Comparison in Twitching Frequencies between Puppies and Senior Dogs in Sleep

Abstract

Most dogs tend twitch frequently while sleeping and exhibit rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. However, the twitching frequencies seems to vary between dogs of different ages. The purpose of this experiment would be to test if puppies twitch more frequently than senior dogs in their sleep. The experiment was carried out by observing live cams on explore.org/ (Links to an external site.) for videos of sleeping dogs in "Senior Dog Gathering Room" and "Great Dane Puppy Nursery" and the number of twitches observed per minute per individual dog were collected. To compare the data for puppies vs senior dogs a one-way ANOVA analysis was performed by GraphPad Prism. The one-way ANOVA shows p-value <0.0001 and upon further analysis through Tukey’s test, the mean twitches per minute between the groups of dogs were found to be statistically significant hence supporting the hypothesis that puppies tend to have relatively more twitching frequencies in comparison to senior dogs.