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What can we know about human–animal interactions (HAI) research by looking at information about its research articles, such as publication information, text of abstracts or author keywords, or cita...

The human–animal bond (HAB) has been shown to provide a buffering effect for stress and adversity, particularly when individuals experience lower social support networks. This study aimed to explor...

Animal-assisted therapy (AAT) has gained popularity within K-12 schools for the emotional-social support, academic support, and sense of belongingness animals provide, however, concerns still arise...

In response to a gap in veterinary care for low-income, under-served populations, the Student Health Outreach for Wellness (SHOW) Clinic in Phoenix, AZ took a One-Health initiative to establish a pilot veterinary care program to serve the veterinary needs of the local homeless pet owners receiving human medical care at the clinic. The study examines the pilot program through the lens of the human-animal bond (HAB) and focuses specifically on the attachment dimension of the bond as measured by the Lexington Attachment to Pets Scale (LAPS). Data was collected from the homeless pet owners, and Rasch modeling was used to investigate the importance of various factors of the owner attachment to pet as described in LAPS items. The results demonstrate the perceptions of the homeless pet owners of ownership. The findings also provide psychometric evidence for revising the LAPS to better serve future research on human-animal relationships. Limitations and possible extensions of the research as related to the HAB and owner attachment to pets are discussed and enhancements proposed for the pilot program to better serve the local homeless people.

Pets provide companionship and social facilitation among excluded populations, including homeless people. However, having a pet may restrict access to services, including accommodation. The aims of...

Individuals in many cultures have a close relationship with their pets and think of them not only as companion animals but also as family. Research on the ways in which people memorialize their dec...

Adult attitudes toward animals have received extensive research attention. By contrast, despite the importance of child-animal interactions for children’s development and animal welfare, children’s attitudes toward animals have not been fully explored. The aim of this study was to examine Spanish children’s attitudes toward animals. A twelve-item scale named the 'Brief Attitudes Towards Animals scale for Children (BATAC) was designed and completed by 416 Spanish primary school children aged between 6 and 13 years. Analyses revealed that the attitude scale had very good internal consistency (Cronbach's α = 0.75; Revelle's omega = 0.75; Sijtsma's glb = 0.84) and three factors, referred to here as ‘compassion’, ‘friendship’ and ‘opinion on ownership’, explained 56.47% of the variance. The sub-scales were used in subsequent analyses alongside the total score. Demographic variables such as age, school year group, ownership of a companion animal, and children's beliefs about animal mind were shown to be associated with children's attitudes toward animals. Being older, being in a higher school year, having a dog or a small mammal at home, and scoring animals higher on sentience capabilities were associated with higher pro-animal attitudes. Other pet types (i.e. cats, birds, reptiles or fish) and children's gender were not associated with attitudes to animals. This study is the first to explore attitudes toward animals among Spanish primary school children, and it highlights attitudinal differences regarding animal species and child demographic variables.

Pain is a significant burden for those with chronic disease and negatively impacts quality of life, causing disability and substantial work and health-care costs. Chronic pain has been identified a...

Repeated interactions within individual human and animal dyads can lead to the establishment of human–animal relationships (HARs), which may vary in quality from good to bad, defined in terms of th...

Final exams at colleges and universities have proven to be a time of anxiety and stress for students. This paper contains an exploration the effects of Animal-Assisted Activities (AAA) on exam anxi...

Companion animals (i.e., pets) have been increasingly recognized for the roles they play in families, including those with children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). This cross-sectional study e...

Companion animals are increasingly being recognized by society as beneficial to our health and considered by many owners as authentic and affectional family members. Human relationship theories hel...

Numerous studies have examined the link between companiondog ownership and improved physical or psychological health outcomes; however, few have examined the association between dog ownership and owners’ overall wellbeing or quality of life (QOL). Moreover, the potential for dog ownership to adversely affect owner QOL has been largely ignored. In general, little is known regarding the specific aspects of QOL that are most affected by dog ownership, and there are no instruments specifically designed to assess the QOL of dog owners. If such a tool was available, these effects could be better quantified, understood, and potentially utilized to further improve owner QOL. The aim of the present study was to develop and validate a QOL questionnaire specifically suitable for use in dog owners. A literature review, focus-group activities, and expert content review were used to generate an item pool for the instrument. Both positive and negative effects of dog ownership on QOL were considered. Developmenta...

