Temporal Consistency of Behavior Trait Measurements in Guide Dogs

Emma Hilby^1*Aaron Rendahl¹Jane Russenberger^2,3Madeline Zimmermann^2,3James R Mickelson¹Molly Elizabeth McCue¹

• ¹University of Minnesota Twin Cities, St. Paul, United States
• ²Guiding Eyes for the Blind, Yorktown Heights, NY, United States
• ³International Working Dog Registry, San Antonio, TX, United States

Guide dog organizations have strict criteria to breed, raise, and select dogs to assist people with visual impairments. In collaboration with Dr. James Serpell, several guide dog training organizations developed a scoring tool called the Behavior Checklist (BCL) to evaluate candidate guide dogs. The tool’s use has expanded to the entire assistance dog industry and is rapidly emerging as the standard behavior assessment. Since 2003, Guiding Eyes for the Blind (GEB) has used the BCL to measure individuals dogs’ behaviors up to 8 times between puppyhood and final placement. Here, we evaluate the consistency of the BCL over multiple evaluations in a population of 3,969 Labrador Retrievers raised by Guiding Eyes. We grouped BCL evaluations by two methods, factor analysis and trainer-determined release reasons, and summarized groupings of behavior in two ways, using mean and lowest scores. We then determined the agreement between pairs of evaluations using kappa statistics and the predictive capacity of early BCL scores to predict later scores using positive and negative predictive values. Evaluations that are similar in nature and those that are scored within three to sixl months of one another agree the most. When a dog scores well early in life, they are likely to consistently score well and the dog’s behavior is unlikely to regress over time. We also found that dogs who score poorly early in life either improve their scores on later evaluations with training intervention or are removed from training. One limitation to this data is that dogs who score poorly at early timepoints are often removed from training and the data from later BCL evaluations is biased towards higher scoring dogs. Regardless, these data show that the BCL is an effective way to evaluate assistance dog behavior and has some predictive capacity.