Self-reports of Dutch dog owners on received professional advice, their opinions on castration and behavioural reasons for castrating male dogs

Pascalle E M Roulaux, Ineke R van Herwijnen and Bonne Beerda

PLOS ONE, 2020, vol. 15, issue 6, 1-14

Abstract: Male dogs are often castrated based on the thought that it facilitates well-behavedness. However, the causal evidence for this from prospective studies lacks and the existing associative studies present mixed results depending on the studied behaviours. We aimed to gain insight into possible factors driving an owner’s decision to castrate their male dog, through a quantitative survey based on a convenience sample. We determined the advice owners received from three types of dog professionals (veterinarian practitioners, behavioural trainers, behavioural therapists) and the owners’ assessments of castration’s behavioural effects. Data on 491 Dutch owners of castrated and intact male dogs were analysed with Chi-square tests. Results indicate that owners of both castrated and intact dogs received castration advice most often from veterinarian practitioners, with pro-castration at higher frequencies for owners of castrated dogs (Chi-square, P

Date: 2020
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0234917 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 34917&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:pone00:0234917

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0234917

Access Statistics for this article

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