I was always told that seizure detection, much like cardiac detection, is something that some dogs (very few) are born with and most are not.
Yeah - I remember you saying this, but I hadn't heard it before and didn't know where you were sourcing that from, so I didn't challenge it.
To the extent that some dogs are just naturally better at being SDs than others it's probably true to a degree. Like a whole litter of pups go through the same training to be a Seeing Eye Dog, but only some will pass the testing (although, even that has changed dramatically with the change in the way the those dogs are trained, and these days, using a +R method, they expect around 80% of the dogs to pass, suggesting that a dog's capacity is limited more by its trainer and training method than the dog and its natural skills).
But no, my understanding is the scent-detection, which seems to be the basis for quite a lot of specialised medical alert dogs, is more down the to training method and skills of the trainer and handler than something random occurring in dogs.
You were saying (I think) that a dog is responding, not alerting, to body changes when a seizure happens
I'm not quite sure what you mean by the distinction here?
If you pair a dog with a person who has a medical condition like epilepsy, and you train that person how to interpret the dog's body language, the person can learn to read the way our dog's naturally respond to changes in their handler.
So, a many dogs will naturally be able to detect stuff like this. And the first few times they notice "Boss's hormones/sweating/respiration etc has suddenly changed", their behaviour will change in response to that. Like, "Something's up, Boss, you okay?"
Most often, we interpret that as annoying or unwanted attention/behaviour from our dog (because
we aren't aware there's something wrong with us), and either ignore it, or discourage it ("Piss off dog, I'm trying to work"). The dog instinctively learns this isn't something they need to respond to.
But if you're trained to notice and use these subtle reactions from the dog ("Dog's behaviour has changed, might be something up with me, dog deserves a reward for that"), then you're automatically laying the groundwork for the dog to continue alerting you whenever that same problem occurs.
It's the reason why when we're training dogs and their handlers, any change in the dog's behaviour, the first thing we train the handler to do is check in with themselves (am I okay, am I breathing, am I tense, I am dissociated, etc etc), rather than automatically correcting the dog. Because oftentimes, the dog has simply picked up "Something about
Boss has changed, and I'm concerned".
If the handler learns to respond to that positively? Then the dog will keep doing it.
An example is my dog licks my hand when I'm dissociating. Not something I trained him to do, but he's very reliable at it. He alerts me to my dissociating long before I do.
That came about because the first few times he suddenly started licking my hand when he was happily lying on my lap asleep? I checked in with myself and noticed - shit, I'm totally spacing out - and rewarded him for it. Which is super cool.
Is that an alert or a response? Probably doesn't matter either way. It's just really useful!
any dog can smell a seizure before it happens?
Probably not, or at least, probably not as easily. Dog's have 2 different organs they use for detecting scents, and in dogs with a smooshed face (pugs etc), the second one (which humans don't have) is crushed up and doesn't work as effectively (it sits between their nose and their soft palate in their mouth).
In their primary scent organ (their nose), all dogs have around 10,000 or more scent detection thingos in their nose than humans, and they all have those small flaps on the side of their nostril that allows them to seperate air going in, from air going out. So -
all dogs have a capacity to pick up minute smells in a way that we humans can't even begin to comprehend.
However, their is variation between breeds. Dogs that have been bred for scent-based work can have up to 40,000 more of those scent thingos in their nose, as opposed to the mediocre 10,000 more that regular breeds have. So, you're going to get some breeds (like hounds) that will find scent-based alerting (like seizure alerting) much easier than a regular breed.
ETA Then of course you add in breeding - good chance if you get a Border Collie pup from a particular lineage, they'll have a natural instinct to herd sheep, and in fact their idea of a good time is herding sheep.
Buy a Beagle from the right lineage and you get the same effect - they not only have a great nose by dog standards, they naturally looooove smelling everything and anything. So they use them to sniff out bombs and anthrax in mail because they don't just have the biology required, but their breeding is such that all you really need to train them is what to
do when they detect particular smells, because they're out there smelling all this stuff instinctively anyways, and all humans need is them to let us know
what they're smelling. That's a Beagle's idea of a good time, which makes that training much simpler than with other breeds.
So, same goes for sniffing out seizures. Some dogs are biologically
and behaviourally predisposed to do that more than others.
