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Pet and Companion Animal Welfare: Cruel Practices, Housing, and Husbandry
Pet and companion animal welfare focuses on the physical and behavioral well-being of animals kept for companionship, assistance, research, and other purposes. This topic covers common welfare concerns, including neglect, abuse, inappropriate housing, social isolation, and harmful practices, as well as the importance of proper housing, environmental enrichment, socialization, and husbandry.
The term companion animals refers to animals that human beings keep for purposes of control, companionship, and comfort. The word pet, which suggests the indulgent use of animals (Shell), is increasingly being replaced by the term “companion animals.” However, the term pet animal seems indispensable in conveying the intimate relationship between some humans and selected domesticated species.
Pets generally seem to provide their owners with significant health benefits; keeping pets has been shown to help relieve stress in those who enjoy having animals around. There is now a medically recognized class of “therapy animals,” mostly dogs that are brought to visit people in hospitals, nursing homes, and other care facilities. Walking a dog can provide both the owner and the dog with exercise, fresh air, and social interaction.
Cruel Practices
While some fortunate animal companions are treated as members of the family (as they should be), many others experience nothing but suffering, abuse, and sadness. Some forms of animal abuse and neglect are illegal, but in many states, animals have no legal protection from “standard” practices such as being chained to a post all day and night; having their toes, ears, or tails cut off for human convenience or preference; or being forced to wear collars that deliver painful shocks in response to perfectly normal behaviors such as barking.
Chaining dogs, while unfortunately legal in many areas, is one of the cruelest forms of confinement imaginable for social animals that need and deserve companionship, exercise, and mental stimulation. It can also turn dogs into ticking time bombs. Many people, especially children, have been bitten, mauled, or killed by chained dogs. Similarly, keeping dogs in crates or cages for extended periods prevents them from satisfying all their needs and can become a way for guardians to ignore and warehouse their dogs until they get around to caring for them properly.
Birds don’t belong in cages, either. Bored, lonely, denied the opportunity to fly or stretch their wings, and deprived of companionship, many birds develop abnormal behaviors, such as pulling out their own feathers, bobbing their heads incessantly, and repeatedly pecking at the bars of their cages.
Declawing, another cruel practice performed only for the convenience of the cat’s owner, is a painful mutilation that involves 10 individual amputations—not of the nails but of the ends of the toes themselves (bone and all). The long-term effects of declawing include skin and bladder problems and the gradual weakening of cats’ legs, shoulders, and back muscles. Declawing is both painful and traumatic, and it has been outlawed in Germany and other parts of Europe as a form of cruelty.
Cruel, unnecessary surgeries that are performed on dogs, including ear cropping, tail docking, and debarking, can be painful and traumatic to dogs. They are banned in many countries, but they remain legal in the U.S.
“Training” devices such as shock collars, electric fences, and prong collars rely on painful punishment and negative reinforcement, causing dogs to live in fear of being shocked or choked for normal behaviors such as crossing invisible boundaries, barking, jumping onto surfaces within their own homes, and pulling on the leash during walks.
Animal hoarding exists in virtually every community. Formerly referred to as “collectors” and regarded as well-intentioned people who were overwhelmed by the animal overpopulation crisis, hoarders are now viewed in a very different light. New information has shown that the problem is far more serious than simply having too big a heart. The consequences for hoarders, their human dependents, animals, and the community are extremely serious and often fatal for animals.
Housing and Husbandry
Dogs are kept in kennels by a variety of organizations. Examples include rescue organizations, hunting kennels, quarantine kennels, boarding kennels, police organizations, and assistance organizations. In addition, dogs (mainly beagles) are bred and kept in kennels for biomedical research and nutritional studies. A useful general source of information for housing and care of laboratory dogs is HUR.
Traditionally, kennels were often small, designed to house one dog, and frequently devoid of anything to occupy the dog or provide variety. Such environments resulted in timid, fearful dogs or dogs with repetitive behavior disorders such as stereotypies or self-injurious behavior. Studies in both shelters and research establishments have shown that the longer dogs spend in suboptimal environments, the more likely they are to exhibit abnormal or undesirable behaviors.
These dogs are likely to make poor research subjects; moreover, since dogs may spend considerable periods in kennels, the welfare impact can be considerable. Over the last 15 years or so, there have been some important changes in the conditions considered acceptable for breeding and keeping dogs used in research, and these have also influenced standards for other types of kenneling. Several recent documents provide comprehensive reviews and recommendations based on applied research and the natural history of the dog.
One of the most important changes in the kenneling of research dogs has been the reduction of single housing. For many years, social housing has been the default system in the UK. In the UK, minimum enclosure dimensions are sufficient to house one or two dogs, therefore making pair housing financially advantageous. A similar strategy has now been adopted in the recent revision of Council of Europe recommendations (Council of Europe, 2006), and social housing is becoming increasingly accepted throughout the research community. Even where dogs have to be isolated during dosing in regulatory studies or during feeding in nutritional studies, dogs can still be housed in pairs or groups for the rest of the time.
In Europe, it is common for dogs on GLP toxicology studies to be socially housed but separated for feeding so that food consumption can be measured more accurately. This practice is less common, however, in the United States. Nonetheless, studies have shown that it can be done, and as UK companies have to comply with the same or similar regulatory requirements, more widespread adoption of social housing would seem to be a relatively easy improvement to implement in the USA.
Good kennel design is critical for allowing the adoption of social housing, and modular designs that allow animals to be housed together as desired are a useful, flexible means of achieving this. Social housing does bring an increased risk of injury, however, and husbandry regimes should be designed to monitor aggression.
