You would know if your dog was in pain, right? Well, science might say otherwise. A recent study suggests that pet owners are missing key signs of distress being shown by their pets.
This research comes from a team at Utrecht University who found that dogs are frequently showing small signs of distress, most of which their owners are completely missing.
647 people were surveyed, 530 dog owners and 117 people who didn’t have a pet. Participants were given 17 doggy behaviours and asked to rate them based on how likely each one was to indicate pain.
Both pet owners and non-pet owners were better at recognising the obvious issues. If a dog was hopping and keeping its hind leg raised, 97% of dog owners and 92% of non-owners considered pain a likely problem.
However, results dropped drastically for subtle issues. These included reduced playing, changes in personality, hesitant paw lifting, scratching, lip and nose licking, restlessness and other less noticeable problems.
In these scenarios, the rate of pain assumption dropped drastically with roughly 53% of dog owners and 55% of non-dog owners recognising these signs as an issue.
“A dog’s pain experience may at first, or only, be reflected in subtle signs and missing these signs may prolong and/or worsen a dog’s suffering. In dogs and other animals, pain signs are often subtle,” the study authors explain.
Interestingly, the study noted that people who had personally experienced a painful event themselves were more likely to recognise pain in the subtle-pain scenario. 60% of these people classified pain as likely or very likely in the subtle-pain examples compared to 46% of people who didn’t have this trauma.
Rates of subtle-pain acknowledgment also increased for people who had previously experienced a painful accident with a previous pet.
While the study doesn’t suggest that dog owners should panic at every small behavioural trait, it does show that a dogs health or pain experience can be shown in a number of ways.
Analysing changes in your dog’s behaviour is a crucial way to get ahead of problems that they may be experiencing.
“We argue that education on dog behaviour may benefit from addressing how behavioural signs may also, or alternatively, be indicative of pain,” the study explains.
“Our finding that owners of dogs that experienced a painful event, scored a higher likeliness of certain possible pain signs, indicates that experience matters and this underpins how education on dog behaviour could possibly benefit animal welfare through addressing subtle pain signs in dogs.”
