The Use of Infrared Thermal Imagery for the Measurement of Core Eye Temperature in the Domestic Cat

A key aspect of ensuring animal well-being is understanding an animal's response to stress. Recently, there has been an increased interest in developing and testing non-invasive methods that allow for valid and reliable stress measurement. Previous studies have shown that infrared thermography is a reliable non-invasive stress measurement able to assess stress levels over multiple time points. Core body temperature increases in response to stressors and reliably correlates with the lacrimal caruncle area's temperature in the eye, making the measurement of core eye temperature a reliable method to measure stress. This preliminary study evaluates the reproducibility of measuring the lacrimal caruncle's temperature as a reliable method for assessing baseline core body temperature. We used thermal imagery to score temperatures of the lacrimal caruncle, the head, the torso, and the legs. We found that temperatures recorded from the lacrimal caruncle were significantly closer to the domestic cat's baseline CBT than other body parts, which aligns with previous findings.  We plan to use this knowledge to validate thermography as a non-invasive measurement of the domestic cat's stress response.