Working dogs: They’re just like us. Recent research shows how scent detection canines do worse at their job when they haven’t eaten yet.
Scientists in New Zealand and Australia studied the effects of hunger on the performance of these precious pooches. Before the dogs ate breakfast, they found, the animals were more likely to produce false alarms, though they were still just as accurate at identifying correct targets. Their experiments suggest that meal timing should be a key consideration when using these dogs, the researchers say.
“These findings have important implications for applications involving scent-detection animals,” they wrote in their paper, published last month in the journal Learning and Motivation.
The breakfast effect
Scent detection dogs are deployed for a variety of tasks, from sniffing out drugs at the airport to confirming bedbug infestations in people’s homes. So finding ways to improve their performance would certainly be worthwhile.
Previous studies have evaluated whether eating a meal can affect a dog’s ability to perform memory tasks, albeit with mixed results. According to the authors, however, there hasn’t been much research looking at how a recent meal could shape the effectiveness of dogs’ scent detection specifically. The team, made up of researchers from Adelaide University in Australia and the University of Waikato in New Zealand, enlisted the help of six dogs to do just that.
The dogs were trained to pick up the scent of four distinct odors. On some days, the dogs would perform their job before breakfast; on others, they worked after their meal.
In either condition, the dogs were about 90% accurate at detecting a targeted scent. But when they hadn’t eaten, the dogs more often cried wolf on a scent that wasn’t the target. After they ate, they were better at not falling for these non-target scents.
“What we found is that hunger appears to change the likelihood of a dog saying a target scent is present, rather than simply making them better or worse at smelling,” said study author Tim Edwards, a researcher at the University of Waikato, in a statement from Adelaide University.
The researchers actually expected the dogs to perform worse at false alarms due to a concept known as motivating operation. Put simply, it’s the idea that certain situations or variables can influence how animals, humans included, perceive the world around them.
“The reason for this is probably very similar to the reason that, when you have lost your keys and need them very urgently, every small metallic thing looks like your keys. When we are highly motivated to find something, we are biased toward seeing it or smelling it in the case of our dogs,” Edwards explained.
A related study of theirs, published last month in the journal Behavioral Processes, found that hungry scent dogs might whine more frequently and express more frustration while on the job, but not to a significant degree.
The implications for scent detection dogs
Given the small size of this study, more work will be needed to validate the team’s research. And even if it holds up, it doesn’t necessarily mean that scent dogs should always be treated to a buffet before they go off to their job, the researchers say. Different dogs might respond differently to hunger than others, for instance, and other variables could interact with a dog’s appetite to influence their performance.
“Our results suggest that feeding strategies could be one factor worth considering when planning scent-detection work, although we need more research to understand how these findings translate to operational settings,” Edwards said.
Still, it’s at least comforting to know that much like people, some dogs just need a little food in their tummy before they can work well. Cats, on the other hand, will probably refuse to do anything they don’t want to do, treat or not.
