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- All Subjects: Welfare
- Creators: Gunter, Lisa
Description
Each year, nearly three million dogs will enter one of over 13,000 animal shelters in the United States. The purpose of this dissertation is to better understand how breed identity and dog welfare in the shelter, in addition to post-adoption and fostering interventions out of the shelter, can contribute to the betterment of dog lives. In Chapter 2, I conducted the largest sampling of shelter dogs’ breed identities to-date to determine their breed heritage and compare shelter breed assignment by staff as determined by visual appearance to that of genetic testing. In Chapter 4, I examined the efficacy of a post-adoption intervention intended to reduce returns by encouraging physical activity between adopters and their dogs. In Chapter 6, I examined the effects of brief stays in a foster home on the urinary cortisol: creatinine ratios of dogs awaiting adoption compared to ratios collected before or after their stays; and in Chapter 7, I characterized the relationships between multiple physiological, health, and cognitive measures and the in-kennel behavior of shelter dogs.
Four suggestions from the findings of this dissertation that will likely better the lives of dogs living in animal shelters are: 1) Shelter dog breed heritage is complex and visually identifying multiple breeds in a mixed breed dog is difficult at best. Shelters should instead focus on communicating the morphology and behavior of the dogs in their care to best support adopters. 2) While encouraging walking did not influence owner behavior, adopters who reported higher obligation and self-efficacy in dog walking were more active with their dogs. Thus, post-adoption interventions that can effectively target owner perceptions of obligation and self-efficacy may be more successful in changing behavior. 3) Temporary fostering is an impactful intervention that reduces stress for dogs awaiting adoption; however addressing stressors present at shelters that are likely contributing to higher stress responding is also needed. 4) It is possible to predict the internal stress responding of shelter dogs by observing their overt, in-kennel behavior, and this study is a first step in assessing and improving the welfare of dogs living in animal shelters.
Four suggestions from the findings of this dissertation that will likely better the lives of dogs living in animal shelters are: 1) Shelter dog breed heritage is complex and visually identifying multiple breeds in a mixed breed dog is difficult at best. Shelters should instead focus on communicating the morphology and behavior of the dogs in their care to best support adopters. 2) While encouraging walking did not influence owner behavior, adopters who reported higher obligation and self-efficacy in dog walking were more active with their dogs. Thus, post-adoption interventions that can effectively target owner perceptions of obligation and self-efficacy may be more successful in changing behavior. 3) Temporary fostering is an impactful intervention that reduces stress for dogs awaiting adoption; however addressing stressors present at shelters that are likely contributing to higher stress responding is also needed. 4) It is possible to predict the internal stress responding of shelter dogs by observing their overt, in-kennel behavior, and this study is a first step in assessing and improving the welfare of dogs living in animal shelters.
ContributorsGunter, Lisa (Author) / Wynne, Clive D. L. (Thesis advisor) / Luecken, Linda J. (Committee member) / Barber, Rebecca T. (Committee member) / Casey, Rachel A. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
According to hedonism about happiness, all and only enjoyable experiences are the basic constituents of one’s happiness, and these experiences contribute to one’s happiness just to the extent that they have a greater intensity or duration. After defending this view, I show that it must be amended to count as an equally plausible theory of what constitutes one’s well-being. I then present two such amended versions of hedonism about well-being. The first, which I call objective hedonism, adds the claim that the objective worth of the things one enjoys also makes a difference to the extent to which an enjoyable experience contributes to one’s well-being. The second, which I call reliabilist hedonism, adds the claim that one’s evaluative intuitions about which things are good for one track which things have proven themselves to one to reliably lead to enjoyable experience. I conclude that reliabilist hedonism constitutes a revival of hedonism about well-being.
ContributorsFanciullo, James (Author) / Portmore, Douglas W. (Thesis advisor) / Calhoun, Cheshire (Committee member) / DesRoches, Tyler (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020