By Christine D. Calder,
DVM, DACVB
Board-Certified Veterinary Behaviorist, www.caldervbs.com
Anyone who has walked through a shelter has seen both dogs: the one pressed flat against the back of the kennel and the one bouncing off the walls. They look like opposites, but both are struggling. The trouble is that they need very different help, and shelter staff have never had a simple, reliable way to tell the two apart and pass that information along to a vet.
A team at Michigan State University set out to change that. Their new assessment, called COPE (short for Canine Observed Provision of Enrichment), was published this year in the Journal of Veterinary Behavior. Unlike the behavior assessment tests that came before it, it does not try to provoke the dog at all.
The old way versus the new way
For decades, many shelter behavior evaluations were essentially provocation tests. They would do things like pull food away from a dog mid-meal or handle sensitive body areas to see whether it would snap. The goal was to predict aggression and decide whether a dog was “safe” to adopt out. The trouble is, those tests are stressful, and a frightened dog in a loud, strange shelter does not necessarily behave the way it would in a familiar living environment. Their accuracy has been seriously questioned.
COPE works differently. None of its activities are designed to provoke fear or aggression. Instead, it walks a dog through eight ordinary, often enjoyable interactions (the kinds of things a volunteer might do anyway) and watches how the dog copes: a treat offered through the kennel door, a few minutes of play with toys, a chance to settle on a mat with a chew, a calm walk back to the kennel. The whole thing takes about 20 minutes, uses cheap supplies most shelters already own, and a volunteer can be trained to run it in under two hours.
The assessment doubles as enrichment, which means the dog gets something good out of it either way. The researchers even noticed that dogs assessed repeatedly started getting excited when the assessor approached, anticipating the treats and play.
Two ways of not coping
The core of COPE is a simple, intuitive idea. Dogs that are not adjusting to shelter life tend to fall into one of two camps:
• The shut-down dogs are withdrawn and frozen. The researchers call this “anxious avoidance.”
• The wired dogs are over-aroused, unable to settle, lacking impulse control. They call this “excessive arousal.”
COPE turns what it sees into a single number, relaxed, appropriate behavior scores zero. Withdrawn behaviors push the score negative. Over-aroused behaviors push it positive. A veterinarian glancing at that score gets an instant read not just on whether a dog is struggling, but on how, which matters, because the two patterns can call for completely different treatments.
Does it actually work?
The researchers were careful here, and honest about what they found. They tested COPE on 91 dogs and checked its scores against the diagnoses of a board-certified veterinary behaviorist who watched the same dogs on video without knowing their scores.
The good news is that COPE reliably flagged the shut-down, anxious-avoidant dogs. Their scores were clearly and significantly more negative than everyone else’s, exactly as predicted.
The caveat is that the tool could not yet cleanly separate the over-aroused dogs from the well-adjusted ones. The over-aroused dogs trended in the right direction, with higher scores, but not strongly enough to be statistically convincing. Part of the reason is simply that there were not many of them in this group, only 20, and just two with severe symptoms. The researchers suspect their scoring scale may also need widening, since no dog landed near the extreme ends of the possible range.
So, COPE is a promising work in progress, not a finished verdict. The research team is upfront about the next steps: more dogs, a wider scoring range, and testing across different shelters with real staff doing the scoring.
Why this matters for the rest of us
You might be thinking: I have a dog at home, not a kennel full of them. Why care?
A few reasons. If you have ever adopted, fostered, or volunteered, this is the kind of behind-the-scenes science quietly making shelters more humane, moving the culture away from “is this dog dangerous?” toward “what does this dog need to feel okay?” That helps more dogs get the right support and find homes.
The idea is also useful closer to home. Distress in dogs does not show up just one way. The same scary thunderstorm might make one dog disappear under the bed and another bark frantically at the window. Recognizing which way your own dog tips when overwhelmed, shutting down or winding up, is the first step toward helping them. That is the same question COPE is trying to answer for dogs in shelters.
Source: Breithaupt, A., Hopfensperger, M., & Jacobs, J. (2026). “Development and rater reliability of COPE: A behavioral assessment tool to monitor shelter dog coping behavior.” Journal of Veterinary Behavior, vol. 85. The validity findings described here come from the related MSU doctoral dissertation (Breithaupt, 2023), which the published paper builds on.