In this paper, we elaborate and test a comprehensive theoretical model of SWB of animal caregivers. This model includes risk factors such as restrictions in daily life, negative emotions, and finan...

Transitioning from high school to university can prove to be a for midable challenge for many first-year students, with many experiencing home sickness. Given that students who experience homesickness are more likely than their non-homesick cohorts to drop out of university, universities have a vested interest in supporting students during their first-year transition. Programs that provide opportunities for human–animal interactions on campus are gaining popularity as one way of increasing students’ wellbeing. The current study examined the effects of an 8-week animal-assisted therapy (AAT) program on first-year university students’ wellbeing. An initial feasibility study (n = 86) was conducted that provided opportunities for students to interact, in small groups, with trained therapy dogs and their volunteer handlers. Results indicated that this program reduced participants’ levels of homesickness and increased their satisfaction with life. An experimental study was then conducted utilizing a sim...

Riding is considered to be an arousing activity for horses. It has been suggested that wither scratching may be a more useful tool for relaxation compared with the common practice of neck patting. In the current study, 18 horses were exposed to 3 treatments, including control or no interaction, neck patting, and wither scratching, for 1 min each following a short obstacle course. Heart rate, heart rate variability, and a variety of behaviors were measured in the horses. Wither scratching produced a significantly longer duration of relaxed-type behaviors. Wither scratching could be a useful tool to help a horse relax while under saddle. Additionally, the study identified 2 ear positions that may be useful for future research in horse behavior.

Veterinary social work (VSW) is the provision of services at the intersection of veterinary medicine and social work practice. Based on scholarly literature and practice experience, four competency areas are identified for social workers attending to the human side of the human-animal bond: grief at the loss of an animal companion, compassion fatigue in the animal services fields, the connection between animal and human violence, and animal-assisted interventions. This review explores how the four competency areas of VSW have evolved, to what extent these services are being provided, and in what realms these services exist.

This study explored the relationships between adults with disabilities and service dogs through leisure participation. The relationships between service dog and owner and perceptions of and access ...

Older adults are at high risk for physical illness and emotional disorders, particularly those of lower socioeconomic status. Pet ownership has the potential to reduce the impact of these problems by providing companionship, reducing social isolation, and enhancing physical activity and well-being. Despite these potential benefits, older adults face challenges in adopting and owning pets, including functional limitations, financial considerations, and concerns should the pet owner fall ill or die. In this article, the authors detail the literature on pet ownership for older adults, hurdles they face in adopting pets, and steps that could be taken to address these challenges.

Therapy dogs are trained and socialized to provide comfort to individuals who are ill or experiencing stress. The following article explores therapy dog outreach programs in academic libraries by describing a successful venture at McGill University Library. Background, planning advice, assessment results, and recommendations are presented with an aim to inform those who would like to implement similar programs at their libraries.

Thirty-five graduate and undergraduate students, owners of dogs and cats, were asked to respond in writing to a several questions regarding their relationship with their pet. In this retrospective analysis, we discuss aspects that describe the pet-owner relationship, including attachment and the role played by the pet in the owner's life (e.g., emotional support, the pet being seen as a family member). Most of the participants felt that their pet's loss caused great pain; some considered that even if they had suffered greatly, the death of their pet was not felt more intensely and severely than the death of any other family member or a friend.

Animals have an anxiety-reducing effect on humans. However, in the search for which interventions are the most effective, one notices that studies in this field are not comparable as they all use different designs. Hereby, we investigated the anxiety reducing abilities of different animals and a plant using a public speaking task with identical set-ups and measures in all conditions. After speech anxiety was induced in university students (n = 71), they were presented with either a dog, a fish, a plant, or were left alone (control condition) for an intervention phase of 5 minutes. Anxiety measures were taken at five different points throughout the testing procedure. When comparing the participants' levels of anxiety before and after the intervention, we found that all students showed reduced anxiety levels in the experimental conditions, with no differences among the types of intervention, while no such effect was found for participants in the control condition. Our results not only demonstrate a ...

