The World Of Hurt

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226 – September, 2022

By Sue M. Copeland

Ouch you cry when you touch something sharp or hot. “If you make contact with something that hurts you, you pull away your hand,” says Margaret E. Gruen, DVM, MVPH, PhD, DACVB, Assistant Professor of Behavioral Medicine at North Carolina State University’s (NCSU) College of Veterinary Medicine. “If the contact results in a wound, pain makes you more likely to care for that hand. Functional pain protects your body and promotes healing.”

You can verbalize the level of pain you experience to other people, and to your doctor. While some of us may seem more stoic than others, studies show that humans tend to feel pain at the same level.

“If you use objective data, humans are all just as sensitive as each other to pain,” says Duncan X. Lascelles, BSc, BVSc, PhD, FRCVS, CertVA, DSAS(ST), DECVS, DACVS, Professor of Surgery and Pain Management at NCSU.

But what about your dogs? They can’t verbalize the pain level they feel when sick or injured—it’s up to you and your veterinarian to try to figure it out. You’ve likely known breeds that seem more (or less) sensitive to pain than others. You may have heard other breeders, owners, or veterinarians suggest the same.

So engrained are these perceptions that Dr. Gruen did a survey in 2020 to look at how people rated pain sensitivity between different dog breeds.

“I showed about 1,000 general-public members and 1,000 veterinarians photos of dogs of a variety of breeds and asked them to rate the breeds on a pain sensitivity scale from not at all sensitive (low), to the most sensitive imaginable (high),” she said. “The responses showed both groups strongly endorse differences in pain sensitivity between dog breeds. In the public cohort, it tended to be based on size, with large breeds perceived to be less sensitive than smaller ones.”

“On the veterinary side, the pattern was different,” she continues. “Breeds that were rated by the public as having low pain sensitivity, such as the German Shepherd Dog and Siberian Husky, were rated as highly sensitive by veterinarians. Variance in the veterinary community was low. Not only did they generally have the opinion that Labrador Retrievers, Staffordshire Terriers (or Pit Bulls), and Golden Retrievers had low pain sensitivities, they also were consistent in thinking that, for instance, Maltese and Chihuahuas were highly sensitive.”

And that raised a question. “Are those perceptions picked up in veterinary school?” Dr. Gruen asked herself. “Or are they based on experience?” That question sparked a quest to find the answer using groundbreaking, data-based research funded by AKC Canine Health Foundation (CHF). Dr. Gruen is the study’s principal investigator, with Dr. Lascelles her co-investigator.

THE GOALS

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226 – September, 2022

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