Do Dogs Inherently Understand Pointing Gestures?
Earlier I mentioned a possible correlation between reactivity and vision problems, which got many of us thinking about the relationship between eyesight and reactive and/or fearful behavior in dogs. I had remembered that a researcher at UW-Madison did a study on eyesight in dogs, in which GSDs had an especially high rate of myopia, or nearsightedness. That got my attention, given how many reactive GSDs I’d been seeing in my office at the time. We just found the study, and here is a summary of it: (You can find the entire study in Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, Vol 33, No 8, July ‘92, by Murphy, Zadnik & Mannis). The researchers looked at the physical structure of the eye (no one asked the dogs if the marks on the wall were bones or dinner bowls!), to evaluate the eyesight of 240 dogs presented at the UW-Madison clinic, and in 53 GSDs in Guide Dogs for the Blind programs. In the general study, they found 3 breeds in which over 50% of the dogs were myopic: 53% of GSDs, 50%
