Cats' and dogs' welfare: text mining and topics modeling analysis of the scientific literature

Abstract

Animal welfare is a field with increasing significance and has been raising huge concerns of the public and the political stage. Cats and dogs possess an important role in human life, but their welfare is not always secured from a legal aspect. This review aimed to describe the evolution and geographical distribution of "cats and dogs" and "puppies and kittens" welfare literature over the last 40 years, distinguish the main research topics studied and highlight gaps in knowledge. A search using Scopus® was performed with different search strings and predetermined filters as time range, language, and subject area. A total of 2,725 scientific literature records were retrieved but only the ones that referred to cats and dogs' welfare aspects were retained. The final 1,775 records were processed through descriptive statistics, and text mining and topic analysis procedures were performed on their titles and abstracts. The results showed that the number of studies has been increasing, especially in Europe and North America. "Shelter" was the most frequent word, followed by "behavior," "owner" and "adopt." The nine topics that emerged from the analysis were breeding, stress and housing conditions, welfare and pain assessment, public health, shelter management and euthanasia, behavioral problems, health issues and management, human-animal interaction, and owners' and veterinarians' perceptions. While stress and housing conditions, public health, and owners' and veterinarians' perceptions were the most studied topics, human-animal interaction was the least studied. This review confirmed the increasing research and interest in cats' and dogs' welfare and showed gaps in knowledge where further studies are needed.

Keywords: behavior; canine; companion animals; feline; machine learning; systematic review; well-being.

Figure 1

Flow chart representing scientific literature search and each step of selection of the scientific literature records on dogs’ and cats’ welfare. The number of the excluded records and their reason for exclusion from the study are represented by the dashed lines. Not-relevant species were every species different from dogs and cats.

Figure 2

Peer-reviewed scientific literature records (n = 1,775) on the welfare of cats, dogs, puppies, and kittens from 1980 to 2023. The dashed line represents the trend over the years. The asterisk on the year 2023 indicates that results for that year are related to the period from January to March.

Figure 3

Pie chart depicting the distribution of the 1,775 scientific literature records selected for inclusion per regions and subregions, represented by their respective percentages.

Figure 4

Distribution by European country of peer-reviewed scientific literature records (n = 1,775) on the welfare of cats, dogs, puppies, and kittens based on the nationality of the corresponding/first authors that are published from 1980 to 2023.

Figure 5

Histogram illustrating the most frequent words (i.e., words with term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) values ≥13) and the weight of the 1,775 records included in the study.

Figure 6

Word cloud with the most frequent words (i.e., words with term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) values ≥13) of the 1,775 records included in the study. The words with larger font are the ones with higher weight.

Figure 7

Histograms with the most frequent 15 words (terms) for the 9 topics of the 1,775 scientific literature records included in the study. The “beta” indicates the relative probability of each word belonging to each topic.

Figure 8

Graphs of the 1,775 records’ distribution over the years 1980–2023 for each topic. The blue lines indicate the number of scientific literature records per year and the dashed lines indicate the trendline for the whole timespan.