Assessing quality of life in companion and kennelled dogs: a critical review

Challenges in Sheltering Seized Animals from Hoarders from a One Welfare Perspective

Animal hoarding is a complex issue that, when discovered, frequently necessitates opening shelter doors to many animals. This is due to hoarders' inability to provide even the most basic welfare standards for their animals, resulting in poor welfare conditions that frequently border on mistreatment. These people are frequently unaware of their failure to care for their animals, as well as of the harm that they cause to people around them and the environment. They usually do not care for themselves either. The majority of hoarders have difficult histories, and they all need help getting back on track. When the agencies discover the status quo, the animals are usually seized and taken to shelters, where they face a variety of welfare consequences, beginning with confinement in an unknown environment that is associated with additional risks (e.g., infectious diseases, behavioral deterioration, and distress). Furthermore, the targeted shelters are frequently overcrowded and cannot adequately accommodate the large numbers of animals found in hoarders' environments. The One Welfare approach, which is increasingly being used alongside One Health to work at the intersection of human and animal health and welfare, could be adopted to benefit animals while also addressing the poor states of humans. This concept's depiction of the interconnections between animal welfare, human well-being, and the environment can fit with all the components of the animal-hoarding phenomenon, including the peculiarities of the hoarding environment, as well as those of shelters where animals are often moved. The purpose of this paper is to offer insights into how the One Welfare concept may be critical in tackling all of the interests concerned in these cases and offering solutions.

Cats' and dogs' welfare: text mining and topics modeling analysis of the scientific literature

Animal welfare is a field with increasing significance and has been raising huge concerns of the public and the political stage. Cats and dogs possess an important role in human life, but their welfare is not always secured from a legal aspect. This review aimed to describe the evolution and geographical distribution of "cats and dogs" and "puppies and kittens" welfare literature over the last 40 years, distinguish the main research topics studied and highlight gaps in knowledge. A search using Scopus® was performed with different search strings and predetermined filters as time range, language, and subject area. A total of 2,725 scientific literature records were retrieved but only the ones that referred to cats and dogs' welfare aspects were retained. The final 1,775 records were processed through descriptive statistics, and text mining and topic analysis procedures were performed on their titles and abstracts. The results showed that the number of studies has been increasing, especially in Europe and North America. "Shelter" was the most frequent word, followed by "behavior," "owner" and "adopt." The nine topics that emerged from the analysis were breeding, stress and housing conditions, welfare and pain assessment, public health, shelter management and euthanasia, behavioral problems, health issues and management, human-animal interaction, and owners' and veterinarians' perceptions. While stress and housing conditions, public health, and owners' and veterinarians' perceptions were the most studied topics, human-animal interaction was the least studied. This review confirmed the increasing research and interest in cats' and dogs' welfare and showed gaps in knowledge where further studies are needed.

Anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism as influences in the quality of life of companion animals

Since animal minds are private, so their perception of their own quality of life (QoL) must be also. Anthropocentrism, the interpretation of reality exclusively in terms of human values and experience, has to be guarded against in any assessment of animal welfare; for domestic pets, misapprehensions about their olfactory and cognitive abilities appear to present the greatest challenge to their welfare. Anthropomorphism, the attribution of human qualities to animals, presents a particular problem when considering companion animals, since most bonds between owners and their pets appear to be based upon a perception of the pet as almost human. Many owners report that their dogs, cats and horses are capable of feeling complex emotions, such as pride and guilt, that require a level of self-awareness that has been difficult to demonstrate even in chimpanzees. Such beliefs appear to contribute to the development of behavioural disorders in pets; for example, clinical experience suggests that the application of punishment by owners who attribute ‘guilt’ to their animals may unwittingly lead to compromised welfare. Anthropomorphic owners are also likely to be poor proxies for reporting their pets' QoL.