Background
Aims
Dogs are one of the most popular companion animals in the world but unfortunately, there has been an increase in the number of dogs being rehomed. The rehoming process is stressful to dogs and therefore it is vital to reduce the stress for dogs living at shelters, especially considering that dogs may be at these facilities for an extended period of time.
Environmental enrichment has been shown to reduce stress in shelter dogs and also improve their welfare and overall behaviour. However, most types of enrichment are time consuming for the shelters. A more time efficient type of enrichment would be sound enrichment. Indeed, sound is one promising method to improve the welfare of dogs since dogs do perform less vocalisation and more resting behaviours when exposed to sound enrichment.
The aim of this project was to investigate if sound enrichment can increase resting-related behaviours in shelter dogs, thereby improving their welfare.
To test this, shelter dogs were exposed to either nature sound or pink noise to investigate if there is any difference in the effects between a more unpredictable sound to a homogenous sound. The dogs were video recorded before, during, and after sound exposure, so that any behavioural changes resulting from adding or removing the sound enrichment could be investigated. The main hypothesis was that nature sound would have a more positive effect on shelter dogs’ behaviour than the pink noise. Further, a secondary hypothesis was that both groups of dogs would show less physical activity during sound enrichment compared to before any sound was introduced.
