What The Studies Of A Dog's Nervous System Have To Tell Us

Dogs of any breed, size or type can suffer from stress. In fact, a certain amount of stress is necessary for a healthy life. Hunger begets a form of stress that motivates us to find food, a healthful activity. However, a pet dog that receives a doting owner's petting and praise on demand all weekend tends to build an insatiable "appetite" for constant social gratification.

Later, left alone on weekdays, the dog is frustrated by an unsolvable, hence frustrating, problem: it cannot find its “emotional food”. Whether this condition results in problem behavior depends on the stability of the dog's nervous system and how the animal behaves to relieve tensions that will always arise from frustration. For example, a chewing problem develops in the orally oriented animal. The tension relief is manifested by chewing up objects that smell and taste of the owner, or things that, to the dog, are symbolic of the owners.

Developmental Neurophysiology and Behavior

Each puppy is born with and develops a nervous system that is unique in many ways. Both genetic and environmental factors produce these individual variations. Some important developmental yardsticks may be applied to the canine nervous system to explain many kinds of behavior.

Turnover of RNA (ribonucleic acid, a vital chemical messenger in the memory process) in a pup's brain does not reach adult rates until 22 weeks of age. This helps explain why a puppy may have "accidents" during its house-training program, or why training pups to simple "Come," "Sit" or "Stay" commands is best conducted in brief sessions no longer than 5 minutes. This may also bear on the 13 to 16-week-old pup's behavior, when it apparently does not recognize, growls at, or runs from visitors with whom it had friendly previous contact, or a pup who starts barking at objects previously ignored. In this case, the optic tract also may not have reached maturity.

Mammals normally born blind but reared without light until maturity develop apparently normal eyes that are "nerve blind" due to failure of the optic tract to develop normally - a good reason not to shake puppies as punishment. Stimulus deprivation of various sorts produces animals with comparatively lighter and less precisely structured brains, according to Russian studies in the 1950s.

Puppies drastically restricted from sensory stimulation and exercise in special cages from weaning until maturity failed to avoid painful burns on their noses from matches or pin pricks, while normally raised puppies quickly learned to avoid them. The deprived pups appeared to feel the pain, but did not learn to associate it with the match or the pin. Even more bizarre, these deprived puppies spent more time close to the human experimenter after being burned or pricked than before the painful stimulus. This was not the case with normally reared puppies.

This work may explain why so many behavioral problems are experienced with puppies bred and reared in the restrictive environments of "puppy mills," where litters are reared in stacked cages and then shipped to pet shops, where they spend more time in cages.