Exploring the Intersection of Poverty, Environment and Canine Health

SUMMARY: Researchers will use data from the Golden Retriever Lifetime Study to examine how socioeconomic status and environmental risk affect dog health outcomes.

THE PROBLEM: Patterns of socioeconomic and environmental risk across places can point to early or hidden threats to both animal and human health. This project studies how local poverty and environmental dangers affect study participants to understand broader patterns affecting other dogs.

THE PROJECT: The team will focus on three health outcomes that are likely to reflect socioeconomic conditions: infectious diseases, cancer, and unhealthy body weight. The team will use data from the Golden Retriever Lifetime Study (GRLS). For each dog, they’ll link the dog’s location to nearby place-based features and long-term health data, allowing the team to test whether dogs in certain areas have higher disease rates.

Certain living conditions are associated with increased health risks. For instance, poor sanitation, a concentration of older homes containing toxic materials, and limited access to services are often associated with poverty, and dogs in these environments may experience poorer health. Past studies have looked at links between social conditions and dog health over time. Many of these studies, however, rely on census data, which lack local detail. This makes it hard to detect risks at the small neighborhood level. To overcome this limit, the team will use detailed place-based, or georeferenced data. These include satellite images and location data from crowd-sourced maps. This allows analysis at a 1 km by 1 km scale and is not tied to census borders.

The geospatial data, which vary across space and time, are complex. To analyze them, the researchers will use machine-learning tools. These tools help find which place-based features best predict disease.

POTENTIAL IMPACT: If successful, the results from the study will sharpen our understanding of how poverty and environmental stressors affect animal health. Because animals share spaces with people, the findings also inform human health risks.