New directions in the human-animal bond
Скачать книги из серии New directions in the human-animal bondThe Extraordinary Spirit of Green Chimneys
Green Chimneys is a nationally renowned US nonprofit organization that helps improve the lives of at-risk urban children by incorporating animals and environmental activities into their educational experiences. Founded by Dr. Samuel (Rollo) B. Ross, Jr., “Green Chimneys Farm for Little Folk” opened its doors in 1948 with just eleven students. The property has since expanded to cover nearly seven hundred fifty acres in New York, and the school now serves almost two hundred students. Recognized as a worldwide leader in animal-assisted therapy and activities, Green Chimneys provides innovative and caring services for children and their families, as well as the animals with which they spend time. It targets its services at restoring emotional well-being and fostering independence. For over sixty years, Ross developed and operated this innovative and experimental year-round school, and he still remains integrally involved. This book recounts his experiences, sharing a lifetime of practical learning and insights to benefit and inspire all those who work with troubled children, and who believe in the healing power of the natural world.
Come, Let Me Guide You
Come, Let Me Guide You explores the intimate communication between author Susan Krieger and her guide dog Teela over the ten-year span of their working life together. This is a book about being led by a dog to new places in the world and new places in the self, a book about facing life's challenges outwardly and within, and about reading those clues-those deeply felt signals-that can help guide the way. It is also, more broadly, about the importance of intimate connection in human-animal relationships, academic work, and personal life.In her previous book, Traveling Blind: Adventures in Vision with a Guide Dog by My Side, Krieger focused on her first two years with Teela, her lively Golden Retriever-Yellow Labrador. Come, Let Me Guide You continues the narrative, beginning at the moment the author must confront Teela's retirement and then reflecting on the entire span of their relationship. These emotionally moving stories offer the reader personal entrée into a life of increasing pleasure and insight as Krieger describes how her relationship with her guide dog has had far-reaching effects, not only on her abilities to navigate the world while blind, but also on her writing and teaching, her ability to face loss, and her sense of self.Come, Let Me Guide You is an invaluable contribution to the literature on human-animal communication and on the guide-dog-human experience, as well as to disability and feminist ethnographic studies. It shows how a relationship with a guide dog is unique among bonds, for it rests upon highly regulated connections yet touches deep emotional chords. For Krieger, those chords have resulted in these memorable stories, often humorous and playful, always instructive, and generative of broader insight.
Unleashed Fury
The question of whether dogs should be allowed off the leash in public places has become a major political issue in cities and suburbs across the United States. In the last two decades, “leash-law disputes” have burst upon the political scene and have been debated with an intensity usually reserved for such hot-button issues as abortion and gun rights. This book investigates what has changed in American community life, social mores, and the relationship between humans and dogs to provoke such passionate responses. At its heart, the book details and evaluates the handling of three leash-law disputes, all of which were exceedingly divisive and emotionally intense. Two of the cases took place in San Francisco, a city with a reputation as one of the most dog-friendly in the United States until 2001–2002, when officials curtailed off-leash walking. The other case study occurred in 1998 in Avon—a wealthy suburb of Hartford, Connecticut,—when town officials unilaterally imposed a leash law at a popular off-leash park. This book is not only a revealing study of Americans’ conflicted attitudes toward animals and the difficult balance between individual rights and the public good in our communities. It is also a useful source of information for both dog owners and local government officials who are faced with leash-law disagreements.
Walk a Hound, Lose a Pound
A dog is an ideal workout partner: always supportive, happy to go for a walk and never judgmental. The human-companion animal bond is a great way to help you and your dog lose weight or stay fit. When people and dogs exercise together, fitness and health happen on both ends of the leash. As the obesity epidemic spreads, 70% of Americans and 50% of dogs are overweight or obese, resulting in staggering health care costs and suffering. The causes, consequences, and treatment for overweight and obesity are strikingly similar in people and dogs. Walk a Hound, Lose a Pound, written by an expert veterinary surgeon and a leading nurse researcher, helps you move from a food-centered relationship with dogs, to an exercise-centered relationship. Even better, you don’t have to own a dog! The book gives several creative suggestions to exercise or walk a dog even if you do not or cannot have one. This volume is designed for dog lovers, dog owners and families. Based on the latest scientific findings, it will also help professionals (including physicians, veterinarians, and physical therapists) fight obesity and promote fitness in both people and pets. Dog-walking programs can easily be implemented in neighborhoods, parks, workplaces, animal shelters, hospitals, retirement homes and obesity clinics, and this book shows you how to establish them. In nearly every health care profession, practitioners are teaching human patients and dog owners on a daily basis about the risks of obesity. Never has there been a more compelling time for innovative approaches to increasing physical activity, reforming sedentary lifestyles, and enhancing fitness. Walk a Hound, Lose a Pound provides specific strategies for people and dogs to exercise together, lose weight together, and have fun in the process.
