I missed you yesterday. I am taking a drizzly Saturday morning to join you. I enjoyed sharing our week 6 tradition with you last time. Now I will explain why I missed out. Thanks, Vol Peggy for sharing wonderful pictures taken in the arena during Session 3. It was like being there.
About mid-summer I got an email from who knows where and who knows why.....just one of those cyber-things. The email described an international meeting being held in conjunction with a research center from the University of Missouri-Columbia. Good ol' Mizzou, my Alma mater (MS '89) Of most interest was the subject of the meeting; the Human-Animal Bond. The meeting was in Kansas City (old stompin' grounds) and was the International Society for Anthrozoology (ISAZ) with the Research Center for Human-Animal Interaction. The title of the meeting was Human-Animal Interaction: Impacting Multiple Species. The cost for the meeting was around $500.00 for all the members, more for non-members. However, they also offered people who worked in animal shelters, rescue groups, volunteer-based animal support groups a reduced rate of $100.00. I emailed to confirm that this included NARHA centers. Yippee was the answer!
The scientific program was complete with keynote speakers, students of animal behavior, sociologists, nurses, educators, psychologists, veterinarians, ethologists and a variety of presenters from around the world. One young Japanese researcher introduced herself and her talk as the first time she had presented her work speaking English. She did well.
The social program was no less impressive. The committee had set up dinners at several impressive KC venues. We had a catered dinner in the massive, renovated Union Station and an authentic southern-style BBQ at the KC Jazz Museum. The three best KC sauces were featured: Jack's Stack, Gates and Sons, and Arthur Bryant's. I also looked forward to seeing Terry and Tim, the mascot mule team from Mizzou's College of Veterinary Medicine. Staying at Crown Center was also something to look forward to. Since a teen, this "country mouse" had ventured to the big city to see the sights and Crown Center was a landmark where we shopped and peaked into the hotel lobby imagining of some day when we might actually stay there.
This was quite a meeting. I was as excited to go and just excited when I returned. I was seeking research-based methods to describe the human-animal bond that I witnessed in our arena. Of course, I had experienced this human-animal interaction since being a toddler. It was still difficult for me to describe. Grandma just called me "an animal nut" and I was soon labeled as "horse crazy". Since the '80s an organized effort was formed to help describe this human-animal bond in more sympathetic terms. The earliest conclusions of this effort showed that having an animal present with people would help lower people's blood pressure and heart rate which was felt to indicate lowered stress. Many studies followed especially in the area of the positive effect companion animals had with residents of long-term care facilities.
The field of Anthrozoology has greatly expanded. The range of topics covered in the six day meeting included the relationship between animal cruelty cases and child abuse, the moral lives of animals, the care of service animals, starting a visiting animal group, animal-assisted therapies from physical, mental and emotional including adults, youth, and children, effect of pets on people with terminal illness, loneliness, and those away from home at college. Additional topics included increasing reading scores in children reading aloud to a dog, grief associated with pet loss, assessing shelter animal behavior and placement, and the effect of dog walking on obesity in people.
Whewww...it was alot to cover and alot to absorb.
Very often I substituted "horse" for dog/cat as it was presented in the paper. One has yet to find out if a child's reading score increases more if it reads aloud to a dog vs. a cat vs. a pony. That will eventually be researched, I bet.
The world of human-animal bond and interaction is one that is both intimately familiar and rarely defined. Some things seem intuitive, yet our society demands that they be discovered, applied, repeatable, measured, timed, or weighed to be legitimate. And yet our arena is full of people who believe in what they do and surrounded by people who believe in what we are doing.
I was somewhat surprised that the research methods had not advanced much since the heart rate and blood pressure measurement days. I know research moves slowly and it is not a field for the impatient. What I learned was that the measurement tools mostly used at this time were surveys. Either the subject was interviewed or filled out a survey. I asked one researcher if they ever repeated the survey to the same person on a different day in order to determining if the person's feelings or perceptions changed enough to impact the original opinion. The answer was no. Do you let sleeping dogs lie? I am an adamant proponent of observation. I think if people keep their mouths shut and don't interfere and wait a good deal of time, a clear perspective will emerge. Describing that perspective is the difficult part. If it was easy everyone would do it! The newest measurement to surface is the oxytocin levels. Oxytocin is believed to indicate contentment. This is the nutshell version but I bet you don't stumble through this blog for a science lesson.
The meeting was attended by lots of people AND animals. There were service dogs working, service dogs in training, visiting ferrets, and one miniature horse. No cats. The dogs were trained for unsighted people, trained to pre-detect anxiety attack, assist people in wheelchairs. I met exciting, fun people from very diffent backgrounds. I became friends with Jill, a nurse practicioner from New York City who was on the pediatric liver transplant team. Her work supporting liver transplant patients and their families led her to taking her dog, Merlot, on visits to the adolescent group sessons in residential psychiatric treatment. Jill was joined by her husband, Larry, for the presentation of Jill's poster showing that her dog's visit evoked both positive and negative behaviors. The supervising psychiatrist concluded that any demonstration from the individuals in this group was good, in that it was something to work with.
Jill and Larry lived in Manhattan several floors above the street and walk Merlot in Central Park. I couldn't imagine that. They seemed to handle it fine :)
After our ride in the Mizzou mule wagon, Jill and Larry and I had the opportunity to go to the American Royal rodeo. I saw rodeo, an event that had been part of my life since birth, with new eyes. Jill and Larry had not seen a live rodeo performance before. All in all it was a pretty dandy display, the cowboys got busted up, the bull-fighters showed their stuff, and the rough stock was plenty rough. Jill rooted for the calves - but not for the bulls!
My niece, Claire (she's what Grandma would call an animal nut) joined me for part of Saturday's meeting. With all the service dogs in attendance and a scientific lilt to the presentation, I wanted to help Claire begin to describe her human-animal bond. She didn't know it would be like sitting in class. Nothing like giving up your Saturday, huh! Afterwards we went back to the American Royal rodeo finals.
Let's return to One Heart. I always say my final vision for One Heart is that we contribute somehow to the industry of equine-assisted activities and therapies (EAAT) using research. An ISU student of kineaseology has volunteered with us and is working toward a research project he hopes to start in the Spring. I hope that I learned enough about the research methods to help him toward this project.
So, I missed week six but returned filled with ideas and energy.
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