Can I touch you? A pilot study comparing consensual and non-consensual human-dog touch interactions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Choice and consent are critical welfare elements, especially in interactions between humans and animals. Dogs incorporated in therapeutic settings (therapy dogs) may encounter human touch interactions where they have limited control over their circumstances. The present study examined how forced and free-choice touch treatments during interaction with humans influenced the behaviour of therapy dogs and hypothesized that therapy dogs would display a higher frequency of stress-related behaviours during forced in comparison to free-choice touch treatment. The study involved 18 certified therapy dogs with 44 human participants. Each human interacted individually with up to four therapy dogs in forced and free-choice touch treatments for 3 min. During forced touch treatments, dogs were held on a leash by their owners while participants continuously touched the dog, but during free-choice touch treatments dogs roamed freely in a pen and participants were directed to touch them only if they approached within arm’s reach. Treatments were videoed for retrospective behavioural coding. A GLIMMIX for repeated measures tested the effect of treatment on dog behaviours. During forced touch there was a higher frequency of ear back behaviour (p = .0115) compared to free-choice touch treatment. Sniffing behaviour (p < .0001) and avoidance of the participants (p < .0001) occurred more frequently during free-choice touch compared to forced touch treatments. Dogs spent 77.9 % of their time within reach of the participants during free-choice touch treatments. Male dogs demonstrated a higher frequency of avoidance of participants (p = .0031) and interaction with owners (p = .0352) than female dogs, regardless of treatment. The findings revealed subtle behavioural differences in therapy dogs between forced and free-choice touch treatments with humans, highlighting the importance of incorporating choice and agency in human-dog interactions within therapy programs to enhance dog welfare. • Therapy dogs showed more frequent ear back behaviour during forced touch treatments. • Therapy dogs remained mostly within human reach when given the option to avoid interactions voluntarily. • Choice and agency are important factors in improving therapy dogs' welfare during human-dog interactions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".