Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Natural Dog Training Provides New Ways To Understand And Manage Stresses Of Canine Assistance Work, Jean Marie Thompson, Kevin Behan

International Veterinary Social Work Summit

Limiting dis-stress experienced by assisted therapy, crisis response, and combat comfort dogs is a concern of handlers, organizations, and researchers. Dogs communicate feelings via body language especially muzzle expressions and physical behaviors that people and other animals recognize. Projection of dis-stress by dogs negatively impacts therapeutic interactions, distracting and detracting from beneficial flow of feelings. Dog welfare is risked. Behan's Natural Dog Training ("NDT") presents an alternative paradigm for understanding dog dis-stress. NDT is an energy flow model that is different from but compatible with positive reinforcement techniques and attuned to Adrian Bejan's constructal law of nature, a physics principle. …

The Link, One Health, And Social Capital: A New Strategy For Empathy Education And Social Work, Phil Arkow

International Veterinary Social Work Summit

For 150 years, animal welfare and veterinary advocates have promoted a doctrine that animal welfare will be enhanced by teaching children kindness to animals and responsible animal husbandry practices. However, these efforts have been stymied by societal and professional perceptions that “animal” causes are less worthy than “human” services. Ten significant challenges have made it difficult, if not impossible, to gain access to educators’ curricula and social work training. In a society that continues to place humans’ interests above animals’, it is time to try a new approach that focuses on the human benefits of animal welfare. In particular, a …

Compassion Fatigue Or Ethics Exhaustion?, Sonnya Dennis

International Veterinary Social Work Summit

Compassion Fatigue or Ethics Exhaustion?

In veterinary practice, the diagnosis is critical for proper treatment. Different diseases can cause the same symptoms, and while palliative treatment is sometimes necessary, ideally we want prevention or cure. In this talk, I will speak from the experiential perspective of companion animal general practice about the very real and common problem of compassion fatigue, and why it is different from, and can mask, what I call Ethics Exhaustion. In brief, I define Ethics Exhaustion as the feeling of being powerless to even try to do what you think that you ethically should do, because …

Cruelty Intervention Advocacy, A New Approach To Animal Hoarding Interventions, Allison Cardona

International Veterinary Social Work Summit

Animal hoarding affects thousands of animals and people across the United States. Conservative estimates place the number of new cases at two to three thousand per year, though no centralized database exists, so the full scope of the problem is unknown. Unlike intentional, single acts of cruelty, animal hoarding impacts a large number of animals over a prolonged period of time. Any type of animal can be hoarded, though the majority of hoarding situations involve cats and dogs, with numbers ranging from a few dozen to several hundred and even thousands of animals living in a single location. Accumulation of …

Canines And Childhood Cancer: The Effects Of Animal-Assisted Therapy For Patients, Families And Therapy Dogs, Molly Jenkins Msw, Amy Mccullough Ma, Ashleigh Ruehrdanz Ba, Kevin Morris Ph.D.

International Veterinary Social Work Summit

PLEASE USE THE PDF (available from the "download" link) TO FOLLOW ALONG WITH THE VIDEO

For many people, animals take center stage in their daily lives, offering companionship, comfort, joy and for some, even kinship. Increasingly, greater attention has been given to the roles that animals can play in supporting the health and emotional well-being of people in need, specifically through the use of animal-assisted therapy (AAT). However, while the field of human-animal interaction (HAI) research has expanded enormously in recent years, it is still unclear whether the incorporation of animals into clinical settings is effective from a scientific standpoint. …

Abuse And The Role Of The Human-Animal Bond, Iman A. Turner

International Veterinary Social Work Summit

ABUSE AND THE ROLE OF THE HUMAN-ANIMAL BOND

Background: Research has demonstrated an undeniable link between domestic violence and animal abuse. Currently, there are more than 71.4 million women in the United States who live in domestically violent households, while also owning at least one companion animal (Krienert,Walsh, Matthews & McConkey, 2012). Further research suggest that one-half to three-fourths of women who have fallen victim to domestic violence, have also reported that their companion animal(s) had been threatened, harmed or even killed by their abuser (Flynn, 2011).

Problem: Despite the quantitative and qualitative data supporting the correlation between domestic …