Animal rescue shelters provide temporary housing for thousands of stray and abandoned dogs every year. Many of these animals fail to find new homes and are forced to spend long periods of time in kennels. This study examined the influence of the length of time spent in a rescue shelter (<1 month, 2-12 months, 1-5 years, >5 years) on the behaviour of 97 dogs. The dogs ‘ position in their kennels (front, back), their activity (moving, standing, sitting, resting, sleeping), and their vocalisation (barking, quiet, other) were recorded over a 4 h period at 10 min intervals. The dogs’ behaviour was significantly related to the length of time the animals had spent in the rescue shelter. Dogs housed in the shelter for over five years spent more of their time at the back of their kennels, more time resting, and less time barking than dogs housed in the shelter for shorter periods of time. The age of the dog could not account for the significant results found, suggesting that environmental factors were responsible for the change in the dogs’ behaviour. The findings suggest that lengthy periods of time spent in a captive environment may encourage dogs to behave in a manner that is generally considered unattractive by potential buyers. This may decrease the chances of such dogs being adopted, resulting in longer periods of time spent in the kennel environment and the possible development of further undesirable behaviours.

One of the hypotheses proposed to account for why badgers Meles meles are highly social in the U.K., the resource dispersion hypothesis, is that patchy resources are unpredictably dispersed in the environment and therefore must be shared, but that these patches are rich enough, when available, to support several badgers at any one time. Previous empiricists in our study site at Wytham Woods calculated that single patches could be rich enough to support 30 badgers in a night. The sustained increase in population density in Wytham Woods suggests that food was not limiting and territories were below capacity, and therefore that feeding competition was relatively low. Low feeding competition would predict an absence of dimorphism in trophic apparatus between the sexes. Contrary to this, significant sexual dimorphism was found, after removing effects resulting from body size allometry, in canine cross-section length, width (both P < 0.0001) and skull breadth (P < 0.001). The differences in canine dimensions were still significant when allometry of both body length and skull breadth are accounted for statistically (P < 0.0001). It is therefore suggested that feeding competition may not necessarily be low, which would have implications for understanding the costs of social behaviour. Alternative explanations involving sexual selection and phylogenetic inertia are discussed.