In 2003, Japan passed the Act on Assistance Dogs for Persons with Disabilities, requiring public facilities, public transport, and private businesses serving the general public to allow access for people with physical impairments who use assistance dogs. One purpose of this law is to enable people with disabilities to lead independent and fulfilling lives as active members of society. In order to achieve this goal, the law requires public facilities such as national institutions and public transport, as well as private businesses serving the general public, such as hotels and restaurants, to allow access to people with physical impairment accompanied by assistance dogs. In 2007, the law was amended to stipulate acceptance to the workplace of people with a physical impairment accompanied by an assistance dog. We conducted a questionnaire survey of 6,062 business owners covered by the legislation, to ascertain the extent of knowledge of the law and acceptance of assistance dogs. In cases where the r...

Zoo animals serve an important function in helping educate the public about their conservation needs. Despite this important function, little is understood about how visitors perceive different zoo exhibits and the animals that reside within them. In the present study, the behaviors displayed by two jaguars located at the Woodland Park Zoo were correlated with visitor behaviors and perceptions. Overall, visitors perceived their enjoyment to be lower when a jaguar was out of sight and rated the behavioral welfare of the jaguar to be lower when it was engaged in stereotypic behaviors. In addition, visitors who described a jaguar's behavior as stereotypic were significantly more likely to give lower ratings than those who perceived the jaguar to be active. It is suggested that by understanding how visitors perceive exhibited animals, zoos can address these perceptions in order to create more positive experiences for their visitors.

During 2009–10, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork with 31 immunologists, virologists, and neuroscientists working with either rats or mice. I encountered how the conceptual and physical bounds that have traditionally separated nature from culture, specie from specie, human from animal, are crossed, blurred, and reasserted. In this ambiguous zone, a scientific incuriosity about animals themselves persists, in the practice of inquiring into animal bodies and minds to produce insights into human health and its betterment. This privileging of human health bypasses animals themselves in favor of a view of them as human similars and prone objects, wholly available to persons, and affirms the Heideggarian thesis, that science occupies an arrogated position in modernity. Such incurious encounters with animals produced ideas and pronouncements about the close biological and genetic similarities that humans and animals share, that scientists in my study called “biokinship” and “genekinship.” These terms in...

Contact with people, both familiar (e.g., caretakers) and unfamiliar (e.g., members of the public), is a significant part of the lives of nonhuman animals in zoos. The available empirical evidence shows that in many cases this contact represents a source of stress to the animals, although there is sufficient overall ambiguity in these studies to suggest that the effect of people on the animals is much more complex than this. A possible way to try to understand human-animal relationships in the zoo is to ask how the animals might perceive the humans with whom they have contact, and here this question is explored further, using a framework first published by Hediger as a starting point. Hediger suggested that zoo animals might perceive people as an enemy, as part of the inanimate environment, or as a member of the same species. He supported these categories with anecdotal evidence, which was all that was available at the time, but more empirical evidence is available now, so it is appropriate to revisit these categories. The evidence suggests that animals discriminate both conspecific and heterospecific others, rather than just viewing familiar people as members of their own species, and that additional categories (stimulating part of the environment and friendship) may be warranted. These categories are then placed in a general model that suggests how relationships of different qualities, and hence different perceptions of each other, might develop between animals and the people they are in contact with in zoos.

When explaining academic outcomes in specific content areas, people reveal their implicit theories of academic ability. Those who hold an entity theory generally attribute differences in achievement to stable, uncontrollable factors. In contrast, those who hold an incremental theory take into account controllable psychological or environmental variables. Implicit theories affect motivation and are expected to crystallize by about fourth grade. This research examined changes in southwest suburban third graders' implicit theories of reading ability for self, others, and other species in a quasi-experimental, crossover design employing entity and incremental treatments. Seventy-one third-graders completed a 16-week reading program teaching a dog tasks that supported and challenged entity theories of what dogs can do. A therapy dog acted as our confederate because reading to dogs has been shown to improve children's reading skills, but not necessarily change their beliefs about reading ability, becaus...

