Assessing stress in dogs during a visit to the veterinary clinic: Correlations between dog behavior in standardized tests and assessments by veterinary staff and owners

A visit to a veterinary clinic can be very stressful for the dog, and stress may interact with pain. The aim of this study was to observe the behavior of dogs in a veterinary clinic and to correlate it with subjective stress assessments by different persons. Systems have already been developed to assess pain in dogs. We tested the behavior of 105 dogs, sampled from 233 dog owners who completed our questionnaire and whose dogs were patients at the clinic. The dog owner, the test leader, the nurse, and the veterinarian were each asked to assess if the dog was experiencing pain or was stressed and to evaluate, overall, how the dog experienced the visit. Three behavior tests were also carried out to describe the dog's reaction in the veterinary clinic: a “social contact” test, a “play” test, and a “treat” test. The play and treat tests were carried out both inside and outside the veterinary clinic to see if the dogs reacted differently in the 2 situations. Agreement between observers was good to excellent but generally better when assessing pain than stress. Dogs rated as more stressed were significantly less likely to engage in social contact with an unfamiliar person (P < 0.0001). They were significantly more willing to play and eat a treat outside the veterinary clinic compared to inside the clinic (P < 0.001), implying that the dogs themselves experienced inside the clinic as being more negative. The results also indicated that the type of relationship the owner has with the dog may influence the dog's behavior during the clinical examination. The good agreements between the different measures in this study suggest that there is potential for a system to be developed to assess the extent to which the dog is stressed in the clinic.