Our Changing World: The science behind dog welfare

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"Every day they make me laugh with their antics and their companionship," says Dr Mia Cobb of her two dogs Rudy and Luna.

Rudy is a 10-year-old stag hound. "He looks like a womble cross with a muppet. He's a very big, grey, shaggy creature with long legs." Luna is a four-year-old German shorthaired pointer. "She's very, very energetic, even considering that the breed is known to be active. She's extra."

Both ended up in SPCA. Rudy was picked up as a stray dog in a regional farming area, while Luna was someone's "pandemic puppy" - bought when Melbourne was in lockdown, but far too active for her first home.

Having started her career in canine welfare working with the SPCA, Mia says having dogs is an "occupational hazard". She can't imagine a time in her life when she won't have dogs.

Now at the University of Melbourne, she's in the early stages of a canine welfare science fellowship investigating how we can provide a better quality of life for our four-legged friends.

Our dogs are talking, we just need to listen

There is a range of experiments that have shown dogs are acutely attuned to our moods - a dog's 'guilty look' is actually a response to our facial expressions and they might be able to smell when we are stressed.

But are we returning the favour?

It's the tricky issue with animal welfare, says Mia - you can't have a discussion with your dog about how they are doing. Instead, you have to look out for indicators. "People always say to me, oh, if only my dog could talk. And in so many ways, they are."

A wagging tail is a classic sign of a happy dog, but there's more to it than that. Dogs tend to hold their tails to the right when they're feeling emotionally positive. If they're feeling a bit unsure it's more likely to be curved to the left.

Loose, floppy behaviour - "waggly through their bodies" as Mia puts it - means a dog is feeling good. Their mouth will be relaxed, with "soft eyes" that don't have any white showing.

Signs that they are less happy or need some more space include looking away, yawning, licking their lips, or showing the whites of their eyes. If we miss these signs, then dogs might escalate their communication through a growl or a snap.

Advocacy and agency

The key, says Mia, is getting to know your individual dog's likes and dislikes. Are they a people person or not much of a cuddler? Do they enjoy the company of other dogs or prefer to do their own thing? Are they energetic and active or like to lounge?

Rudy, tall and shaggy as he is, is often approached by strangers who want to wrap their arms around him. But he doesn't really enjoy hugs (not many dogs do, an inconvenient truth for us touchy-feely primates) and Mia often advocates on his behalf, asking people to give him a chin scratch instead.

In her work Mia often uses the Five Domains Model of animal welfare, first published by Emeritus Professor David Mellor at Massey University 30 years ago. Since then, the model has been updated as we learn more about animal behaviour and emotion.

The five domains are: nutrition, physical environment, health, behavioural interactions and mental state. The first four allow a negative or positive experience, which contribute to the animal's mental state, domain five.

Recently, Mia has been exploring animal experiences in the fourth domain, behavioural interactions. Along with Massey University researcher Dr Kat Littlewood, she's been looking at agency - enabling animals to make their own decisions about actions they want to take.

With dogs at home this can look as simple as allowing them to choose the direction of the walk or setting up a choice between two activities that they can then make.

It's part of the exciting new direction of animal welfare science, says Mia. Traditional animal welfare management focused almost solely on minimising suffering, whereas nowadays the research has shifted to consider how animals can have positive experiences.

The fellowship that focuses on the dog's point of view

Mia began her canine welfare science fellowship in February this year, with an ambitious range of topics to tackle.

A lot of the research to date has focused on what humans get out of our dog-human interactions - whether that's to do with our improved mental health or having effective dog work colleagues. Mia will be using her time focused on what dogs need to live a good life.

An interdisciplinary researcher with a joint degree in zoology and psychology, one of the things she's keen to look in to are the choices that people make around the kinds of dogs they buy, in particular the flat-faced dogs like bulldogs and pugs, who have a tough time living in the body that humans have bred them into.

"The shortened skull leads to a lot of breathing issues. They can have eye problems and skin problems as well. And basically, they tend to live very uncomfortable lives. What we haven't been able to work out yet is how we change people making the decisions that result in dogs living in those bodies."

Listen to the audio to hear stories from New Zealand dog owners, Our Changing World producer Ellen Rykers about her rescue greyhound Clay, and more from Mia on the experiments that have revealed how much our dogs care about us.