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Principal Investigators
Rationale
Therapy dogs are rarely free to choose interactions within AAI sessions, raising welfare concerns as not all dogs may be equally inclined to participate in various settings. Additionally, the therapeutic value of distressed or unwilling dogs may be questionable. Understanding how to assess and respect therapy dog preferences will offer practical guidance for professionals to promote dog autonomy and enhance welfare, thereby ensuring the suitability of animals for specific types of AAI engagements.
Objective
The objectives are to understand how individual differences in dogs predict their interest in engaging with participants and, ultimately, create guidelines for professionals to screen dogs for their interest, rather than just tolerance, in order to ensure the welfare of therapy dogs is protected.
- Study 1: Researchers will experimentally assess therapy dogs’ preferences for different types of activities..They then aim to uncover behavioural predictors of engagement through psychometric assessments and performance in socio-cognitive tasks.
- Study 2: Researchers will disentangle the effect of therapy-specific dog training on the displayed preferences by replicating the experiment with pet dogs.
Hypothesis
- Study 1: Therapy dogs will exhibit distinct preferences for different activity levels and the degree of direct interaction with people within the AAI context, with certain personality characteristics predicting these preferences.
- Study 2: Certain characteristic will remain consistent predictors regardless of the dogs’ training background.
Design
Researchers will enroll 25 therapy (Study 1) and 25 pet dogs, matched in breed and age (Study 2). A within-subject design with repeated measures will be deployed. In each study, owners will complete two dog behaviour questionnaires related to their dogs’ predisposition towards reactivity to various stimuli, as well as their responsiveness for food or toys. Each dog will visit UBC’s Human Animal Interaction Lab twice, in which they will experience mock AAI sessions differing in their levels of (a) activity and (b) intensity of the interactions in an experimental choice set-up. Preference will be determined through time spent in the session, latency to re-enter, and withdrawal attempts. Dogs will also complete the Unsolvable Task and The Novel Object Task, which are socio-cognitive tasks aimed to explore social behaviours towards humans as well as persistence in problem-solving attempts. Sessions will be videotaped and analyzed using behavioural coding methods focusing on affiliative and stress behaviours. Univariate regression models will identify predictors of preference.
Expected Results
Study 1: Researchers expect to uncover behavioural predictors of engagement according to psychometric assessments and performance in socio-cognitive tasks.
In Study 2 Researchers will further validate their methodology by applying the identified predictors to a new sample comprised of pet dogs. This will allow the researchers to disentangle the effects of prior training of therapy dogs to validate the screening. They additionally hypothesize that some behavioural predictors of engagement will also be identifiable in the case of pet dogs, suggesting underlying personality effects of suitability separate from training.
