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Mammalian parental care, in most of the cases, is given by the female, who provides food, warmth, and protection. In domestic dogs, maternal behaviour shown by the dam mainly consists of contact, nursing, grooming/licking, play, punishment, thermoregulation, and motion. Peer-reviewed literature published between 1952 and 2018 was retrieved from CAB Abstracts, PubMed, ISI Web of Knowledge, Scopus and book chapters. Keywords for this search included the following terms: behaviour, bonding, altricial, precocial, offspring, maternal, whelping, nursing, domestic dogs, female dog, aggression, puppies, anogenital licking. In this review, we reported and discussed scientific information about maternal behaviour in domestic bitches, comparing altricial vs precocial species; the importance of the bonding, grooming/licking and nursing, and their impacts on puppies’ behaviour; altered maternal behaviours such as aggression, cannibalism, rejection, and also the relation between hormones and maternal care behaviours. We concluded that the level of interactions between the dam and the puppies influences the physiological, cognitive and behavioural development of the litter, and the main hormones in the bitch for inducing maternal care behaviours are estradiol, oxytocin, prolactin and progesterone.

In light of the need to perform surgical techniques and the importance of animal welfare because of acute pain, the objectives of the veterinary anaesthetists are to manage muscle relaxation and adequate analgesia in order to conserve a balance in the autonomic nervous system, enhance the action of the parasympathetic system in the face of the emerging action of the sympathetic portion provoked by the surgeon, and maintain a balance among them. The aim of the present review is to describe different evaluation criteria for acute pain using unidimensional and multidimensional scales, correlating these findings to parasympathetic tone activity (PTA) and bispectral index (BIS) assessment, to conduct an objective evaluation of pain that patients (dog or cat) perceives, in order to administrate an adequate analgesic treatment in each case. In conclusion, this integral, objective evaluation will allow veterinarians – especially anaesthesiologists – to improve the management of pain in the patients.

Supplemental Material, DS1_VET_10.1177_0300985819837719 for Fat, Cartilage, and Bone Metaplasia in Lungs of Cattle With Caudal Pleural Lesions and Subjacent Interstitial Fibrosis by Cecilia Ramírez-Hernández, Luis Jorge García-Márquez, Horacio Decanini-Arcaute, Julio Martínez-Burnes, and Rafael Ramírez-Romero in Veterinary Pathology