Relationships among morphological, environmental, social factors and aggressive profiles in Brazilian pet dogs

Abstract

Pet dog aggression concerns both dogs and owners’ wellbeing and their relationship, since nowadays owners work to guarantee proper conditions for their dogs’ wellbeing, and to have a healthy emotional relationship with them. Aggressive behaviours often fall under the category of ‘undesired’ behaviours since they are mostly associated with negative contexts and possible bites or attack incidents. However, aggression remains an important component of dogs’ behavioural development, relying on communicative skills, and must be regarded as such if we want to understand how, why, and when it occurs in pet dogs. This study contributed to the ongoing investigation of how aggressive behaviour expression is affected by morpho-physiological, social, and physical environmental factors of dogs. We investigated aggression incidence and dog related factors through questionnaires applied to dog owners. Two questionnaires developed by our team were used to investigate dog, environment, and owner descriptive factors. To investigate aggression, we applied together the Canine Behavioural Assessment and Research Questionnaire (C-BARQ). Dog and owner factors, and dog aggression data scores were associated through logistic regressions. Our results indicate that features such as the dog’s weight, skull morphology and sex, and socio-environmental proprieties like their owners’ gender and age, training regimen and household habitat, significantly affected the probabilities of complete absence or significant incidence of highest aggression in urban Brazilian domestic dogs. On the other hand, aggression was not associated to the Body Mass Index (BMI), a measure used in this study to represent the dog’s size. Rather than determining aggression to a single factor common to the species or specific breeds, our results reinforce how individual behaviour, combined with dogs’ unique genetics, physiology, life experiences and environmental contexts interact throughout development to produce the observed expression patterns.