The increasing attention to animal well-being has stimulated the study of biomarkers of an organism’s adaptive response to the environment, with cortisol emerging as one of the most interesting. Saliva is a biological fluid that is easy to collect and has the advantage that its cortisol content parallels that in blood with a 20-30 minutes delay, thus “photographing” the adaptive
response to a past stimulus without interference due to handling while taking the sample. Recent studies have shown that salivary cortisol can be used as a biomarker for some diseases and behavioural modifications, as well as in support of canine activities and sports. The new point-of-care devices for assaying salivary cortisol concentration in dogs provide practitioners with a useful method for evaluating the degree of activation of the hypothalamicpituitary-adrenal axis in response to central or peripheral stimuli.