Effects of an Enhanced Human Interaction Program on shelter dogs’ behaviour analysed using a novel nonparametric test

The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of introduction and interruption of an Enhanced Human Interaction Program (EHIP) on shelter dogs’ behaviour and welfare and to apply a novel statistical method to analyse the behavioural data. Twenty-two dogs, which were never subjected to similar programs, were studied. The EHIP consisted of walking and petting the dogs for 15 min once a week. Dogs were divided into two groups: dogs participating in the program (EHIP, n = 9) and control dogs receiving no such program but exposed to human visual stimuli (n = 13). EHIP dogs started being walked on day 8 of the study and continued until day 42 when the walking schedule was stopped. Behavioural observations were performed by instantaneous scan sampling every 3 min for 3 h on days 1, 3, 8, 10, 15, 36, 38, 42, 57, 59 and 64. Hence three periods were identified: the first in which all the dogs were not walked, the second in which EHIP dogs were walked (subdivided into early interaction and late interaction phase), the third in which all the dogs were not walked. Data were analysed using the inferential multivariate nonparametric methodology called NPC (Nonparametric Combination) Test. EHIP increased the time the dogs were visible from the front of the pen and the time they were tail wagging (p < 0.05). These changes may make the animals more likely to be re-homed. No behavioural sign of stress was recorded when the program was discontinued. These findings lead to conclude that EHIPs may be useful enrichment programs for shelter dogs. Furthermore, the NPC Test proved to be a suitable and powerful statistical tool since it does not need a modelling for dependence among variables and it is not affected by the problem of loss of degrees of freedom when the number of variables is large compared to sample size as was the case in the present study.