What is this project about?

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Nowadays animal welfare is a widespread concern and assessing individuals wellbeing is extensively discussed. Progress in improving animal welfare is currently limited by the lack of objective methods for assessing lifetime experience. Animal welfare is assumed to be influenced by the cumulative effects of the positive and negative events experienced by an individual.
Measuring stress is the main mechanism to evaluate welfare. One way to assess animals' life quality is measuring stress hormone levels because they are strongly associated with individual's health. Stressed individuals are more prone to develop cardiovascular diseases and have poorer immune responses. Looking older than your real (chronological) age is an indicator of a stressful life as you are ageing biologically faster than you should be. In humans looking old for your age, which can be assessed using facial photographs (perceived age) is associated with illness and death. A good measure of cumulative experience needs to be validated for non-human animals.

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Project's Aim

The aim of this project is to develop a simple and non-invasive system to evaluate the cumulative lifetime experience to validate age as a reliable tool to assess dog welfare.