A triple blind placebo-controlled investigation into the assessment of the effect of Dog Appeasing Pheromone (DAP) on anxiety related behaviour of problem dogs in the veterinary clinic

The behaviour and emotional state of 15 dogs, known to be fearful of the veterinary clinic wasevaluated during a standardised 5 min waiting room procedure and standardised 2 min consultationroom procedure prior to a sham clinical examination, in the presence of Dog Appeasing Pheromoneand placebo. Subjects acted as their own controls and were semi-randomly allocated into treatmentgroups to control for order effects. A triple blinding procedure was used in order to remove bias fromthe assessment of video recordings of the dogs, with two na?¨ve independent raters used to analyse thevideo recordings of the behaviour of dogs during the test procedures. The raters showed good, andsimilar, agreement in their evaluation of both the specific behaviour of the dogs and their putativeemotional state (relaxed, aroused and anxious). The results suggested that the use of DAP in the clinicwas associated with greater relaxation of the dogs but there was no effect on aggressive behaviourduring the clinical examination.# 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.