Bold personality makes domestic dogs in a shelter less vulnerable to disease

Bold personality makes domestic dogs in a shelter less vulnerable to disease(journals.plos.org)

16 points by fern12 8 years ago | 6 comments

I feel like the causality is likely backwards from the title - if you are less vulnerable to disease, you can better afford to boldly take risks and explore new situations and withstand the possible negative consequences.

duskwuff 8 years ago | |

Or: Dogs who are congenitally more prone to disease are more likely to have missed socialization windows due to illness, making them less outgoing.

dmos62 8 years ago | |

That would presuppose that the dog knows that he has a fit immune system, which we couldn't really explain either. I think the causality relationship is less interesting than that there's a correlation between different aspects of interaction with the environment. Maybe the causality works both ways even?

trhway 8 years ago | | |

>That would presuppose that the dog knows that he has a fit immune system, which we couldn't really explain either.

feeling well is a pretty good proxy for a well working immune system, and it doesn't require any knowledge about immune system.

sghi 8 years ago |

So this is the research area that I currently work in, albeit with a disease ecology perspective rather than a biochemistry one. I've had a quick read of it and and although it does seem to track other research that has been done ("Why are behavioral and immune traits linked?" by Lopes 2017 is a nice review) I'd love to see some power analyses - the sample size seems pretty small for something as complex as this question. The study I'm helping with now has a minimum sample size in the hundreds, for instance, for a broadly similar question. PCA-ing a few tests together is pretty common, but also comes with a lot of potential biases (see "Avoiding the misuse of BLUP in behavioural ecology" by Houslay and Wilson if anyone is interested!)

no-brainer 8 years ago |

tl:dr; healthier dogs seem happier...