Owner-companion dog interactions: Relationships between demographic variables, potentially problematic behaviours, training engagement and shared activities

By P. Bennett, Vanessa Rohlf. 2007

316 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Many companion dogs occupy a privileged position in our society, living closely with human caretakers who go to great lengths to provide for their needs and desires. Others fare less well, being abandoned or killed, many because they are believed to exhibit behaviour problems. The aim in this study was to investigate the frequency of potentially problematic behaviours experienced by a convenience sample of companion dog owners and to establish if the presence of these behaviours was associated with demographic variables, involvement in dog training activities and participation in other dog-human interactions. Potentially problematic behaviours were reported to occur by the 413 adult participants only infrequently, but fell into five factors; disobedience, unfriendliness/aggression, nervousness, anxiety/destructiveness and excitability. Each of these factors was associated with a number of owner and dog characteristics. Engagement in training activities was predictive of lower scores being obtained for many of the behaviours, as well as increased involvement in shared activities. Some of the behaviours, particularly the perceived friendliness of the dog, were also predictive of involvement in shared activities. This confirms that strategies designed to increase participation in dog training activities and promote canine sociability may have significant benefits for both companion dog owners and their dogs.

Subfields: Genetics, Speech and Hearing, Virology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/939e0004d7bd5c5f143267450f5162b05872b975

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Genetics

1. R. Casey
2. Lichi Sun
3. I. Meyer
4. C. Clark
5. N. Rooney
6. B. Forkman
7. Y. Hsu
8. P. Bennett

In Speech and Hearing

1. Lichi Sun
2. I. Meyer
3. B. Forkman
4. Y. Hsu
5. N. Rooney
6. C. Clark
7. R. Casey
8. Tammie King

In Virology

1. Lichi Sun
2. Y. Hsu
3. I. Meyer
4. B. Forkman
5. R. Casey
6. P. Bennett

Citations in the corpus

• The Relationship between Empathy, Perception of Pain and Attitudes toward Pets among Norwegian Dog Owners (2010, background): “Research has shown that receiving obedience training and obedience counseling has a great impact on behavior and a positive effect on the human–dog relationship (Clark and Boyer 1993; Bennett and Rohlf 2007).”
• Minimizing fear and anxiety in working dogs: A review (2016, background): “Similarly pet dog owners who shared more activities with their dogs were less likely to categorize them as “nervous” (Bennett and Rohlf, 2007).”
• Describing the ideal Australian companion dog. (2009, background): “This is unfortunate but common in these types of studies when similar recruitment methods have been used (Bennett and Rohlf, 2007; Ley et al., 2008).”
• The Emotional Lives of Companion Animals: Attachment and Subjective Claims by Owners of Cats and Dogs (2016, background): “Additionally, owners are the primary source of information regarding companion-animal behavior problems (Bennett and Rohlf 2007; Blackwell et al. 2008; Arhant et al. 2010), and are able to identify overt behavioral indicators of stress (e.g., trembling, crying, or excessive barking), indicative of…”
• Trainability and boldness traits differ between dog breed clusters based on conventional breed categories and genetic relatedness (2011, unknown): “B. Turcsán et al. / Applied Animal Behaviour Science 132 (2011) 61–70 63 tivity in these assessments, such as the differing experience the owners have with dogs in general (Bennett and Rohlf, 2007, but see Tami and Gallagher, 2009).”
• Dog and owner characteristics affecting the dog–owner relationship (2014, background): “Spending a lot of active time with the dog could increase the PC of owning a dog, but it could also result in fewer behavioral problems (Kobelt et al., 2003; Bennett and Rohlf, 2007) and thereby lower the PC of owning a dog.”
• Factors associated with aggressive responses in pet dogs (2010, methodology): “Household size has been found to have important relationships with dog aggression in previous studies (Bennett and Rohlf, 2007).”