Companion animal behavior

Research on companion animal behavior often focuses on animal-human or animal-animal interaction in cats and dogs. No matter what the aim of your research is, The Observer XT, combined with our hardware and services, offers the best solution.

• Stay focused on the dog or cat you are observing; The Observer XT automatically adds time stamps to the logged events. 
• Log behavior live or from previously recorded video files.  
• Code detailed behaviors rapidly and accurately.
• Playback those parts of the video in which many behaviors occurred to take a second look at it and edit or add events.
• Select data for analysis in order to calculate statistics on certain observations, animals, or event types.
• Exclude observer bias and confirm intra-rater reliability by performing reliability analysis.
• Make clips of video parts that are of interest to you.

Introduction
Research on companion animals typically focuses on animal-human interaction and problem behavior in dogs and cats. To measure their interactions, a dog or cat and its owner are often observed during a certain period of interest, for instance during a playing session. In problem behavior assessments the animal is usually left alone in a confined area, such as a kennel, (artificial) living room, yard, or paddock, while behaviors are scored.

Combine The Observer® XT with our video and computer hardware and services to collect and analyze companion animal behavior in great detail. Our knowledgeable staff will be happy to help you find the solution that works best for your needs.

How it works
Start you experiment by designing a coding scheme (ethogram) on the computer running The Observer XT software. Make it as simple or complex as you need; The Observer XT will help you keep it clear and organized. Include each individual and behavior you want to study, with their corresponding codes. To add more information you can even link so-called ‘modifiers’ to behaviors. For example, when investigating play behavior of dogs, the behavior ‘shake’ can be extended with the modifier ‘toy’ and modifier values ‘ball’, ‘squeaky toy’, and ‘rope’. When observing cats, the behavior ‘rub’ can be extended with the modifier ‘body part’ and the modifier values ‘neck’, ‘head’, and ‘body’.

Choose whether you want to score live or offline. Consider the advantages: live scoring gives you the possibility to take certain events that were not caught on camera, into account. Offline scoring gives you the advantage to score in more detail, because you can play the video at slower speed, and you can always look back to check if a behavior was scored at the correct time. Or combine both methods: score live, but connect a camera and use The Observer XT to acquire a video file at the same time.

If observations are spread over long periods of time, you need to be aware of possible intra-observer bias. The Observer XT allows you to check for intra-observer reliability by comparing an observation scored at different points in time, and analyzing the differences. You can then check the consistency of scoring over time.

Of course you can also check for inter-observer reliability when the scoring of behaviors is done by multiple observers. After your observations are completed, The Observer XT provides you with the perfect tools to select, visualize, and analyze your data. Subjects, behaviors, modifiers, and independent variables (such as dog breed or age) can all be used in your selection prior to analysis. This allows you to specifically compare dogs that are observed in a backyard with grass to dogs that are observed in a paved backyard. Or you can investigate what kinds of behaviors were exhibited by a kitten while its mother was asleep, or what a dog did while his owner was absent. The Observer XT allows you to analyze your data to different degrees: from basic classification to in-depth selection and analysis. To take your analysis one step further, use Theme™ to reveal patterns of repeating sequences of behavior. This is especially interesting for studies on interaction between owners and their pet.