Assessment of the agreement between fosters and trainers evaluating behavior with the C-BARQ and Behavior Checklist
This repository contains materials used to produce slides presented at the International Working Dog Breeding Conference in October 2021.
Authors:
Elizabeth Hare
Dog Genetics LLC/
Penn Vet Working Dog Center
Jennifer L Essler Penn Vet Working Dog Center
James A. Serpell
University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine
Cynthia M. Otto
Penn Vet Working Dog Center
Working dog programs have an interest in the early identification of puppies who are likely to succeed in training. The Penn Vet Working Dog Center begins training and fostering puppies at about eight weeks of age while collecting several types of behavioral data. The Canine Behavioral Assessment and Research Questionnaire (C-BARQ) contains 100 items grouped into 14 subscales and is usually completed by fosters. The Behavior Checklist (BCL) contains 44 items which partially overlap with C-BARQ items and subscales. After matching within dog and age group, there were 86 records on 64 dogs. Spearman correlations were calculated as a measure of agreement between the BCL item scores and C-BARQ subscales and individual items using the Holm correction for multiple testing. When testing C-BARQ subscales, BCL and C-BARQ stranger-directed aggression were moderately correlated (0.51, p < 0.05), as were C-BARQ dog-directed aggression and BCL stranger-directed aggression (0.50, p < 0.01). When testing BCL items with individual C-BARQ items, C-BARQ dog-directed aggression items were moderately but significantly correlated with eight BCL items including resource guarding around people, stranger-directed aggression, dog-directed aggression, and resource guarding around dogs. [C-BARQ] (https://vetapps.vet.upenn.edu/cbarq/) stranger-directed aggression items were correlated with 12 BCL items including stranger-directed fear, stranger-directed aggression, and dog-directed aggression. The moderate correlations for fear and aggression and lack of correlation for other traits suggest that dogs’ behavior may be different in their foster homes than in training or that trainers evaluate dogs differently than fosters.
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