Dog Owners’ Perceptions of Their Pet Dogs’ Behavior When Owners Became Pregnant
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent anecdotal evidence suggests that some pet dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) display behavior changes when their owners are pregnant. The current study sought to document the proportion of owners who report that their dogs’ behavior changed when they (the owner) became pregnant and to determine if any owner, dog, sociodemographic, or owner pregnancy variables predicted whether owners reported that their dog’s behavior changed during owners’ pregnancies. Participants (n = 130) who owned a dog when they were pregnant completed a custom-made online questionnaire that contained questions about owners’ and dogs’ demographics, owners’ pregnancies, and dogs’ behaviors before and during owners’ pregnancies. Owners also completed two subscales from the Monash Dog Owner Relationship Scale. Results showed that 65.4% of owners reported a change in their dogs’ behavior when they became pregnant, and 26.9% reported that their dogs’ behavior changed before they were aware of their own pregnancy. Sign tests revealed significant increases in behaviors during the owners’ pregnancies for four of five behavior categories examined. A binomial logistic regression revealed that pre-pregnancy behaviors related to guarding around unfamiliar people and fear/anxiety toward other dogs predicted whether owners reported that their dogs’ behavior changed during the owners’ pregnancy. No other dog or dog-owner (participant) demographics or pregnancy variables predicted reported behavioral changes in dogs during owners’ pregnancies. This is the first study to document that a substantial proportion of owners report that their dogs’ behavior changed during their pregnancy. These findings aid our understanding of the relationship between dogs and their owners and owners’ perceptions of their dogs’ behaviors during significant life changes.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
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".