Users View Animal Welfare Assessment Grid for Dogs as Valuable Decision Tool

Every day, veterinarians, shelter managers, and assistance dog trainers face decisions that can change the course of an animal’s life: Should this dog undergo invasive surgery? Can this animal cope with long-term kenneling? Is it time to consider euthanasia? A new study published in Veterinary Medicine and Science suggests that a structured scoring tool known as the Animal Welfare Assessment Grid, or AWAG, may help transform these fraught, instinct-driven judgments into transparent, evidence-based decisions. In a survey of 38 veterinary and animal welfare professionals who use the tool in their workplaces, more than 96 percent acknowledged its utility in aiding decision-making, and many described it simply as “helpful,” “objective,” and “useful.”

The research, led by Rachel Malkani of the University of Surrey together with Sharmini Julita Paramasivam and Sarah Wolfensohn, set out to explore how the AWAG functions as a decision-making instrument across three distinct sectors of dog welfare: veterinary medicine, rehoming shelters, and assistance dog organisations. The stakes in these settings are considerable. Advances in veterinary specialisation and technology now make it possible to prolong life in ways that were unthinkable a generation ago, yet clinicians increasingly question whether aggressive interventions truly serve the animal’s best interests. Treatments can be invasive, extensive, and risky, and there is growing concern that procedures may be motivated by professional advancement, financial incentives, training opportunities, or unrealistic client expectations rather than by genuine welfare benefit. Studies have even linked such dilemmas to moral injury in veterinary professionals, the psychological distress that comes from participating in decisions that conflict with one’s ethical values.

The AWAG was designed to inject objectivity into exactly these situations. It is a validated quality-of-life assessment tool applicable across a range of species, and it evaluates four parameters: physical health, psychological health, the environment, and procedural or management events, reflecting the widely used five domains of welfare framework. Under each parameter, a series of factors are scored from one, representing the best welfare possible, to ten, representing the worst. Crucially, the scoring relies on mutually exclusive descriptors for each value, an approach intended to reduce bias and subjectivity by anchoring each number to an observable definition rather than an assessor’s impression. The software then produces a cumulative welfare assessment score, known as the CWAS, alongside mean scores for each parameter and a set of visualisations that show how an individual animal’s welfare changes over time and how it compares with that of an average healthy dog.

To investigate how professionals actually use the tool, the team emailed an online mixed-methods questionnaire to 99 veterinary and animal welfare professionals in the United Kingdom and Australia who were actively using the AWAG in veterinary clinics, rehoming shelters, and assistance dog organisations. All registered users had completed standardised training through instructional videos and scoring methodology, ensuring a shared understanding of how scores should be assigned. Thirty-eight respondents completed the survey, which combined Likert-scale questions with open-ended prompts asking how the AWAG influenced their treatment and management decisions, their welfare assessments, their workplaces, and, in a final exercise, three words they would use to describe it.

The quantitative results were strikingly one-sided. When asked how the tool contributed to overall treatment and management decisions, 22 of the 38 respondents found it very useful or extremely useful, and a further 12 found it moderately useful. Only two rated it slightly useful and one found it not at all useful. Because of the small, exploratory sample, the researchers analysed these data descriptively rather than applying inferential statistics, but the pattern was clear: the overwhelming majority of trained users regarded the grid as a meaningful contributor to clinical and management reasoning.

The qualitative analysis went deeper, using Braun’s six-step thematic analysis to identify patterns in the free-text responses, and sentiment analysis conducted in R using the tidytext package’s “bing” lexicon, which classifies words as positive or negative, supplemented by manual screening to detect mixed and neutral sentiment. Three dominant themes emerged around decision-making: the AWAG as objective and science-based, the AWAG as a driver of change and approach, and its benefits, utility, and challenges. One respondent described it as providing “a black and white assessment for the dog which helped with decision-making and assessing his quality of life,” while another praised the way it “provided a science-based approach to recording deterioration and improvement to the overall condition of the animal.” Others noted that by revealing whether a problem was rooted in the environment, a procedure, or a management event, the tool allowed teams to target the area most in need of intervention.

