Dogs that enter animal shelters experience a variety of well-documented environmental stressors that may lead to chronic stress. Stress response can become maladaptive when shelter dogs are unable to effectively cope with their environments. Often pharmaceutical intervention is necessary to prevent further behavioral decline. However, access to pharmaceuticals is dependent on shelter resources with many lacking veterinary behaviorists on staff. Furthermore, a reliable assessment that would accurately communicate shelter dogs’ needs to clinicians does not exist. In response, a novel behavior assessment was developed based on extant literature and expertise of a board-certified veterinarian behaviorist and doctorate in ethology, designed to provide enrichment while remaining feasible for shelter staff to implement. During the preliminary pilot, the tool went through several iterations based on evaluation of reliability and clinical relevance. June-October 2022, 91 single-housed shelter dogs, ≥ 12 weeks of age were assessed either indoors (n = 43) or outdoors (n = 48). Dogs were assessed in real-time by two raters for inter-rater reliability and video recorded for intra-rater reliability. Inter- and intra-rater percent agreement was moderate to near perfect. To establish validity criterion, a board-certified veterinarian behaviorist blinded to coping score diagnosed participating dogs as either adaptive coping (AC), maladaptive coping anxious-avoidant (MC-AA) or excessive-aroused (MC-EA) using assessment video. There was no evidence of a difference in coping score between assessment areas; therefore, indoor and outdoor assessments were pooled for validity analysis. At statistical significance, the tool was able to differentiate MC-AA dogs from AC and MC-EA but was unable to differentiate MC-EA from AC, although MC-EA dogs had higher marginal mean total score than AC dogs. As expected, the marginal mean for MC-AA dogs was negative and MC-EA positive, between which fell the marginal mean for AC dogs. Based on reliability and validity, the tool was further refined for use in future studies including, establishment of a diagnostic scale for interpreting coping score, and evaluation of tool’s ability to track changes in coping behavior over time and in response to pharmaceutical interventions.
Read
