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Article History

Received: 6 November 2019

Accepted: 4 February 2020

First Online: 17 February 2020

Ethics approval and consent to participate

: This study has been approved by the Massey University Animal Ethics committee (protocols 15/26 and 18/53). All dog owners have given oral consent to their dogs being included in the study.Written consent is not a requirement in New Zealand and there are many cases in which projects will be approved without written consent. In this survey verbal consent was considered both acceptable and appropriate: 1) the dog owners had to agree to allow the veterinarian to visit the property, 2) when the veterinarian arrived the dog owners had to consent to them being there and 3) the owner had to provide the dog to the veterinarian for examination. Further, at each round of data collection dog owners were free to withdraw. Several did withdraw from the study and others did not return phone calls. In terms of the actual process of ethical approval, when the proposal was sent to the Massey University Animal Ethics Committee the method of gaining consent was not included and the Committee did not require the inclusion of this prior to approval.

: Not applicable.

: The authors declare that they have no competing interests.