The Nage people of Flores island, eastern Indonesia, recognize an unnamed (or “covert”) life-form category comprising several named kinds of lizards as a distinct component of their folk zoological taxonomy, a general purpose classification of animals based primarily on universally observable morphological and behavioral features. Exploring symbolic values of lizards evidenced in Nage thought and practice, this essay considers how far lizards might also compose a unitary symbolic class and whether symbolic similarity and contrast may inform Nage taxonomy. The answer is in both cases negative. Typically, symbolic classes cross-cut the major divisions of a folk taxonomy of animals, thereby associating, on symbolic grounds (such as common association with spiritual beings), animals belonging to diverse life-forms such as snakes, birds, and fish. With reference to this and other findings, exploration of Nage lizard classification serves to introduce a discussion of general differences between folk tax...

Dingoes feature prominently in Australian Aboriginal Creation stories and are also widely regarded as having an intricate relationship with Aboriginal people. A large volume of anthropological work on the complex relationship between Australian Aboriginals and dingoes has determined a considerable uniformity in the human–dingo relationship across northern Australia. Whilst there are many parallels between northern and southern Aboriginal Australia, this reconsideration of the archival record explores the hitherto rarely considered evidence of the relationship between Aboriginal people, British colonizers in Victoria (south-eastern Australia), and dingoes. The data provide an insight into the unique relationship, which indicates some striking differences between northern and southern Aboriginal Australia; especially the utilitarian and symbolic significance of dingoes for Aboriginal communities in south-eastern Australia and how dingoes were used by both Aboriginal people and the colonial usurpers ...

We evaluated three forms of primate free-ranging displays at Singapore Zoo, each with varying restrictions on ranging area and freedom for the primates, as well as visitor proximity. The cotton-top...

Recent trends in social sciences advocate the recognition of interactive properties in human–animal relationships. Based on an ethnographic study, this paper explores the interactive properties of the relationships between herding dogs and their trainer-users, and how the dogs' behaviors participate in the construction of trainer-users' knowledge. Trainer-users' discourses and practices revealed a common theoretical axis, portraying the herding dog as a social predator descended from the wolf and driving the game towards his pack-leader. The dog's hunting skills are used to turn him/her into a working tool, through minimally constrained education and training. Once trained, the dog should become an autonomous but controllable worker, who helps livestock breeders lead their flock quietly. Two training modes were identified and used simultaneously by the trainers: contextual training (teaching the human–dog–livestock relationship to the dog) and conditioned training (teaching the commands to the dog...

This research suggests that learning biology in an outdoor environment has a positive cognitive and affective impact on 13–15-year-old, Swedish high school pupils. Eighty-five pupils in four classe ...

Associations between mammalian coat color and behavior have been investigated in a number of species, most notably the study of silver foxes by the Institute of Cytology and Genetics at the Russian...

Many displaced dogs are unable to find new homes in developed countries, including Australia, each year, even though demand for dogs in general remains high. Understanding community attitudes towards shelter dogs and beliefs about common shelter practices, particularly behavioral assessments conducted by shelters, may help shed light on this issue. To investigate what current and potential dog owners think about shelter dogs, we used an internet-based survey to probe the beliefs and attitudes of 1647 self-selected adult participants, using the online Public Attitudes towards Animal Welfare Shelter-Dogs (PAAWS-D) Survey. Over 80% of the sample indicated they would be likely or very likely to obtain a future pet dog from an animal shelter or rescue organization. Nonetheless, one-third of the participants believed that adult shelter dogs often have behavioral problems. Most participants were aware of routine shelter procedures, such as health and behavioral checks, and the consequences of a dog faili...

Nonhuman animals are abused in many ways in farming but this arouses little disquiet in society where most people actively support the industry. A corpus of writing in a popular South African farming magazine was analyzed and found to contain, along with other discourses, one which may be described as a discourse of production. Within this discourse are “use terms” which portray nonhumans as having anthropocentric purposes or uses for their lives. This ideology of purpose or implicit use has significant implications for facilitating moral disengagement both in those working in the industry and those supporting it. These implied purposes may derive in part from an old but persistent ideology that the world is composed of greater and lesser beings with the “lesser beings” existing for the purposes and use of the “greater beings.” A scheme is proposed to show how these use terms may play a part in the facilitation of mass nonhuman abuse. Further investigation reveals that use terms are not confined t...

