Development of a fixed list of terms for the Qualitative Behavioural Assessment of shelter dogs

Laura Arena, Franҫoise Wemelsfelder, Stefano Messori, Nicola Ferri and Shanis Barnard

PLOS ONE, 2019, vol. 14, issue 10, 1-17

Abstract: The shelter environment may have a severe impact on the dogs’ quality of life, and there is thus a need to develop valid tools to assess their welfare. These tools should be sensitive not only to the animals’ physical health but also to their mental health, including the assessment of positive and negative emotions. Qualitative Behaviour Assessment (QBA) is a ‘whole animal’ measure that captures the expressive quality of an animal’s demeanour, using descriptive terms such as ‘relaxed’, ‘anxious’, and ‘playful’. In this study, for the first time, we developed and tested a fixed-list of qualitative QBA terms for application to kennelled dogs. A list of 20 QBA terms was developed based on literature search and an expert opinion survey. Inter-observer reliability was investigated by asking 11 observers to use these terms to score 13 video clips of kennelled dogs. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was used to extract four main dimensions explaining 70.9% of the total variation between clips. PC1 characterised curious/playful/excitable/sociable demeanour, PC2 ranged from comfortable/relaxed to anxious/nervous/stressed expression, PC3 described fearful demeanour, and PC4 characterised bored/depressed demeanour. Observers’ agreement on the ranking of video clips on these four expressive dimensions was good (Kendall’s W: 0.60–0.80). ANOVA showed a significant effect of observer on mean clip score on all PCs (p

Date: 2019
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0212652 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 12652&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0212652

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0212652

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().