Canine Behavior: Do Microchips Cause Behavior Problems in Dogs?
Microchips Are Known to Cause Cancer. Do They Also Cause Behavior Problems?
Dogs and Humans Are Sensitive to Electromagnetic Fields
You may have heard about this story in the news not too long ago. A group of researchers from the Czech University of Life Sciences and the University of Duisburg-Essen, found—after examining 70 dogs of 37 breeds over a space of two years—that under “calm magnetic field conditions” they preferred to defecate while their bodies were aligned along the north-south axis of the earth’s magnetic field, and avoided doing so on the earth’s east-west axis.
Why on earth would dogs prefer the north-south axis and avoid east-west? No one knows. Yet the point is that dogs are able to sense the earth’s magnetic field.
In a much earlier study—done by American neuroscientist Allan Frey in 1961—human subjects were discovered to be able to actually hear pulsed microwave radiation from a distance of 100 meters from the transmitter. This was accompanied by side effects such as dizziness, headaches, and a pins-and-needles sensation. This phenomenon was first reported by soldiers working near radar transponders during World War II. The sounds were inaudible to others who weren't as close to the transponders, suggesting that the microwave frequencies were directly affecting each victim’s brain.
Can microchips affect your dog’s brain and, subsequently, his or her behavior?
Yes.
Puzzling Behaviors
About ten years ago I began seeing fairly severe and puzzling behavior problems in young dogs. The first was a puggle, who had a severe form of separation anxiety with an intensity I’d never seen before in a dog so young. Since puggles were a fairly new hybrid, I wondered if some genetic anomaly might be the cause of this severe behavior problem.
A few years later I had a client whose young Jack Russell Terrier became highly agitated whenever he was walked on a certain block in Brooklyn. On a hunch, I asked the client if there was a power station nearby.
Surprised at the question, he confirmed that there was, right on the corner. He then told me that when he took the dog on alternate routes, the strange behavior didn’t occur. That’s when I came to wonder if EMFs—electromagnetic frequencies from cell phones, computers, cell towers, etc.—might be having an adverse effect on canine behavior.
In more recent years I’ve been seeing strangely intense fearfulness and aggression in young dogs beginning at about three-and-a-half to four months of age. In none of the cases was there a stressful or fear-inducing event causing the behavior. That’s when I began to suspect that microchips might be causing these problems (dogs are usually microchipped at the same time they’re spayed or neutered, often around 3 1⁄2 to four months of age).
Other trainers, particularly those who’ve only been working with dogs for the last seven years or so, may not have an awareness that these problems exist simply because they don’t have the same reference points that I and other trainers do.
But could something as simple as a microchip really cause behavior problems?
Yes. A microchip may be small, but it’s hardly simple. Each chip is encased in a glass bead about the size of a grain of rice. It contains a radio transmitter, an antenna and a computer chip (or integrated circuit) with a ten digit code. It also has a coil inductor with a magnetic core and a capacitor, which stores energy in the form of an electrostatic field. The coil inductor is capable of receiving power when the chip is scanned. The coil and capacitor together form an LC circuit, storing electrical energy—tuned to the frequency of the scanner's magnetic field—to produce power for the chip. When scanned, the radio transmitter sends the chip’s data to the external scanner.
So here’s the problem. Every cell in the body has its own electromagnetic frequency, a specific vibratory rate essential for optimal health and cell division, etc. Neurons and other brain cells are very easily affected by EMFs, which travel at the speed of light.
Out of the Freying Pan Into the Fire
In 1960, Allan Frey was part of Cornell University’s General Electric Advanced Electronics Center. He became curious about the impact on the nervous system of electromagnetic fields, and found that EMFs had significant biological effects, one being that they seem to “dissolve” the blood-brain barrier. For instance, if you inject a rat with a fluorescent dye, its entire body and all of the organs fluoresce, all except for the brain. That’s because the brain protects itself from possible contaminants in the bloodstream via this important barrier.
But Frey found that when you injected the dye, then exposed the rats to very weak pulsed microwaves, within a few minutes brains also began to fluoresce. Two other labs followed suit, using other techniques, and showed similar effects of EMFs violating the blood-brain barrier.
In the 1970s, Frey did research to determine if EMFs have an effect on specific parts of the brain involved in learning, memory, mood and behavior. He and other researchers found that EMFs had significant effects on the parts of the brain involved in producing and regulating opiates, dopamine, serotonin, gamma-amino-butyric acid (GABA), melatonin, and their substrates, all of which either regulate or are involved in learning, mood, behavior and memory. They also found that EMFs could clearly be traced back as a root cause of aggression and anxiety in animals.
More recent research shows that rats who’ve been conditioned to respond to certain cues fail to do so a significant percentage of the time after being subjected to low-level electromagnetic frequencies.
Researchers in Switzerland found that cows pastured near a radio tower began showing strange behaviors, but when they were re-pastured several miles away, they began behaving normally again. There were also reports of sleep disturbances in the humans living nearby, but when the tower was turned off for three days, their sleep patterns returned to normal, which confirms Frey’s research on the effects that EMFs have on melatonin.
Puppy ADHD
A 2006 study done in Denmark, involving nearly 13,000 children, showed that kids who were exposed to EMFs as infants were 80 percent more likely to develop symptoms of ADHD by age seven. (A 2010 study done at UCLA confirmed those findings.) This is telling because many trainers I know have started complaining about a new puppy behavioral anomaly they refer to as “Puppy ADHD.”
There’s a problem with these data, though, because while they’re telling us something important about the link between EMFs and behavior problems, science currently has no way of explaining how EMFs cause these disturbances.
However, in his book What Is Life? Dr Lebrecht von Klitzing, who spent years studying these phenomena, says that while EMF “intensities are too low for an explanation by the known physical laws [...] the number of disturbances seen in correlation with an exposure to these fields over a long period of time is increasing dramatically.”
Water absorbs electromagnetic waves. Dr von Klitzing says one explanation for these behavioral disturbances might be that EMFs interfere with normal bio-electric information processes taking place in the brain—which is roughly 73 percent water.
In “Can EMFs Shorten Your Dog’s Life?"—a 2014 article found on the webiste of Dogs Naturally magazine—the authors explain that “Iron, necessary for healthy blood and stored in the brain, is highly affected by EMFs.”
So if EMFs adversely affect clusters of water and iron molecules in living cells—particularly in your dog’s brain and nerve cells—it might explain some of the strange new behavioral problems I’ve been seeing in very young dogs.
What Should You Do?
Don’t order a tin-foil hat for your dog just yet. On the other hand, don’t allow your newly-adopted rescue dog or new puppy to be microchipped. If your dog has already been chipped, just be aware that the chip’s presence may be having an adverse effect on your dog’s behavior. Don’t ask your vet to have the chip removed unless there is a lump at the injection site (which may indicate a cancerous growth), or unless your dog will be put under anesthesia for another reason. There are also holistic companies that sell products that may shield your pet from environmental EMFs.
The bottom line is that microchips can have a deeply negative impact on learning and behavior in dogs. They can either intensify a fearful or aggressive behavioral tendency, or actually cause certain behavior problems to develop—particularly unnaturally fearful and aggressive behaviors as well as exaggerated sensitivities to normal stimuli, anxiety, and hyperactivity. So whenever I’m doing an intake evaluation with a potential client, and I hear about a dog’s unusual behavior, one where there’s no history of abuse or of a deeply traumatic event, I’ll ask the client if their dog has been microchipped.
Invariably the answer is yes.
Lee Charles Kelley
“Life Is an Adventure—Where Will Your Dog Take You?”