The purpose of this study was to determine whether the presence of a dog would have an impact on object recognition memory performance of preschool children. This work represents an extension of previous research which found that preschoolers require fewer instructional prompts to complete this type of memory task when in the presence of a dog. If children require fewer instructional prompts it is possible that they are better able to focus on the task itself and as a result, improved memory performance is likely. Because the earlier experiment utilized a very simple version of the task that was readily completed by the preschool children, the overall performance data were at ceiling. The current study, involving 20 preschool children, included a manipulation of task difficulty through varying the number of distracters (one versus four) present at test. Increasing the number of distractors in a simple recognition task is known to make that task more challenging, and thus performance was expected t...

Amphibians are vulnerable to extinction due to their need for both terrestrial and aquatic habitats to complete their life cycles. Some of them occupy urban areas, thus human tolerance of amphibians is likely to have a significant impact on their survival. Here we investigated tolerance of amphibians by interviewing a convenience sample of 201 pond owners and non-owners of various ages in Slovakia. Tolerance of tadpoles was higher than tolerance of adult amphibians. About 26% of pond owners reported that they kill adult amphibians, as did 31% of non-owners. We found that tolerance of amphibians was positively correlated with perceived importance of amphibians and negatively correlated with a disgust reaction to amphibians. Disgust and importance of amphibians negatively correlated, suggesting that people who perceived amphibians as disgusting underestimated their importance in nature. These correlations were statistically significant. Owning a pond, gender, age, education level, and mean amphibian...

This study describes a comparison of the efficacy of the Monty Roberts horsemanship technique (MRT) in comparison with a UK conventional training technique (CT) for the initial training of horses. The sample consisted of 14 untrained horses, between 3 and 5 years old, sourced from a variety of non-competition yards in the UK. Horses were matched on temperament and randomly assigned to either the MRT group or the CT group. Each trainer was allowed 30 minutes per day to work with each horse for 20 days, following which the horses undertook a standardized ridden obstacle and flatwork test and a ridden freestyle test. Horses were scored for technical performance by a panel of judges who were unaware of the study or the trainers involved. During the session where the first saddle and rider were achieved, MRT-trained horses had significantly lower (p = 0.0137) maximum heart rates (bpm ± SD) (first saddle: 127 ± 37, first rider: 76 ± 12) when compared with CT-trained horses (first saddle: 176 ± 24, first...

This study aims to explore the influence of outdoor teaching among students, aged 13, on arithmetic performance and self-regulation skills as previous research concerning outdoor mathematics learni ...

Literary Animal Studies began, as did most of the disciplines that contribute to Animal Studies and Human–Animal Studies, in the 1980s. That era of raised social-consciousness opened academic disci...

This paper presents an adaptive methodology to study child–pet interactions in diverse cultural groups. A systematic and procedural guideline, in the form of a process flow which graphically encapsulates the abstractions of the ethnographic research paradigm is presented. The methodology is based on the iterative and self-corrective features of the ethnographic approach, and is shown to be effective in uncovering detailed and culturally nuanced data. The approach involves adaptations, if needed, during the course of research as opposed to strict application of initial designs that may prove to be culturally inappropriate or irrelevant. The iterative nature of the process involves the following recurring cycle of collection of data, analysis, check for validation, and if not satisfactory, adaptation leading back to collection of more data. This cycle repeats until valid results are found. This methodology was used in the context of a 3-year study which involved 90 children from six different cultur...

This essay considers issues facing historians working within the Animal Studies field. It draws on historiographical debates within feminist and social history to re-visit debates on animal agency,...

The aim of our study was to examine the influence of dyadic attachment, owner and dog personality, and owner gender on stress hormone dynamics in owner–dog dyads. We hypothesized that owner persona...

The events of Hurricane Katrina focused attention on the plight of companion animals and their human guardians during disasters. One result was the Pets Evacuation and Transportation Standards (PETS) Act of 2006. Hurricane Ike, one of the first mass evacuation events after the legislation was signed into law, provided an opportunity to examine pet owner evacuation in a post-Katrina PETS Act environment. The relationships between two dimensions of the human–animal bond—attachment and commitment—and evacuation decisions among pet owners were examined using the Lexington Attachment to Pets Scale (LAPS) and the Miller-Rada Commitment to Pets Scale (CPS). A self-administered questionnaire was mailed to a sample of pet-owning residents in zip codes that had been under mandatory evacuation order. One hundred and twenty valid responses were received. Descriptive and bi-variate statistics and logistic regressions were conducted. The two dimensions of the human–animal bond were positively correlated. The re...

