Curiously, and perhaps eagerly, I am looking at a bull terrier named Sputnik, searching for a resemblance.
He’s a stocky three-year-old, mostly slate grey, with a white stripe on his head and a pink splotch on his elongated, bull-terrier nose. So far, our only similarity is we’re both waiting in a trailer that’s serving as his examination room at Tufts University’s veterinary school in North Grafton, Massachusetts.
Sputnik has canine compulsive disorder (CCD) and is at Tufts for a checkup with Nicholas Dodman, a veterinarian who has been studying CCD for over two decades. I’m shadowing this visit to learn about Dodman’s work and, selfishly, to learn something about myself; I was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) a few months ago.
When Dodman first started seeing these dogs, he realised he had been handed a potentially ideal animal model to study human OCD. But in 20 years of studying dogs, discovering genes that may be involved and new neural pathways, one problem has continually clouded his research: the debate over whether CCD can truly be compared to human OCD. “When it comes to problems of the mind, people have a mental block,” he says. “The mind is thought of as uniquely human.”
More:
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170627-how-do-you-treat-a-dog-with-ocd
