04/09/2026
How hunger affects dogs participating in scent detection activities.
New research! 🔥
Excited to see new research from Jade of Animal Behaviour Matters out this week! These two studies were undertaken with the Scent Detection Research Group at the The University of Waikato in New Zealand.
🦴 Dogs were given breakfast before or after completing a scent-detection task.
❌ When working prior to eating, dogs made significantly more false alarms.
🐺 Being hungry may cause a mild increase in frustration-related behaviour during scent work for some dogs.
🐕 Dog’s hunger state can influence both scent-detection performance and behaviour.
Yee et al. (2026) found that dogs working before breakfast produced more false alarms, suggesting hunger may increase dogs' tendency to respond to non-target odours.
Fountain et al. (2026) found that unfed dogs showed more whining and interaction with the equipment, indicating mild frustration associated with hunger. However, frustration behaviours were generally infrequent and varied between individual dogs.
Links to both of these open access articles will be in the comments or search them on google scholar/research gate.
Fountain, J., Yee, J., Hazel, S. J., McWhorter, T. J., McNutt, T., & Edwards, T. L. (2026). Effects of feeding on dogs’ frustration-related behaviours during a laboratory-based scent detection task. Behavioural Processes, 105430.
Yee, J., Downie, I., Fountain, J., & Edwards, T. L. (2026). The breakfast effect revisited: Dogs’ scent detection performance before and after a meal. Learning and Motivation, 95, 102328.
