If your dog is having a ruff time, throw them a bone.
A new study published in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science suggests that giving an anxious dog a chew toy can actually help improve their memory.
Researchers from Auburn University in Alabama examined the effect of chewing on cognition in dogs.
Dog trainers who had worked with the canines for at least one month prior to the experiment filled out the Canine Behavioral Assessment and Research Questionnaire to rate dogs on their level of “fearfulness.”
They evaluated the performance of 34 Labrador retrievers doing a working memory task where they had to recall which bucket a treat was put in over a period of time.
Immediately before the task, the dogs were given a chew toy to bite on for five minutes while a computer program recorded the frequency of bites.
“We found that in dogs with high fearfulness, more frequent chewing when given access to a chew toy was associated with better spatial working memory, while the opposite was true for dogs with low fearfulness,” the researchers wrote.
They believe that for anxious dogs, chewing on something can help them focus and decrease physiological arousal, while for calmer dogs, chewing could actually be a distraction.
“What may be happening is that the fearful dogs are gaining a more therapeutic effect from the chewing than the non-fearful dogs — with chewing in the former group perhaps helping to reduce cortisol levels and stress,” Dr. Deborah Wells, a reader in animal behavior and welfare at Queen’s University Belfast, who was not involved in the study, said per the Daily Mail.
However, chewing could help both fearful and non-fearful dogs when it comes to long-term memory, the study suggests.
On a different day than the bucket task, researchers gave the dogs a maze task that they had to relearn.
“We also found that dogs with a higher maximum bite intensity displayed better performance on the maze test,” the study authors wrote.
“These results are the first to suggest that chewing may have positive benefits on cognition in dogs and that this relationship may be pronounced in dogs with high fearfulness.”