Canine obesity is a prevalent disease, but many owners are unaware of it, partly due to misperception of their dog’s body shape. Body condition scoring (BCS) is a simple method of assessing body composition, but whether it can reduce owner misperception is unclear. Our aim was to determine the effect of a BCS system on owners’ ability to estimate the body condition of their dog. Information fro...

Because of extensive media coverage, it is now widely believed that pets enhance their owners’ health, sense of psychological well-being, and longevity. But while some researchers have reported that positive effects accrue from interacting with animals, others have found that the health and happiness of pet owners is no better, and in some cases worse, than that of non–pet owners. I discuss som...

Last years, Wavelet Packet Modulation (WPM) or Wavelet Packet Transform based Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (WPT-OFDM) have been introduced to wired and wireless communication fields as efficient Multicarrier Modulation (MCM) techniques. The wavelets have interesting features such as flexibility, compatibility and localization in both time and frequency domains with no need to use ...

Canine obesity is a prevalent disease, but many owners are unaware of it, partly due to misperception of their dog's body shape. Body condition scoring (BCS) is a simple method of assessing body composition, but whether it can reduce owner misperception is unclear. Our aim was to determine the effect of a BCS system on owners' ability to estimate the body condition of their dog. Information fro...

In the paper we investigate how owner personality, attitude and gender influence dog behavior, dyadic practical functionality and the level of dog salivary cortisol. In three meetings, 12 female and 10 male owners of male dogs answered questionnaires including the Neo-FFI human personality inventory. Their dyadic behavior was video-taped in a number of test situations, and saliva samples were c...

Our prior visual experience plays a critical role in face perception. We show superior perceptual performance for differentiating conspecific (vs non-conspecific), own-race (vs other-race) and familiar (vs unfamiliar) faces. However, it remains unclear whether our experience with faces of other species would influence our gaze allocation for extracting salient facial information. In this eye-tr...

Encouraging family forest owners to create early successional habitat is a high priority for wildlife conservation agencies in the northeastern USA, where most forest land is privately owned. Many studies have linked regional declines in wildlife populations to the loss of early successional habitat. The government provides financial incentives to create early successional habitat, but the numb...