Compulsive Behaviours and Stereotypes? What's the Difference and Does It Matter?

Repetitive behaviour as a client problem, may take many forms, and comparisons are often made with similar conditions in people. However, the situation is far more complex than these analogies may suggest and this may partly explain the challenge traditionally associated with managing these cases. Originally, the term stereotypy was frequently used in the animal science and veterinary behaviour literature to describe repetitive, relatively invariate behaviour with no obvious function. However, the use of the term in this context is purely descriptive and should not be considered to be based on the consistent evidence of mechanistic homology which is more commonly associated with the human medical term “stereotypy”. A failure to appreciate this can lead to both unnecessary and inappropriate treatment recommendations.

More recently the terms obsessive compulsive disorder and compulsive disorder have entered the clinical veterinary behaviour literature, but these too are not without a similar problem. Although it has been noted that acral lick problems in dogs seems to share many similarities with human obsessive compulsive disorder, which makes it an interesting potential model of the human disorder, this cannot be said of all repetitive behaviour problems.

Unfortunately a tendency to make sweeping generalizations about repetitive behaviour in companion animals on the basis of relatively superficial behavioural similarities seems to be remarkably common. For example, in 2010, work from the team in Tufts (1) was widely reported in the popular media, noting that the CDH2 (Cadherin 2) gene on chromosome 7 of dogs tended to be different in Dobermans who flank or blanket sucked. On the basis of this and the knowledge that this gene is also found in people, there has been some quite excessive speculation about the importance of this gene and “canine compulsive disorder” (CCD) in general, as a potential key to increasing our understanding of OCD and a range of other disorders featuring repetitive behaviour in people such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD) – conditions which are very different both developmentally and mechanistically. The authors of the Doberman study also seem to move effortlessly between the terms OCD and CD, or sucking problems in Dobermans and CCD in general (the diagnostic criteria of which are not well known); However, this disorder in Doberman’s is not widely reported outside of North America and so it is likely that it is not representative of the wider range of repetitive behaviour problems arising in this species. The gene is also well known in people and if it were highly important, it seems likely that the link with OCD would have already been identified, it has however been implicated in certain forms of ASD. Generalisations should therefore be both made and interpreted with great caution. In short, these problems are complex.

Since the terms “stereotypy”, “compulsive disorder” and “obsessive compulsive disorder” as widely used in the animal and veterinary sciences, give rise to confusion about the level of understanding of the problem being presented, I prefer to use the term “stereotypic behaviour” until further evidence is available in any given case to indicate a more specific diagnosis. This latter term is less closely aligned with an obvious human problem with more prescribed features. The term “stereotypic” implies that the condition shares at least some features with stereotype, [...]