Educational intervention on dog sterilization and retention in Taiwan.

We conducted a controlled randomized study to evaluate whether an educational intervention could alter dog owners' decisions to have their dogs sterilized and to retain the dogs in the household. One hundred and twenty-six new dog owners were recruited from 15 animal clinics across Taiwan and were successfully followed up for 3-8 months. Among them, 66 were randomly assigned to the intervention group and the other 60 were in the control group. At the end of the study, 22 had their dogs sterilized and 23 reported having an unsuccessful dog ownership. The educational intervention did not affect the owners' decisions to sterilize their dogs (hazard rate ratio (HRR) for the intervention group against control group=0.7, 95% confidence interval (CI)=0.4, 1.3). We found a heterogeneous effect of the applied education on the rate of unsuccessful dog ownership. The intervention group had a higher rate of unsuccessful ownership than the control group in the first 4 months of their ownership (HRR=19.2, 95% CI=4.6, 79.7), and the effect reversed after 4 months (HRR=0.5, 95% CI=0.2, 1.1).