Animal Welfare

  • Understanding brachycephalic ownership

    It has become increasingly clear that understanding the motivations and desires of both current and prospective brachycephalic dog owners is key to devising more targeted human behaviour change interventions in the future. To date, RVC work in this area has uncovered a number of key findings.

  • Investigating healthy conformational limits

    While demand for brachycephalic dogs remains high, understanding whether the body shape of brachycephalic breeds can be refined to reduce the risk of conformation-related disease is of priority. RVC research in this area worked to identify conformational risk factors for common disorders, and define ‘healthy conformational limits’, thresholds beyond which the risk of disease becomes unacceptably high.

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