Having established we think differently about 🐓 compared to 🐕 or 🐅, a Q I explored during my PhD was whether we considered the welfare of one type of animal to vary across different contexts. How would you rate the welfare of a Guide dog? Pet dog? Police dog? Greyhound? Stray?
Even if you don’t ‘know’ a lot about each of these contexts, I bet you have a gut response to how you rate the quality of life for each of these places we find dogs. Consider both physical health and mental wellbeing. I have to duck into weekly RUOK meeting with @AWSciCent now 👋🏼
Over 2000 people told me how they would rate the welfare of dogs across different contexts and there was a lot of variation. This was the first time this had been demonstrated across one type of animal. Do the results match with how you would assess? #animalwelfare #dogs #science
One of the unexpected findings in this study was that the vast majority of people surveyed believed their own dog enjoyed the highest level of welfare compared to all other contexts. This better-than-average-effect seen in other areas of self-assessment e.g. driving & parenting
The other thing interesting thing was that dogs which arguably have the most behavioural, environmental, social and sexual freedom (wild dogs) were perceived to have far lower welfare than dogs living highly controlled lives in the service of humans (e.g. guide or police dogs) 🤔
I’m now supervising 5 graduate research (social and applied psychology) projects at @MonashUni to explore these ideas further in terms of the psychology underlying those attitudes and beliefs regarding dogs and also horses. Projects due to finish in Oct - excited to see results!
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