A triple blind placebo-controlled investigation into the assessment of the effect of Dog Appeasing Pheromone (DAP) on anxiety related behaviour of problem dogs in the veterinary clinic

Abstract

The behaviour and emotional state of 15 dogs, known to be fearful of the veterinary clinic was evaluated during a standardised 5 min waiting room procedure and standardised 2 min consultation room procedure prior to a sham clinical examination, in the presence of Dog Appeasing Pheromone and placebo. Subjects acted as their own controls and were semi-randomly allocated into treatment groups to control for order effects. A triple blinding procedure was used in order to remove bias from the assessment of video recordings of the dogs, with two naïve independent raters used to analyse the video recordings of the behaviour of dogs during the test procedures. The raters showed good, and similar, agreement in their evaluation of both the specific behaviour of the dogs and their putative emotional state (relaxed, aroused and anxious). The results suggested that the use of DAP in the clinic was associated with greater relaxation of the dogs but there was no effect on aggressive behaviour during the clinical examination.