We’ve sort of domesticated ourselves.
you might be thinking of neoteny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny#In_domestic_animals
This is a really fun 16 minute listen to how this precise dog behaviour is exploited to eradicate rats on Lord Howe Island.
They search specifically for dogs obsessed with ball chasing and turn them into rat hunting dogs.
There's funny bit where they talk about finding a dog that had learned how to use the tennis ball firing machine and spent all day chasing a tennis ball and putting it back in the machine which fires the tennis ball in a never ending loop.
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/scienceshow/dogs-help...
Slightly off topic, but I once had a Siamese cat. I could not teach her to fetch a ball, but she could very well teach me to throw again. And it had to be a yellow foam ball - none of the other colors were of any interest.
ffs. What does this study tell anyone about anything?
> Behavioural addictions, characterised by compulsive engagement in rewarding activities despite adverse consequences in the long term, are more heterogeneous and less well-understood than substance addictions, and there is a relative lack of translational research.
Does that make sense to anyone?
"more heterogeneous" (trans: different)
"less well-understood: (trans: I have no idea, but I need to finish this paper)
"adverse consequences" (trans: Who knows? But, I surveyed pet-owners for their opinion, and cited some other source)
"relative lack of translational research" (trans: sounds good, whatever it means)
One of my best friends has a toller (canadian duck retriever) that's a total ball junkie, it's all he seems to live for. I too often played fetch with him as a pup and now he goes completely loco any time I show up at their house. So I accidentally conditioned him to see me as mr playtime, oops. Nowadays I try to just play frisbee and tugging games whenever I'm over for some time. When a ball is in sight, the world just disappears.
I have 2 standard poodles that come from working (hunting) lineage. After few throws of tennis ball they realize that game is rigged, and just go away, making me to go and retrieve the ball
If there's a frisbee or ball in sight, my female border collie won't even attend to basic bodily needs. And she'll chase the object while she's in pain and exhausted or shivering with cold and not notice. She has lupoid onychodystrophy which causes her nails to come in deformed and split and painful and she'll still obsess on some running play/task while she's got bleeding paws and can barely walk. An an owner we have to intervene to remove the object of obsession and force disengagement.
This is a product of centuries of breeding to focus on a task and enjoy the task above all else.
I wonder if autism is a similar kind of selection process. They are people selected by nature to be obsessed about different things, but this could be incredibly fruitful if you end up focused on the right thing. Of course in this situation we have no control over the selection process, it's a product of living in a world that's difficult to
You may find the recently published article “A General Principle of Neuronal Evolution Reveals a Human-Accelerated Neuron Type Potentially Underlying the High Prevalence of Autism in Humans” interesting.
Avoiding spoilers, Peter Watts' works have parts which show what happens when this idea is taken to its logical extreme.
It’s kind of funny how the idea of behavior being a result of breeding goes out the window when it comes to pitbulls. Retrievers naturally retrieve, collies naturally herd, but when a murder-canine eats a family it’s all “oh it could have been any breed”.
It’s just wokery innit. Can’t even train dogs to murder children nowadays because the woke brigade will cancel you.
This research only confirms what many dog owners already know, but it still deserves an Ig Noble Prize.[a]
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It doesn't though. Only the headline implies that. If you read the discussion you find the authors of this study do not claim any addictive behaviors were found.
I disagree. The OP states in the first sentence of its "Conclusion" section:
> To conclude, there appear to be parallels between excessive toy motivation in dogs and behavioural addictions in humans.
Understandably, however, the must authors qualify and frame their conclusion, so later on they add:
> Despite the observed parallels between high-AB dogs and humans affected by behavioural addictions, we refrain from conclusively characterising high-AB dogs as exhibiting addictive behaviour, given the absence of established benchmarks or standardised criteria.
my shiba inu rarely plays with any of his toys these days. he's 4.5 years old. of course that breed is typically known as being more primitive, so i wonder if that can be attributed to it.
>Behavioural addictions, characterised by compulsive engagement in rewarding activities despite adverse consequences in the long term, are more heterogeneous and less well-understood than substance addictions
Indeed. Mostly because every study on "behavioral addictions" is published in third tier journals or is a negative result in real journals. It's something that doesn't actually exist in mammals and it's current popularity is mostly from profit seeking scams for rehabilitation "clinics" preying on the 'screens are addictive' meme burning through current parent populations.
And despite the headlines suggesting otherwise, and the press likely running with those false headlines, *the actual study itself does not find any addictive behavior*. A null result.
