Pig pheromone proves useful in curtailing bad behavior in dogs

In a sense, John McGlone was just like any other pet owner a few years ago. He simply wanted to keep his Cairn Terrier from barking incessantly.

Then again, McGlone is not like most dog owners in that he is a professor at Texas Tech University who just happens to specialize in animal welfare and behavior. And, in that capacity, he just happened to have a product on hand at his house from a previous research study called Boar Mate, an odorous concoction which helps farmers with swine breeding.

So, he gave one little spritz to his dog, Toto, and immediately the dog stopped barking. Right on the spot.

‘It was completely serendipitous,” said McGlone, who works in the Animal and Food Sciences department of the College of Agriculture and Natural Sciences. “One of the most difficult problems is that dogs bark a lot, and it’s one of the top reasons they are given back to shelters or pounds.”

Suddenly, an idea was born. After extensive testing and publishing of the results, and with funding help from Sergeant’s pet care products, Stop That was developed and hit store shelves under the Sentry pet products name about a year ago. It has been met with tremendous success by pet owners who were on their last legs in trying to curtail bad behavior in dogs.

“My dogs were instantly focused and silenced with one spritz,” said one product reviewer on Amazon.com. “It’s changed my life.”

Assist to pigs

Not only did the discovery of this product by McGlone come by accident, it came from a completely different species.

McGlone said Boar Mate contains a pig pheromone, defined as “substances secreted to the outside by an individual and received by a second individual of the same species in which they release a specific reaction.”

In this case, the pheromone produced is androstenone, which, when secreted by male pigs, is picked up by female pigs in heat and ready to breed. It is a foul-smelling odor for humans and also affects dogs through their olfactory system.

Androstenone is produced by pigs in their saliva or fat, but Boar Mate androstenone is synthesized in a laboratory. One spray of Boar Mate on Toto was all it took to set the wheels of experimentation in motion.

McGlone contacted a canine research site he had worked with on previous experiments, knowing this site had a wide array of adult dogs, both mixed and pure breeds. He also knew that about half of the 100 dogs there barked constantly and would be perfect for testing.

“It doesn’t mean it’s going to work on a lot of dogs just because it worked