What Do Dogs Want? Social Choices and Varied Breeding for Better Welfare
A comparison with village dogs highlights some of the ways that pet dogs’ lives could be improved. Photo: Lim Tiaw Leong/Shutterstock By Zazie Todd PhD This page contains affiliate links which means I may earn a commission on qualifying purchases at no cost to you. Do pet dogs have it all? They get to lounge about for most of the day, their meals are provided for them, and they can have endless pets from their humans. But are there ways that we could improve the welfare of pet dogs ? A team of scientists has investigated this question by comparing pet dogs to village dogs in a paper in press in Applied Animal Behaviour Science. After all, dogs existed as village dogs for centuries before any pet dogs came along, so the researchers say “the comparison may serve as a good basis for assessing the effects of the ‘petification’ of dogs.” Dr. Iben Meyer and Prof. Peter Sandøe (Dept of Veterinary and Animal Sciences, University of Copenhagen), two of the authors of the paper, told me, “I