The tool also appears to broaden professional horizons. More than 70 percent of respondents, 26 out of 38, said the AWAG encouraged them to consider factors they would not normally weigh when assessing welfare. This finding matters because research has shown that veterinary surgeons tend to focus disproportionately on physical health, potentially overlooking psychological and environmental dimensions of an animal’s life. Respondents reported that the grid prompted discussions about environmental enrichment, particularly for older dogs with osteoarthritis whose opportunities for walks and play had diminished, and highlighted the long-term welfare impact of procedures that might otherwise be taken for granted. Sentiment analysis of these responses found them largely positive or mixed, with no negative sentiment at all.

Perhaps the most socially significant theme was the AWAG’s capacity to provoke conversation. Users reported using weekly welfare checks to structure team discussions, updating management plans based on score trends, and opening dialogues with clients about weight, enrichment, and sources of stress. The visual outputs proved especially valuable: graphs of a dog’s welfare profile made it possible for people without specialist welfare knowledge to understand deterioration over time, which respondents said was invaluable for caregivers struggling with quality-of-life decisions and for presenting evidence in cases involving dogs held in shelters under statutory powers or seized during investigations. One user described using the tool to document welfare both on a property and later while a dog was in foster care during a legal case.

In the workplace, the impact was framed primarily as behaviour change, with subthemes of improved communication and better handling of complex cases. Respondents said the AWAG “allowed better communication and reduction of conflict with case management” and assisted in “providing evidence of an animal’s wellbeing at times when difficult euthanasia decisions arise.” Some organisations even developed in-house emotional welfare protocols inspired by the tool, crediting it with getting staff to think of dogs holistically and raising the profile of the interplay between health and behaviour. When asked for three descriptive words, the most common choices were “helpful,” “objective,” and “useful,” followed by terms denoting innovation, measurement, visual representation, and ease of use. Only one word, “complicated,” carried negative sentiment, hinting that while the tool is largely welcomed, a minority of users find aspects of it challenging, particularly its time demands.

The authors are careful about what the tool can and cannot claim. Establishing concurrent criterion validity for any welfare assessment instrument remains inherently difficult because no single gold standard measure of animal welfare exists. The AWAG has been assessed for construct validity against clinical measures, including chronic disease and short-term procedural changes such as neutering, and previous work by the same team has used it to identify factors predictive of chronic pain and behavioural disorders in dogs. But the researchers position it as a complementary, holistic framework rather than a replacement for condition-specific measures, and they suggest that pairing it with a structured veterinary ethics tool could create a robust combined approach, grounding decisions simultaneously in the animal’s quantified physical and psychological state and in the ethical implications of the available interventions.

The study also has limitations that temper enthusiasm. The sample size was small, and the analysis did not differentiate between veterinary clinics, charities, and assistance dog organisations, leaving open questions about whether the tool’s value varies by setting. Job roles and length of tool use were not captured, and the respondents were likely self-selected professionals already invested in welfare improvement, potentially biasing results in the tool’s favour. The grid’s generic design may also lack sensitivity to welfare challenges specific to subpopulations such as dogs in complex behavioural rehabilitation, although customised additional factors can be added and require further validation.

Even so, the overall picture is of a tool that is quietly changing professional culture. By converting observations and discussions into data, the AWAG gives clinicians and caregivers a shared, visual, and reproducible language for welfare, one that can validate difficult choices to those with opposing views and reduce conflict in emotionally charged situations. In an era of rising public awareness of animal sentience and mounting political pressure to prevent suffering, the researchers argue that instruments like this grid may help ensure that the decisions shaping dogs’ lives are not only medically defensible but transparent, inclusive, and genuinely centred on the animal’s own experience.