1,720,986 research outputs found
Dogs' and owners' attention in urban areas.
No full textPursuing a study about perception of dogs' and handlers’ behavior in urban areas we assessed dogs and owners reciprocal attention and unwanted behaviors of dogs in different contexts.
The very low reciprocal attention observed would allow control of the partner, but not complex social communication between dogs and owners. The small number of events recorded does not allow drawing conclusions on the relationship between reciprocal attention and the expression of unwanted behavior
The quality of life of pet dogs owned by elderlies depends on the living context, not on the owner’s age.
No full textSocial and physical changes associated with human ageing may influence the characteristics of the relationship between dogs and their owners and ultimately pets' quality of life. In view of the need of data on this aspect, this study examined the effects of owners' age on the quality of life of dogs. We compared parameters of dogs‟ quality of life (owners' care and attachment to them and pets' physical condition) between elderly and adult owners living in rural/suburban areas of two cities in Northern Italy. Within this context, the only finding was the lower degree of health care provided to dogs by their elderly owners, suggesting a lack of specific information about dog health care, rather than a general effect of the owners‟ age on the relationship with their pet. Dogs' quality of life parameters were also compared between elderly people living in rural/suburban areas and another sample of elderly people living in city centers. The latter were more attached to their dogs and provided them with a higher level of care. In conclusion, this study found very limited concerns about the adoption of dogs late in their owners' lives. However, in view of the importance of the living context of the elderly on their pets' quality of life, this aspect warrants further investigation
Successful treatment of abnormal feeding behavior in a cat
No full textAn 8-month-old male cat was presented with a history of abnormal feeding behavior. Physical
examination revealed a dull hair coat and slightly thin body condition. A detailed history and a
behavioral examination revealed context-specific excessive appetite, pica, food-related aggressiveness,
and excessive solicitation of interspecific interactions. Results of routine hematological and urine laboratory
tests were normal, except for the presence of hyperglycemia. The presumptive diagnosis was of
psychogenic abnormal feeding behavior. The treatment was aimed at reducing exposure to stressors
and modifying the cat’s behavior through desensitization to food and counterconditioning to feeding.
The diagnosis of a psychogenic problem was supported by the progression and the successful outcome
of the proposed treatment. Given the lack of an exhaustive description of psychogenic abnormal feeding
behavior in the scientific literature, the present case provides the first characterization of its clinical
aspects and demonstrates the efficacy of treatment
Precedence of global or local elements in visual perception of dogs.
No full textIn processing a visual scene, humans encode the global aspects before proceeding to a more fine-grained analysis of visual inputs. In a previous study, we showed that dogs give priority to the global level in processing hierarchical visual stimuli. Notwithstanding, the dogs were also able to rely solely on differences at the local level to discriminate between stimuli. Following these results, we set out to investigate how the use of a global discrimination criterion affects the performance of dogs in a hierarchical stimuli discrimination task.
Discriminating a known hierarchical stimulus on the exclusive base of a global or a local criterion does not result in different learning speed. Our results do not support the 'novel global discrimination task' as a viable procedure for the assessment of global and local processing by family dogs
Reciprocal attention of dogs and owners in urban contexts.
No full textLaboratory-based studies have shown that paying attention to humans is an important determinant of dogs' behavior. However, there are no data on how gaze is deployed between dogs and owners in non-laboratory conditions. This study aimed at characterizing dogs’ and owners’ attention to each other in two urban contexts, characterized by a different type and density of dynamic stimuli. Short videos of 176 dog-owner couples walking in city streets and squares (CC) or green areas (GA) of the center of Padova (Italy) were recorded. Continuous sampling was used for recording when dogs and owners were visually oriented towards their respective partners. These data allowed calculation of the average length of continuous gazes, number of gazes per minute, and the percentage of time in which dogs and owners were oriented towards their partners; also computed were the frequency and duration of mutual gazes. Eighty-three dogs and 32 owners never looked at their reciprocal partners for the entire duration of the video. On average, dogs were oriented to owners for 0.6% of the time and looked at them 0.5 times per minute, in bouts of 0.5 seconds. All parameters of dogs' attention were higher for off-leash dogs in GA than for on-leash dogs in both GA and CC. While such limited attention to owners may reflect the requirements of on-going action, it also suggests that most dogs do not need to look at their owners during walks, possibly because they are not confronted with situations of uncertainty. Owners were oriented to their dogs for 5.3% of the time and looked at them 1.7 times per minute, in bouts of 1.4 seconds. Owners’ attention was lower in CC than in GA, which may reflect differences between contexts in the number of distracting stimuli or in owners’ motivations for looking at their dogs while walking in these different contexts
Female dogs outperform males in a spatial reversal learning task.
No full textSex-dependent differences in spatial cognition have been demonstrated in humans and other animals, but received little attention in the dog. Our aim was to assess the effect of sex on dogs’ learning, memory and reversal learning in a T-maze navigation task. The results support a sex-related difference in dogs’ cognitive abilities involved in spatial navigation and, to the best of our knowledge, represent the first evidence of this kind in this species. Higher flexibility in navigation strategies by females may account for our findings, as suggested by similar studies in rats
Role of social relevance in heretospecific social cognition of dogs.
No full textSocial cognition in animals refers to complex abilities that range from inter-individual communication and learning to the ability of “inferring the presence of mental states in others by observing their appearance and behaviour under various circumstances”. Over the last decade, a number of studies in this field explored the presence and the characteristics of social abilities of dogs in their interactions with humans. These researches gave evidences that dogs are capable of very sophisticated heterospecific skills such as modifying their behaviour with regard to the attentional state of humans, using human-given postural cues to identify a target, learning and responding to human words and learning by observing humans. Even imitation of human demonstrators is hypothesised in this species. While it seems very likely that domestication has played an important role in canine heterospecific social cognition, less known is the contribution to the development of these skills given by other crucial determinants, like ontogenesis, learning, lifelong experience and emotional component underlying this complex heterospecific relationship. The aim of this paper is to focus attention just about the last aspect
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