>Despite the observed parallels between high-AB dogs and humans affected by behavioural addictions, we refrain from conclusively characterising high-AB dogs as exhibiting addictive behaviour, given the absence of established benchmarks or standardised criteria. It is important to be cautious when pathologising behaviour, especially given that even in humans, addictive behaviours are still difficult to define and measure.
> I'm shocked to see an informal survey based study (which will just confirm the owners pre-existing biases and opinions) being published in Nature of all things.
It's not "Nature", it's "Scientific Reports" with impact factor of only 3.8 vs 48 of "Nature".
Sure the publisher is "Springer Nature", and the domain is "nature.com" but that doesn't make the journal "Nature".
You're right. That's it. I'm going to make a browser extension that'll examine any paper I'm reading and color the address bar according to the impact factor of the journal in which it appears and the h-indexes of the authors.
> given the absence of established benchmarks or standardised criteria
The quote you cite doesn't support your claim. If there is no established criteria, then no amount of evidence will establish the link. But absent a rigorous definition, they are still giving evidence for a qualitative similarity between human addiction and the observed animal behavior. That's not a null result.
can you provide more context for this claim? my intuition and experience tells me the opposite.
what is the definition here? are impulsive avoidance copings like playing a video game instead of doing the hard work of addressing the worries/planned hard activities not a “video game addiction”?
and if we are talking physical withdrawal, then how should we call the same aspect of nicotine/alcohol addiction mechanics?
>It's something that doesn't actually exist in mammals and it's current popularity is mostly from profit seeking scams for rehabilitation "clinics" preying on the 'screens are addictive' meme burning through current parent populations.
What about gambling, eating, or shopping?
Gambling is not an addiction. It is "gambling disorder" and it was grandfathered into the DSM. It is explicitly not an addiction medically. Eating and shopping are two great examples not erronously grandfathered in, which committees repeated find are not addiction, but which those scammers love to profit off of.
My understanding was that self-professed gambling addicts — unlike casual gambers — were discovered to get the same shot of dopamine to their system when losing as the do when winning. Why would that not qualify as “medically addicted”? (IANA-Doctor)
So why do you think people continue to gamble, even after it has ruined their and their families lives and finances? Slot machine addicts will literally void their bladder rather than stop playing for 5 minutes to use the restroom.
Because people make poor choices and it's usually their own fault.
We used have words like "vice" and "sin" to describe these poor choices, but thanks to post-60s radical individualism, the only vocabulary for describing maladaptive behavior that remains of the language of medicine. Therefore, everything bad someone does is a "disease" for which he needs "therapy" or "treatment". We've utterly lost the capacity for describing deficiencies of the conscience.
Why would many, many, many people choose to piss and shit themselves in public instead of stopping for a few minutes to use the restroom? Why would someone choose the push a button every 5 seconds to the point where it ruins their life?
Put it another way: why would gambling companies continue to develop gambling machines? Why not stop with the mechanical, one-armed-bandit of the early 1900s if what they do has no effect on people?
Perhaps by the time someone's at the shitting at the seat phase of a gambling habit the neurological feedbacks arising from the intermittent reward schedule have become too strong for him to resist on his own.
But who made him start gambling in the first place? It's not like people who start gambling don't know how it ends. The most addictive slot machine in the world can't compel someone to sit at it for the first time. People KNOW these machines are addictive and choose to use them anyway.
It used to be cultural common knowledge that the wages of sin is death.
"Gambling Disorder" is in the disorder class "Substance-Related and Addictive Disorders" in DSM-5 though.
Many behaviors have been added and removed as "disorders" from the DSM as politics of the time demanded.
If this is true, why do GLP-1 drugs which are just hormones also shown to have an effect on gambling?
Well, my fellow CBT practitioners would disagree.
There are things you don't do but you understand not doing them is hurting you, so you decide to follow CBT (for example - there are other ways, but CBT has decent efficiency although it's expensive). They don't really need to be classified disorders or fobias.
Similarly, there are things you do and you realize not doing them would be beneficial to you. So you try to stop them and you realize it's hard. Again, you can use CBT or another method (or even medication in some cases). Whether you classify these things as "behavioral addictions" or use another term is secondary, the phenomenon itself is very real and I find it baffling anyone would dispute that.
We have a springer, cocker and a sprocker. We knew that addiction to these things were a problem and so we didn’t allow it to develop. I do think that people who are constantly throwing balls, especially with a wanger, are idiots.
You know your dogs' breeds were susceptible to enjoying fetch so you never played fetch with them. Ah yes those poor idiots who actually work their dogs for their bred purpose.
Where are you that you refer to a ball thrower as a “wanger”? I suspect anyone from the common wealth or the UK would find this quite amusing.