Sensitivity of benchmarked behavioral assays for distress: Should we attend to certain behaviors during exams?

Abstract

Behavioral, emotional, and physical signs of distress are increasingly recognized in veterinary patients during routine care. Visits to veterinarians are associated with development or worsening of fearful behaviors. Veterinary patients experiencing fear and distress create a welfare concern. These negative emotional states may result in deferred veterinary care and incomplete veterinary evaluations. This study is part of our ongoing series of studies on assessing fear and distress in clinical situations using one population of dogs. We sought to evaluate whether there was one or a subset of behaviors in a benchmarked, behavioral scale that best predicted or correlated with a 5-point, subjective, ordinal scale. Both scales were used to evaluate each dog’s behavior throughout a 10-step standardized physical exam. Here we discuss the association between global scoring and the more detailed physical exam scoring. We evaluated dogs (n = 35) that were enrolled in a randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind study testing a novel pharmaceutical intervention for fear associated with veterinary exams. In the original study, the dogs were videotaped at the baseline visit and 2 weeks later at the interventional visit. All videos were coded and blinded. For the purposes of our study, the order of the exams and whether the dogs received placebo, or the novel compound were not revealed. Four people evaluated all videos: three residents and an experienced specialist/researcher who participated in the original pharmaceutical study. The benchmarked behavioral scales indicated that dogs with low body or tail posture (scores of 4-5) during the paw-lift stage of the physical exam, stayed aroused for all subsequent parts of the exam. This was not the case for dogs with lower scores when their paws were lifted. A score of 4 or 5 for tail and/or body posture is a sensitive predictor of future exam behavior in this context, and lifting a paw appears to be a provocative intervention for many fearful dogs. These key behaviors are sufficiently informative so that these should be evaluated at specified exam stages during a standardized exam, as part of a valid baseline behavioral database.