Canine Socialisation: A Narrative Systematic Review

Welsh hospital admissions due to dog bites and strikes (2014-2022)

OBJECTIVE

To describe the incidence and victim demographics of Welsh hospital admissions due to dog bites and strikes from 2014 to 2022.

STUDY DESIGN

Descriptive analysis of Welsh hospital admissions data.

METHODS

Residents of Wales admitted to a Welsh National Health Service (NHS) hospital for a dog bite or strike, were identified using ICD-10 codes. The annual incidence of dog bite and strike admissions between 2014 and 2022 was calculated and stratified by child-adult status, sex, and Local Health Boards. Trends over time were analysed using the Chi-square test for trends.

RESULTS

Hospital admissions due to dog bites and strikes have significantly increased from 16.3 per 100,000 to 23.7 per 100,000 population in 2022. This was driven by an increase in non-geriatric adults and an increase in three Local Health Boards. The Swansea Bay area has the highest incidence in Wales (56.1 admissions per 100,000).

CONCLUSIONS

Wales has a higher incidence of dog bites and strikes than England or the Republic of Ireland. Work in the communities where incidence is exceptionally high is needed to understand the reasons behind having the highest incidence of dog bites in the British Isles and to establish the most efficacious methods for bite prevention.

Ethical Concerns about Fashionable Dog Breeding

The historical relationship between humans and dogs has involved selective breeding for various purposes, such as hunting, guarding, and service roles. However, over time, there has been a shift in preferences from functionality to aesthetics, which has influenced the diverse sizes, shapes, and coats of dog breeds. This review looks at fashionable dog breeding and questions the ethics of prioritising looks over health and behaviour. It aims to alert potential owners, breeders, and regulators to the importance of considering a dog's overall well-being, not just its appearance, which has resulted in fad breeding, leading to genetic disorders, health issues, and a loss of biodiversity. Ethical concerns arise from breeding brachycephalic breeds with respiratory conditions, inbreeding causing inherited disorders, and overbreeding popular breeds while shelter dogs remain unadopted. Additionally, the impact of cosmetic surgeries on popular dog breeds, as well as the neglect of behavioural traits in favour of physical characteristics and strict breeding practices are also considered. The current breeding model can have a negative impact on the emotional and cognitive well-being of dogs, resulting in issues such as aggression, anxiety, and other behavioural problems that can significantly reduce their overall quality of life. Unregulated breeding practices and the demand for rare breeds can lead to illegal breeding, compromising animal welfare. Prospective owners, veterinarians, kennel clubs, and legislators all need to play a responsible role in protecting animals.

The agency domain and behavioral interactions: assessing positive animal welfare using the Five Domains Model

Animal welfare denotes how an animal experiences their life. It represents the overall mental experiences of an animal and is a subjective concept that cannot be directly measured. Instead, welfare indicators are used to cautiously infer mental experiences from resource provisions, management factors, and animal-based measures. The Five Domains Model is a holistic and structured framework for collating these indicators and assessing animal welfare. Contemporary approaches to animal welfare management consider how animals can be given opportunities to have positive experiences. However, the uncertainty surrounding positive mental experiences that can be inferred has resulted in risk-averse animal welfare scientists returning to the relative safety of positivism. This has meant that aspects of positive welfare are often referred to as animal 'wants'. Agency is a concept that straddles the positivist-affective divide and represents a way forward for discussions about positive welfare. Agency is the capacity of individual animals to engage in voluntary, self-generated, and goal-directed behavior that they are motivated to perform. Discrete positive emotions are cautiously inferred from these agentic experiences based on available knowledge about the animal's motivation for engaging in the behavior. Competence-building agency can be used to evaluate the potential for positive welfare and is represented by the Behavioral Interactions domain of the Five Domains Model. In 2020, The Model was updated to, amongst other things, include consideration of human-animal interactions. The most important aspect of this update was the renaming of Domain 4 from "Behavior" to "Behavioral Interactions" and the additional detail added to allow this domain's purpose to be clearly understood to represent an animal's opportunities to exercise agency. We illustrate how the Behavioral Interactions domain of The Model can be used to assess animals' competence-building agency and positive welfare. In this article, we use the examples of sugar gliders housed in captivity and greyhounds that race to illustrate how the agentic qualities of choice, control, and challenge can be used to assess opportunities for animals to exercise agency and experience positive affective engagement.

Puppies Raised during the COVID-19 Lockdown Showed Fearful and Aggressive Behaviors in Adulthood: An Italian Survey

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Prime Minister’s decree issued by the Italian government on 9 March 2020, known as “#Iorestoacasa” (I stay at home), required everyone to stay indoors, with a few exceptions, from 11 March to 3 May 2020. This decree had a substantial impact on the mental health of both people and dogs. We carried out a national survey to compare the personalities of adult dogs who were puppies in lockdown (from March to May 2020) with those of adult dogs born after that time (from June 2020 to February 2021). Our results highlighted a significant increase in personality traits related to fear and aggression in dogs who experienced lockdown restrictions during their socialization period, further confirming that the COVID-19 pandemic strongly impacted the behavioral development of dogs. Therefore, it may be advantageous for these dogs to be closely monitored by veterinary behaviorists and receive specialized behavioral rehabilitation therapy to lower the risk of episodes of aggression and fearfulness as well as to increase the wellbeing of dogs raised under social restrictions.

Correction: McEvoy et al. Canine Socialisation: A Narrative Systematic Review. Animals 2022, 12, 2895

The authors wish to make the following corrections to this paper [...].