Development of a new welfare assessment protocol for practical application in long‐term dog shelters

Abstract

In many European shelters, dogs may spend many years confined. A poor environment and inappropriate management may lead to a low quality of life. The absence of harmonised European regulatory frameworks defining the minimum requirements for shelter facilities makes the definition of welfare standards for kennelled dogs challenging. Here, a new protocol was developed and tested to help identify the main welfare issues for shelter dogs. Twenty-six indicators were identified including management, resource and animal based measures. Accuracy and interobserver reliability were checked between four assessors. The protocol was applied in 29 shelters (n=1308 dogs) in six European countries. Overall prevalence of poor health conditions was below 10%. Test-retest reliability and validity of the protocol were investigated with encouraging results. A logistic regression was carried out to assess the potential of the protocol as a tool to identify welfare hazards in shelter environments. Inappropriate space allowance, for example, was found to be a risk factor potentially affecting the animal's cleanliness, skin condition and body condition. The protocol was designed to be concise and easy to implement. Systematic data collection could help identify welfare problems that are likely to arise in certain shelter designs and thus determine improvement in animal care standards.

Evaluating FIDO: Developing and pilot testing the Field Instantaneous Dog Observation tool

“…However, FIDO may provide an important screening tool that permits users to determine if and where more detailed dog welfare assessments are needed. While behavioral and welfare assessment tools have been developed with a focus on dogs living with families and housed in animal shelters (Kiddie and Collins, 2014;Belshaw et al 2015;Barnard et al 2016) and tools for the evaluation of personality traits in working dogs have also been developed (Sinn et al 2010) this tool is unique. First, it was developed for those who need to quickly and accurately evaluate the physical and behavioral status of breeding dogs in the field without the use of video-recordings or other methodologies and resources that normally permit detailed analyses of long term behavioral patterns (Beerda et al 1999;Hepper and Wells 2000).…”

Assessing the welfare of kennelled dogs—A review of animal-based measures

“…The discussion of each measure has mentioned whether or not it is included within the welfare protocols created by Barnard et al (2014) and Kiddie and Collins (2014), however the true validity, practicality, and usefulness or these protocols is still being determined. For the Shelter Quality Protocol, the authors tested the inter-observer reliability, test-retest reliability, and feasibility of the protocol at 29 shelters across six countries and found promising results (Barnard et al, 2015). They also aimed to assess validity, however this was defined as the similarity between observations taken through the fence and observations while handling the dogs up-close.…”

Development of a fixed list of descriptors for the qualitative behavioural assessment of shelter dogs

“…It will be preferable therefore to apply QBA in conjunction with other physiological, behavioural or health indicators for animal welfare [49]. The QBA scoring tool developed and tested in the present study can be integrated into existing welfare assessment protocols for shelter dogs, and strengthen the power of those protocols to assess and evaluate the animals’ experience [7].…”

“…The present study aimed to build on these outcomes by developing a fixed-term QBA descriptor list that might be integrated with existing on-shelter welfare assessment protocols. Adding QBA could provide information complementary to that provided by quantitative measures, extending a protocol’s power to identify and detect emotional shifts in dogs across the positive and negative emotional spectrum [7,27,28]. Recognising that QBA relies on context-specific qualitative judgment of behavioural expression [19], descriptors included in a pre-fixed list should be representative of the large range of behavioural expressions that dogs could potentially show in variable kennel conditions.…”