This project was initiated by a desire to improve our knowledge about animal welfare. It is a part of a series of projects involving the way dogs are kept in today?s society. The aim of this project was to investigate the dog?s behaviour when left alone in a parked car.

It is a well known fact today that suffering due to skin disorders is one of the most common causes to veterinary calls. For the Doberman breed included in the group of working dogs, the frequency and distribution of the different skinrelated diagnoses that causes visits to the veterinary clinics remains undocumented. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the frequency of skinrelated problems causing veterinary visits of Doberman at four different veterinaryclinics in Sweden retrospectively, and compare these results with dogs in general and three other working dog breeds with the help of information collected from Agria - a Swedish animal insurance company. The total amount of veterinary calls that were registered at the clinics in question during the time of the study was 2460 visits. From these, 658 visits were due to skinrelated disorders, which amount to 27%. The most frequent cause to skinsuffering was injury caused by trauma, 15,7% of the Dobermans that were included in the study were affected, the second most frequent cause was inflammatory and infectious skin problems with 12,3% followed by neoplastic changes in the skin with 7% of the Dobermans affected.

SammanfattningBakgrundDet är i Sverige svårt att tillgodose behovet av cirka 450 tjänstehundar och gällande hälsa är uppfattningen bland användarna att hundarnas fysiska hållbarhet blivit sämre. Med hänsyn till att det lider brist på tjänstehundar och att de tas ur tjänst tidigare än önskat vore det av stort värde att kunna förlänga en polishunds tjänstgöringstid. Ett sätt att förverkliga detta kan vara att använda undersökningstekniker vilka tidigt kan fånga upp lindriga förändringar i rörelsesymmetri, förändringar som kan vara ett första tecken på smärta. En tryckmätningsmatta kan registrera små förändringar i hur hunden belastar sina ben, förändringar som är svåra att se med blotta ögat. Det kan därför vara av intresse att ta fram ett normalmaterial för tjänstehundar så att det med tryckmätningsmattans hjälp tidigt går att upptäcka om en stoisk tjänstehund har ett förändrat rörelsemönster.Syfte & hypotesSyftet var att använda en tryckmätningsmatta för att skapa ett normalmaterial för en tjänstehundspopulation gällande parametrar registrerade med tryckmätnings-mattan.

In 1936 a governmental breeding project was started with aim on military use. The police later came to use dogs from this project as well. In order to utilize dogs that could fit for other purposes training and education of dogs for search of different substances and of guide dogs for blind persons was performed. A political decision to privatize the whole dog programme was taken in 1992. During most part of the time one had serious economical issues since too few of the dogs that were bred could be considered to fulfil the basic demands for service. To satisfy the need of service dogs private bred dogs were bought as well.