The aim of this study is to investigate the hypothesis that people with restricted meat consumption are more sensitive to and strict about animal rights, animal protection and animal welfare in comparison to consumers of meat products. Therefore, we compared attitudes and opinions about the most substantial ethical questions of veterinary ethics in a group of students of veterinary medicine according to their dietary preferences. The research was conducted using a questionnaire, in which students were divided into groups according to whether they consume or do not consume meat. Students then answered questions about basic ethical issues and had the opportunity to express their opinion about topics such as animal euthanasia, animal experiments, animal welfare and welfare of livestock and pets, the impact of meat production on the environment and similar topics.

Canine aggression is a widespread problem which receives a lot of attention from the media. It has important consequences in terms of public health and animal welfare. To address this issue it is necessary to first determine its epidemiological characteristics in the target population. This study was aimed at exploring the characteristics and determining the risk factors for dog aggression in the Slovak Republic and, in particular, for aggression directed at humans. For this purpose, we used a questionnaire directed to dog owners which included information about dog and owner characteristics, housing, training and fear behaviour. From the 177 analysed questionnaires, 67% portrayed dogs with some type of aggressive behaviour. Half of the animals showed some degree of owner-directed aggression and almost 40% were aggressive towards unfamiliar people. The approach of an unfamiliar male was the situation that stimulated most dogs to behave aggressively (33.3%) and a small percentage (2.3%) of the animals always showed aggression when approached by an unfamiliar child. Multivariate logistic regression models found that "owner's age" (OR, 0.96; 95% CI, 0.93 - 0.99) and "neuter status" (OR, 0.36; 95% CI, 0.13-0.98) were significantly associated (P < 0.05) with the exhibiting of aggressive behaviour in different contexts. "Dog's sex" (OR, 2.16; 95% CI, 1.09-4.27) and "type of training" (OR, 2.32; 95% CI, 1.19-4.80) were significantly associated (P < 0.05) with the exhibiting of aggressive behaviour towards familiar people. Younger owners were more likely to have aggressive dogs and neutered dogs were less likely to be aggressive in different contexts. Male dogs and dogs with informal training were more likely to be aggressive towards familiar people. Manifestations of fear were significantly associated with the expression of aggressive behaviour in all models. This study provides the first preliminary results on the characteristics and potential risk factors for human-directed aggression in Slovakia. The analysis of these data may help in determining which preventive measures should be given priority in this country.

This review considers the importance of safety for various species of domestic animals and explains how the need for safety may motivate them to offer a variety of unwelcome responses. We argue that the value of safety to animals is often overlooked by trainers and handlers. As a result, animal owners, handlers, trainers, and veterinarians are regularly injured, and training may fail. Reinforced responses that increase the animal's perceived sense of safety but simultaneously endanger the safety of handlers or trainers may lead to the inadvertent training of dangerous responses. This review offers suggestions about how safety can be used effectively and humanely as a resource in operant training. Training calmness in the presence of a specific stimulus that is associated with safety may deserve closer attention. The ethics of creating the need for safety in domestic animals as part of a training regime are discussed. It emerges that the highly prized attribute of so-called trust in animal–trainer dyads may, at least sometimes, be a manifestation of trainers acting as safety signals. Similarly, animals said to have confidence in and regard for their handlers may value the relative safety they afford.

With the dual purpose of selecting both breeding animals and dogs for training, all German shepherd dogs in the Swedish Armed Forces (SAF) breeding program are subjected to a temperament test. During the test, the dog's behavioral responses are rated with 2 different methods. In a previous study, using Principal Components Analysis (PCA) on the test items, 5 and 3 underlying behavioral dimensions from each rating method were defined. Three of the dimensions were reported to correlate significantly to training success. Using the test results from 873 dogs, we estimated heritabilities of, and genetic correlations among, the 38 test items and the 8 underlying behavioral dimensions. Parameters were estimated using a mixed linear animal model including fixed effects of sex, training level, test age and test year-location combination, and random effects of litter, genetic effect of the individual, and residual. Heritabilities ranged from 0.00 to 0.28 (standard error [SE] = 0.05-0.10), which is similar to what has been reported in previous studies of traits defined and measured in a comparable way. Genetic correlations were high (rg = 0.92-0.98, SE = 0.08-0.12) between dimensions derived from each rating method and defined as either confidence, engagement, or aggressiveness, but relatively weak among these dimensions within rating method (rg = 0.00-0.45, SE = 0.29-0.41). Our results imply that the test measures 3 separate behavioral dimensions and that the SAF temperament test as a whole is possible to use for selection of dogs for breeding, but also that some test items should be measured differently to be meaningful for genetic selection purposes. Furthermore, aggregating variables based on a PCA performed on phenotypic data might be suboptimal when defining dimensions for breeding purposes; taking genetic parameters into consideration resulted in generally higher heritabilities for the dimensions.