Is It Riskier to Be a Dog Athlete or a Human Athlete?

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It's good to be athletic, but, in a weird paradox, it seems actually pretty bad to be an athlete—whose body is more mangled than that of an ex-athlete?—a truism that, I was surprised to find out, extends beyond people.

Julie Hecht has a great arti​cle over at Scientific American about dog athletes and how often they end up injured. Although all but the mellowest of pooches seem to enjoy a good wrestle with each other every now and again, it's not like these athlete dogs are playing contact sports. While new dog sports like dock jumping and flyball are catching on, the most popular dog sport is the agility contest: running an obstacle course with only the vocal commands of their trainer to guide them. (The sport was just added to the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show last year; a seven-year-old border collie named Kelso won.)

While they obviously aren't injury free, I was surprised to find that dog athletes that are doing the agility course are generally healthier than their human counterparts.

Hecht cited two studies that appeared in ​Veterinary and Comparative Orthopaedics and Traumatology​ and Journal​ of the American Veterinary Medical Association which surveyed dog trainers and found that slightly less than one third of dog athletes develop some sort of agility injury.

The most dangerous parts of the dog-agility course are the A-frame (pictured above), where dogs have to run over a small pointy hill, and jumping over bars. The most common issues were sprains and strains, followed by injuries to their furry little shoulders, backs, necks, and phalanges. Slightly over the half of the injuries are considered mild, and don't take more than a month to come back from.

Being brainy doesn't appear to be a great help when handling the agility course obstacles, as border collies were the likeliest breed to be injured in competition, something the study attributes to how fast they are. Commenting on the​ research, the veterinarian Dr. Nancy Kay wrote in a blog post that, "I suspect this susceptibility to injury has more to do with the breed's insanely intense work ethic than it does any inherent musculoskeletal weakness."

Compared to, say, the NFL, this rate of injury is really low. Almost t​wo-thirds of NFL players get injured every year, to say nothing of the increasingly well-known long-term problems. PBS's "League of Denial" has been exami​ning the effect of American football on the brain since 2012, finding things like "documents filed in federal court showed the NFL expects ne​arly a third of all retired players to develop some form of long-term cognitive problem—such as Alzheimer's disease or dementia—in their lifetime as a result of head injuries suffered on the field."

Even though football players have more agency than dogs—albeit sometimes only in the form of very loaded choices like, "play football or don't go to college"—we, as consumers, also have choices, and I feel pretty uneasy when I consider whether watching football makes me complicit in this. It's worth also considering that football sends around 215,000 kids younger than 14 to the emergency room every year.​

Hecht, a dog researcher, doesn't have any ethical qualms about dog agility tests even if the pups occasionally hurt themselves. She seems to think they're overall good for dogs, who like challenging stuff like that.

Basketball is not supposed to be a "contact sport" and down at the high school level, only about 22 percent of male basketball players reported a "time loss injury." Basketball is the sport that contributes the second-highest percentage of athletic concussions, after football, though, so while it has fewer injuries on the amateur level than dog agility tests, some of the injuries can be really severe.

Soccer players tend to get injured ​at a comparable rate to basketball players, although one wonders how often this is just flopping taken to its ultimate extreme.

The human sport most likely to maim you though, is the one that's the most like the agility test: running.

Stephen Messier, the director of the J. B. Snow Biomechanics Laboratory at Wake Forest University, told the New York​ Times that, "The data suggests up to 79 percent of all runners are injured every year," and "what's more, those figures have been consistent since the 1970s."

Obviously there are ways to train yourself to run better, and coaches and athletes can all learn how to condition and watch for injuries better. There are also, I am now no longer surprised to find, strategies and methods for dogs to warm u​p and cool down and prevent injury.

If you want to compare the ethical implications of one spectator sport to another, there are so many questions beyond just percentage of participants injured to consider. That said, if you were just going to compare sports based on injury percentages, only basketball and soccer boast healthier players than dog sports. Something to ponder when deciding between the Puppy Bowl and the Super Bowl this year, I guess.