Dogs'stress In A Kennel

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Bowman et al. (2015)/(2017) showed that music can decrease stress of dogs in a kennel. We wanted to know if this can be repeated in a situation that maybe less stressful than the average day in a kennel. First, we had to confirm our belief that this situation is in fact less stressful for dogs. This consisted of comparing the average of five dogs’ stress levels in a kennel to five different dogs’ stress levels of being left at home for 5+ hours.
2.1 Materials and Methods
2.1.1 Subjects
The subjects for this study were 20 adult dogs, 10 male and ten female. We recruited the subjects through an ad posted online. The requirements that we listed in the ad for participants was that their dog gets left at home alone throughout the day for 5 hours …show more content…

The dogs ranged from 2 years old to 8 years old and all resided in the greater New York City area. The group consisted of 3 German Shepherds,
2 Boxers, 4 Golden Retrievers, 1 Beagle, 2 Bulldogs, 1 Great Dane, and 2 Chihuahuas.
2.1.2 Materials
The materials used in this study consisted of a dog friendly heart rate monitor, video cameras to code for stress related behaviors, and a preset classical music playlist.
2.1.3 Study Design
The first stage of the study was to get a baseline for each of the dogs as a control. We set up cameras in the house to be able to watch the dogs in all areas of the house that they were allowed to roam while alone. We taught owners how to correctly put the heart rate monitor device on their dogs and instructed them to put it on at least an hour before the dog was left alone so that we could see changes being made from not alone to alone. Additionally, we had them turn the cameras on at the same time. We gathered data for 5 days under the control of no additional auditory stimuli. The following week we implemented the auditory stimulus of classical music. Most participants had a speaker system available in their house already for us …show more content…

Again we did this for 5 days.
2.1.4 Data Collection
HRV data was collected through a dog friendly heart rate monitor that wirelessly transmitted data to our computers. The data was processed using an HRV data processing software. Due to the amount of data this provides we decided to focus on the data given for the hour before left alone, the first three hours when left alone, and the hour after the person arrives home. The behavior data was collected using the video cameras previously mentioned. We coded for stress related behaviors for the whole time the cameras were on. Stress related behaviors consisted of time spent laying down vs standing, barking, and panting. The important data for these behaviors was the duration spent doing each.
2.2 Results
The HRV data collected for the control period can be seen in Fig. 1. The far left column represents the time period for the data. A represents the time before being left alone, B represents the time period of being alone, and C represents the time of the owners return. For ease of data processing we split the 20 dogs into 4 random groups of 5. Between the 4 groups there was no statistically significant results that would show one group to be more or less stressed as a

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