https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/823427v1.full
Cortisol, the primary stress hormone, increases sugars (glucose) in the bloodstream, enhances your brain’s use of glucose and increases the availability of substances that repair tissues. Cortisol also curbs functions that would be nonessential or detrimental in a fight-or-flight situation. As your body perceives stress, your adrenal glands make and release the hormone cortisol into your bloodstream. Often called the “stress hormone,” cortisol causes an increase in your heart rate and blood pressure. It’s your natural “flight or fight” response that has kept humans alive for thousands of years.
It’s hard to find good empirical studies on dogs this day in age, but this one is interesting and well worth the read. Cortisol levels tend to dictate stress levels – high levels indicate higher stress. As previously discussed, luring a scared dog to a target repeatedly can increase the epinephrine and cortisol levels – and cortisol itself can be addictive to all animals. The combination can create stress eating or completely shut down appetite — and this can be achieved through both positive and balanced training.
The long and short of this study is that balanced (e-collar) trained (aversive trained) dogs tend to have a higher level of cortisol in their system than dogs trained in a “positive reinforcement” environment. Aversive trained dogs also tended to take longer doing specific tasks – looking like it’s more out of fear of correction than the positive trained dogs.
The outcome?
For each dog, we first summed all the occurrences of each stress-related behavior as defined in the ethogram for stress-related behaviors. A comparison between the two groups revealed that dogs from Group Aversive (balanced) displayed significantly more stress-related behaviors than dogs from Group Reward. (positive training)
Group Aversive showed a significantly higher frequency of body turn, moving away, crouching, salivating, yawning and lip licking. Additionally, balanced trained dogs tended to lay more on their side/back, yelp and paw lift.
Cortisol samples were taken in 3 phases – pre-training, during training and post training. There was a significant difference between groups, with dogs from Group Aversive showing an average increase of 0.10 µg/dL in salivary cortisol concentration after training and dogs from Group Reward showing, on average, no changes in cortisol concentration.
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