Seems like another example of the BCSPCA telling people that they should do one thing while themselves doing something different. It certainly isn’t consistent for the BCSPCA to let a dog go back out into the community that is 100% known to be aggressive and has actually bitten people and another animal, and then also to be saying that they want to destroy a dog that has only given some indications that it “might” have some aggressive tendencies based on the in-house assessment test DTA4.

The so-called test accuracy of DTA4 is summarized on page 44 of the training course. While supposedly showing how valid the assessment is the information there only demonstrates how unscientific the whole process is.

For example the validation at the BCSPCA was done on “211 dogs”. However, of these, it states that only 106 were eventually adopted by new owners and then some follow up was done and that was the information used to determine the accuracy of DTA4.

There is no mention of the 105 dogs that did not get adopted, no results, no information, nothing! So the accuracy of DTA4 is based on only 50% of the dogs.

It isn’t scientific to only use 50% of the results and ignore the rest. When that is done it makes any conclusions completely inappropriate and unreliable, yet that is what was done and then used to state conclusions such as:
“Predictability: How often are dogs that are aggressive in DTA4 also aggressive in their new homes? Across the eight tests, predictability ranged from fair to excellent.”
“Specificity: How often are dogs that are not aggressive in their new homes, not aggressive in DTA4? Specificity ranged from good to excellent.”
“Sensitivity: How often are dogs that are aggressive in their new homes not aggressive in DTA4? Sensitivity was only moderate, meaning that some dogs were aggressive in their new homes but had not displayed aggression in DTA4.”

Another point that is not mentioned is that to carry out this so-called validation would have also meant that dogs which DTA4 showed to be aggressive would have to have been adopted out to see if they were also aggressive in their new homes! Did they do that?

It doesn’t say, but either way is wrong! If they did knowingly adopt dogs that showed aggression to people who were unaware, how responsible is that? If they did not adopt out dogs that showed aggression then how could they determine if those dogs would have shown aggression in their new homes? If the dogs that showed aggression were only adopted out to special homes that could deal with the potential then that would have influenced the results and once again been non-science!

Other and more reasonable methods have been suggested to the BCSPCA and have been ignored.