Do you have a dog? And if so, does your dog have a favorite toy, one that he never lets go of and that he would play with for now regardless of tiredness? If you also answered yes to this second question, the quadruped could be addicted to that toy.
Well yes, even dogs can develop addictions similar to those of us humans: a notion so far supported only by anecdotal evidence, and which now also has an initial scientific basis. We are talking about a study by the University of Bern published on Scientific Reportswhich highlights how some dogs behave towards their toys like some humans do towards gambling or the internet.
The champion. The study involved around a hundred dogs, divided in half between males (56) and females (49), aged between 1 and 10 years and of almost all breeds: the most represented were the Malinois, the border collie and the Labrador. Some specimens were neutered or spayed, others were not: in general, the sample collected a large variety of different dogs, but all with one characteristic in common – a notable love of toys, as reported by their humans.
Are toys like drugs? The dogs were given a simple test: they were faced with a selection of toys and asked to choose one. Then, the scientists observed their behavior in a series of short playful interactions, which also involved their reference humans. The team looked at 14 different aspects of dogs’ relationships with toys, comparing them to human behaviors associated with addictions.
Plush toy addiction. The result is that, among all the dogs tested, 33 exhibited behaviors typical of addiction: becoming excessively fixated on a single toy, ignoring alternatives, even ignoring food or their human… Not only that: these dogs also made considerable efforts to reach the toy when it was out of reach (for example if it was closed in a transparent glass box), and they struggled to calm down once the toy was taken away from them.
In short: many behaviors typical of gaming addiction in humans are also found in dogs, or at least in some dogs, who “lose control” when faced with their favorite toy (which is not a slot machine or a video poker but a stuffed animal or something to munch on) and become fixated on it in an unhealthy way.
Now it remains to be understood why some dogs develop this “addiction”, and how their condition affects their health (physical and mental).
