Qualitative Behavioural Assessment of shelter dogs pre and post walk using two different conducting methods

Dogs are considered by our society pet animals. They are treated as members of human families, all along taking into account the “animal nature” of the dog. It is important to have our dog friends always with us, but it is evenly important for humans to control them. Leash is a useful control instrument used by dog owners; since its first uses, it has been considered as an extension of the human arm. Leashes usually have a section that is thought to be held by human hands, and one that needs to be secured on the dog’s body. There are two main devices that have the function to connect the dog and the leash: harness and collar. It’s a concern of dog experts, lovers, students, and vets to understand if dogs enjoy and feel better while wearing either a harness or a collar, during walks with their owners. An experiment was planned and carried out to scientifically answer this issue. The focus of this thesis is on a subjective tool called QBA, used during the forementioned experiment, aimed to analyse the quality of the behaviour of dogs before and after the use of both collar and harness, during a walking period of about half an hour. The experiment took into consideration, besides QBA, some objective parameters to measure and detect the physical and psychological state of dogs and draw conclusions. Dogs involved in the trials were 14 shelter dogs, with different ages, sizes, and temperaments, but all of them were needed to be tame and friendly, and this was ascertained by the experimental team and staff of the shelter. Each dog was tested during two different days and twice a day, using alternatively collar and harness, and then switching the order of the tools on the day after. Each trial was composed of a pre-walk and a post-walk phase, and each of the phases started with the filling of a QBA sheet by a non-trained operator, which followed an observation period of a couple of minutes. A statistical analysis was performed on QBA data, with the purpose of understanding whether it’s more adivisable, according to the QBA analysis results, to use either the harness or the collar to walk dogs.