The current study was designed to examine whether preschool children categorize picture stimuli differentially in the presence of a real dog compared with a stuffed dog or a human. Seventeen preschool children (age in months; M = 51.67, SD = 8.06), both Typical and those with a developmental delay (“Identified”), were asked to categorize Animate and Inanimate objects into two environments (Farm and Ocean) in each of three Collaborator conditions (Real Dog, Stuffed Dog, and Human). As predicted, there was a main effect of animation: the children more accurately categorized Animate (e.g., cow) exemplars than Inanimate ones (e.g., tractor). Additionally, the Animation variable interacted with Collaborator, such that in the presence of the real dog the impact of animation was significant, but this effect was not significant in the presence of the stuffed dog or human. This result indicates that the presence of the real dog served as a highly salient stimulus which encouraged the children to focus more...

The present study examines how children and adolescents respond when witnessing animal abuse and why many do not intervene to help animal victims. Ethnographic interviews were conducted with 25 late adolescents who witnessed animal abuse months or years earlier. Results were generally consistent with, but not identical to, findings from previous research on bystander intervention with human victims. On the one hand, the response of bystanders to animal abuse was similar to that of bystanders witnessing violence against humans. Both kinds of bystanders are very troubled by what they witness but often appear to be indifferent to the distress of victims, saying or doing little if anything to stop victims from being harmed or to prevent perpetrators from repeating their violence. On the other hand, while both types of bystanders faced the same general barriers to helping, the nature and salience of these barriers differed when comparing the two groups. Child and adolescent bystanders of animal abuse, ...

The expeditions to reach the South Pole mounted by Scott, Amundsen, and others between 1901 and 1912 have attracted considerable scholarly effort. These expeditions all took draught animals, which were key to the success or failure of the missions. Much of the literature in this field is highly partisan, focusing on the relative merits of Scott and Amundsen: the fates of their animals have received little attention except as ammunition for one side or another of this very polarized discourse. This paper describes the treatment of the dogs and ponies taken as draught animals on the expeditions led by Scott and Amundsen. These expeditions were planned such that animals would be used to pull sledges and slaughtered when required for food, or when the food for the animals ran out. Each of these expeditions is shown to have engaged in cruel practices and to have caused some animals extreme suffering. Scott's and Amundsen's management of their animals are compared. Amundsen kept close oversight of the c...

This study tests the effects of feedback from a virtual pet on behavior change. A randomized field experiment with 39 adolescents in the US examined how a mobile phone game influenced their likelihood to eat breakfast. Manipulations included varying positive and negative visual feedback in response to participants' photos of breakfast meals. Results indicate that participants with a virtual pet that provided both positive and negative feedback were twice as likely to eat breakfast than those with a pet that provided only positive feedback or participants in the control condition.

The aims of the present study were as follows: (1) to identify the particular characteristics of a horse that are important to riders, and (2) to examine which of these properties are significant for different categories of riders. The participants (197; 78.7% females) were surveyed using the Ideal Horse Questionnaire (IHQ), which contains items that are categorized as “physical make-up,” “behavior during riding and handling,” “training level,” and “maintenance.” “Behavior during riding and handling” (43.6% of respondents) and “physical make-up” (32.8%) were selected most frequently as the most important category, followed by “training level” (16.9%) and “maintenance” (6.7%). The responses for the questionnaire were subjected to factor analysis (FA). The first four factors of the FA, labeled “ease of handling and maintenance/sociability,” “jumping suitability,” “dressage suitability,” and “challenge” accounted for 13.7%, 11.7%, 8.6%, and 5.9% of the variance, respectively. The highest values on th...

Although there is a substantial body of research on inter-human empathy and inter-animal empathy, there is a dearth of research comparing humans’ empathic reactions to humans and animals. To addres ...