An Animal Just Like Me: The Importance of Preserving the Identities of Companion-Animal Owners in Disaster Contexts

'I want to be the sort of owner that he wants me to be': Rationales for biosecurity implementation among British horse owners

BACKGROUND

Horse owners play a critical role in mitigating the risk of pathogen spread between horses. However, little is known about how they view biosecurity and whether they experience barriers to the uptake of preventive measures.

OBJECTIVES

To explore horse owners' attitudes, perceptions, and experiences of biosecurity and identify how these factors shape horse owners' decisions for biosecurity implementation.

STUDY DESIGN

Qualitative study using semi-structured interviews.

METHODS

Interviews were conducted with 23 horse owners across Great Britain. Participants were purposively selected to include those in different geographic regions, with different management arrangements, and varied length of horse ownership experience. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analysed using a critical realist thematic analysis.

RESULTS

Participants felt a moral obligation to prioritise their horse's happiness, which became a challenge when certain biosecurity measures (e.g., quarantine) were perceived as compromising their horse's happiness or comfort (Theme 1). A lack of biosecurity was the social norm among shared yards and competition venues (Theme 2), which made it difficult for participants to implement biosecurity measures effectively on their own. Combined with the sense of moral obligation participants felt towards their horse, this meant that participants had to 'care double' (i.e., be more vigilant than they would otherwise) to compensate for collective inaction (Theme 3).

MAIN LIMITATIONS

Participants may have been more interested in and/or knowledgeable about biosecurity than the general horse owning population.

CONCLUSIONS

The findings highlight several challenges that could be addressed to improve biosecurity implementation among horse owners. Efforts to encourage improved uptake of biosecurity measures should focus on communicating how reducing the risk of disease aligns with horse care. Further research on social norms in the horse industry is needed, in addition to identifying strategies to encourage a collective adoption of biosecurity measures.

It Keeps the Good Boy Healthy from Nose to Tail: Understanding Pet Food Attribute Preferences of US Consumers

The study provides insights for marketing managers in specialized pet supplies retailers, as well as for vets and animal welfare organizations. This study proposes a model that investigates the importance pet owners place on convenience, natural ingredients, and value and health claims as product attributes. For this purpose, an online survey with a sample size of 206 pet-owning US residents was conducted. Partial least squares structural equation modelling shows that pet food purchase involvement positively impacts subjective and objective knowledge about pet food. Subjective knowledge appears to be the strongest factor impacting the importance consumers place on all three attributes. This is followed by objective knowledge. Socio-demographic factors such as gender, age, income, and education appear to have a limited impact as predictors for the importance consumers place on the product attributes.

Keeping Lily Safe: An Autoethnographic Exploration of Human–Animal Attachment during Adversity

This article is an autoethnographic examination of my experiences as a pet owner during a particularly challenging time in my life. Beginning with a summary of a critical incident, it shows the way in which fears for the safety of my pet cat, Lily, and my relationship with her impacted my health, wellbeing and identity. Depicting self-knowledge as partial, local and culturally located, I deconstruct the relationship I had with Lily in relation to the particular set of circumstances in which it was situated. I was seen by my doctor and prescribed a course of cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) during this period, and so, my account draws on my medical records, CBT notes and my CBT thought diary in an attempt to understand how and why my anxiety was manifested in my concern for Lily. The article calls for cognitive behaviour therapists to carefully evaluate external stressors before fears are dismissed irrational and reformulated as alternative thoughts. This article also demonstrates that familiesare diverse, and there are many ways of ‘doing family’. For many heterosexual and same-sex couples, pets give stability to a partnership and elevate it to family status, if only within the privacy of the home. Human–animal attachments can be comparable to human–human attachments, and where attachments to pets are as strong as those toward humans, fear of harm can be devastating.

A Multispecies Approach to Co-Sleeping : Integrating Human-Animal Co-Sleeping Practices into Our Understanding of Human Sleep

Human sleeping arrangements have evolved over time and differ across cultures. The majority of adults share their bed at one time or another with a partner or child, and many also sleep with pets. In fact, around half of dog and cat owners report sharing a bed or bedroom with their pet(s). However, interspecies co-sleeping has been trivialized in the literature relative to interpersonal or human-human co-sleeping, receiving little attention from an interdisciplinary psychological perspective. In this paper, we provide a historical outline of the "civilizing process" that has led to current sociocultural conceptions of sleep as an individual, private function crucial for the functioning of society and the health of individuals. We identify similar historical processes at work in the formation of contemporary constructions of socially normative sleeping arrangements for humans and animals. Importantly, since previous examinations of co-sleeping practices have anthropocentrically framed this topic, the result is an incomplete understanding of co-sleeping practices. By using dogs as an exemplar of human-animal co-sleeping, and comparing human-canine sleeping with adult-child co-sleeping, we determine that both forms of co-sleeping share common factors for establishment and maintenance, and often result in similar benefits and drawbacks. We propose that human-animal and adult-child co-sleeping should be approached as legitimate and socially relevant forms of co-sleeping, and we recommend that co-sleeping be approached broadly as a social practice involving relations with humans and other animals. Because our proposition is speculative and derived from canine-centric data, we recommend ongoing theoretical refinement grounded in empirical research addressing co-sleeping between humans and multiple animal species.

Expanding protection motivation theory: investigating an application to animal owners and emergency responders in bushfire emergencies

Background

Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) was developed by Rogers in 1975, to describe how individuals are motivated to react in a self-protective way towards a perceived health threat. Rogers expected the use of PMT to diversify over time, which has proved true over four decades. The purpose of this paper is to explore how PMT can be used and expanded to inform and improve public safety strategies in natural hazards. As global climate change impacts on the Australian environment, natural hazards seem to be increasing in scale and frequency, and Emergency Services’ public education campaigns have necessarily escalated to keep pace with perceived public threat. Of concern, is that the awareness-preparedness gap in residents’ survival plans is narrowing disproportionately slowly compared to the magnitude of resources applied to rectify this trend. Practical applications of adaptable social theory could be used to help resolve this dilemma.

Discussion

PMT has been used to describe human behaviour in individuals, families, and the parent-child unit. It has been applied to floods in Europe and wildfire and earthquake in the United States. This paper seeks to determine if an application of PMT can be useful for achieving other-directed human protection across a novel demographic spectrum in natural hazards, specifically, animal owners and emergency responders in bushfire emergencies.

These groups could benefit from such an approach: owners to build and fortify their response- and self-efficacy, and to help translate knowledge into safer behaviour, and responders to gain a better understanding of a diverse demographic with animal ownership as its common denominator, and with whom they will be likely to engage in contemporary natural hazard management. Mutual collaboration between these groups could lead to a synergy of reciprocated response efficacy, and safer, less traumatic outcomes.

Summary

Emergency services’ community education programs have made significant progress over the last decade, but public safety remains suboptimal while the magnitude of the awareness-preparedness gap persists. This paper examines an expanded, other-directed application of PMT to expand and enhance safer mitigation and response behaviour strategies for communities threatened by bushfire, which may ultimately help save human life.