Team from behavioral biology invites dog owners to participate in the research project
Muenster. Dog owners who want to support a research project by the Institute for Behavioral Biology at the University of Münster for animal welfare can do this via smartphone-with the “WAU-app”. Interested parties can grasp the emotions and the behavior of their dogs via this free app. No special prior knowledge is necessary. The WAU app can be downloaded from the Google Play Store or Apple App Store. WAU is a university's citizens' science project on the subject of “emotions, laterality and personality in dogs”.
And so the app works
If WAU is started, general information about the dog and its personality is first asked. Afterwards, the participants can document the side -specific behavior of their dog, for example, in which direction the dog circle when they lie down to sleep. After each observation, the users also give an assessment of the dog's emotional condition. In order to enable the most objective evaluation possible, explanatory tutorials are offered that illustrate what should be observed in an observation.
Behavioral biologists from the University of Münster are looking for suitable indicators that allow conclusions to be drawn about the well -being of animals. A promising approach is the observation of “side preferences”. As the person in which there are right-hand and left-handers, animals also show side preferences, and there are initial indications of a connection between such side-specific behaviors and emotions: short-term side preferences seem to provide information about the current mood of an individual, while long-term side preferences are related to the personality of an animal. The findings can potentially be transferred to other animal species and thus contribute to improving animal welfare.
From December 2021 to summer 2024, data from more than 450 dogs with over 8,400 individual observations have already been collected. Now the Wau app goes into the second round. All data collected via the app is automatically transferred to a database and made accessible to the Department of Behavioral Biology anonymously and analyzed there. The research process can be pursued at www .wau-app
Civic science
Citizen Science (Citizens' Science) is the active citizen participation in research. Voluntary data can record or evaluate and help shape research questions or prepare results.