Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

Several studies have shown that dogs can have an attachment to their owners that is similar to that between children and their parents. However, most research has been focused on identifying a secure attachment between dog and owner and the various forms of insecure attachment styles have mostly been overlooked. Behaviour around reunion after separation has been shown to be a reliable way to measure the relationship between dog and owner. In this study, I wanted to research how dogs’ behaviour during reunion changed after they had interacted with two people using different caregiving styles. In this experiment, 12 beagle dogs interacted with two, for the dogs previously unknown, people during 7 days. Each dog had a secure interaction with one person and a disorganized interaction with another person on each day. A separation and reunion test was conducted before and after the interactions, with both people the dog would/had interacted with present. The dogs’ position, orientation and physical contact with the two people were recorded. Comparisons were made between the two tests as well as between behaviours within each test. There were no differences in the dogs’ behaviour between the first and second separation and reunion test. Surprisingly, in the first test, where the people were unknown to the dogs, dogs were more oriented towards the person who was going to interact with the dogs in a secure style and they tended to be more in proximity as well as have more physical contact with the secure person to be. In the second test, i.e. after the interaction period, there were no differences in who the dogs were oriented towards but there was a tendency for the dogs to be more in proximity as well as have more physical contact with the person that they had secure interactions with. Because these tendencies were also found in the first separation and reunion test it cannot be determined that these results indicate that the dogs had developed a preference for the person who had used a secure caregiving style. This is probably due to that the interaction period was too short for the dogs to develop different attachment styles towards the people. Therefore, in future studies I think the focus should be on prolonged interaction periods or on already established relationships between dogs and humans, as well as focus more on what consequences different attachment styles have on dogs behaviour, welfare and relationships with us humans.