Particular breeds have particular behaviours they exhibit with CCD.

Tail chasing is a common compulsive behaviour for dogs, and for bull terriers specifically. Dodman had seen this kind of spinning many times before. Schmuck drove from his home in Baltimore to see Dodman in Massachusetts. Even though he’s getting hit so hard that you think he’s getting a concussion, he will keep doing it until his teeth and his tail start hitting the wall and he’s shooting blood all over the place.” He will slowly start working up to chasing, and it will get faster and faster until his head is hitting whatever wall he bangs into. “His head will lurch all the way against his shoulder, and stare at his tail, as if his nemesis is staring right back at him. “It was as if I didn’t exist,” Schmuck explains. They took a video of their young puppy spinning, and you could hear them laughing in the background. At first, Schmuck and his wife thought it was funny. His mother called him to say that their new dog had started chasing his tail, and she couldn’t get him to stop. Two years ago, after rescuing Sputnik from a shelter, his owner Dan Schmuck went on a business trip. Like me, it seems he keeps that kind of behaviour away from the public eye. Sputnik was a tail chaser, and would spin for hours on end. “The mind is thought of as uniquely human.” “When it comes to problems of the mind, people have a mental block,” he says. 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 Dodman first started seeing these dogs, he realised he had been handed a potentially ideal animal model to study human OCD. 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. 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. 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. 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. Curiously, and perhaps eagerly, I am looking at a bull terrier named Sputnik, searching for a resemblance.

Ocd dog pica