Your Ideal Cat
For a happy relationship with your cat, go beyond the looks and make your pick based on demonstrated breed behavior. This is the advice of the Harts, two experts in animal communication and behavior, whose new book takes the process of selecting a cat to the next level by offering data-based behavioral profiles of a wide range of cat breeds. Developed over a lifetime of research and through extensive interviews with eighty veterinary experts, the profiles are presented in easy-to-use graphical form. A history of the development of different breeds is presented, and then breed-specific differences across a range of variables are discussed. These include twelve behavioral traits, in areas such as affection, sociality, activity level, and litter box use. After giving guidance about choosing a cat, the authors present some strategies for avoiding problem behaviors and resolving those that emerge. They also share fascinating theories about the origins of various common cat behaviors, including purring, yawning, eating grass, «flipping out» on catnip, and staking out territory. While the focus is on purebred cats, there is also lots of good information for owners of blends. The book ends with helpful guidance on further reading. Based on the latest science, this is a great book for anyone interested in the fundamental building blocks of feline behavior, and an invaluable handbook for cat owners.
The Golden Bridge
In The Golden Bridge, Patty Dobbs Gross explains how specially bred and trained dogs facilitate communication for children with autism and other developmental disabilities. This important work is a guide for parents, teachers, and therapists alike, and is written for all those who are dealing with the social, emotional, and educational issues related to raising children with such cognitive challenges. The Golden Bridge explores unique and complex issues inherent in living with autism, training an assistance dog to work with a child with autism or a developmental disability, and using an assistance dog to deal with a child's grief. Myths and labels about autism are explored, examined, and carefully redefined. While focusing on children with autism in The Golden Bridge, Dobbs Gross shares key insights applicable to anyone breeding, raising, training, and working with dogs to mitigate any type of disability at any age. This impressive volume also contains a list of resources for follow-up information, a section on books about autism, and a directory of assistance dog providers.
That Sheep May Safely Graze
The very mention of Afghanistan conjures images of war, international power politics, the opium trade, and widespread corruption. Yet the untold story of Afghanistan’s seemingly endless misfortune is the disruptive impact that prolonged conflict has had on ordinary rural Afghans, their culture, and the timeless relationship they share with their land and animals. In rural Afghanistan, when animals die, livelihoods are lost, families and communities suffer, and people may perish. That Sheep May Safely Graze details a determined effort, in the midst of war, to bring essential veterinary services to an agrarian society that depends day in and day out on the well-being and productivity of its animals, but which, because of decades of war and the disintegration of civil society, had no reliable access to even the most basic animal health care. The book describes how, in the face of many obstacles, a dedicated group of Afghan and expatriate veterinarians working for a small nongovernmental organization (NGO) in Kabul was able to create a national network of over 400 veterinary field units staffed by over 600 veterinary paraprofessionals. These paravets were selected by their own communities and then trained and outfitted by the NGO so that nearly every district in the country that needed basic veterinary services now has reliable access to such services. Most notably, over a decade after its inception and with Afghanistan still in free fall, this private sector, district-based animal health program remains vitally active. The community-based veterinary paraprofessionals continue to provide quality services to farmers and herders, protecting their animals from the ravages of disease and improving their livelihoods, despite the political upheavals and instability that continue to plague the country. The elements contributing to this sustainability and their application to programs for improved veterinary service delivery in developing countries beyond Afghanistan are described in the narrative.
Teaming With Your Therapy Dog
Todays therapy-dog handlers recognize the need to be teammates with their dogs. Teaming with ones dog involves unobtrusively providing physical and emotional support as well as respectful guidance in what to do. Being a teammate requires attention to our own behavior, not just our dogs. This book reminds all handlers that being conscious of what we do with our dogs helps them do their best work, and also can increase the effectiveness of our visits.Teaming with Your Therapy Dog teaches the STEPs of Teamwork and how those STEPs fit with the Therapy Dogs Bill of Rights. These general principles free handlers to apply them in their own way to their therapy dogs individual personality and work, and to everyday life at home! As the author writes, The book explores a way of being conscious of what you do with and to your therapy dog to support him in his work. It describes functional principles of behavior you can learn and use immediately, either together as a package or independently. Using an exciting new methodology, the author guides readers to deepen their relationship with their dogs by acting consciously and respectfully.
Pet Politics
Although scholars in the disciplines of law, psychology, philosophy, and sociology have published a considerable number of prescriptive, normative, and theoretical studies of animals in society, Pet Politics presents the first study of the development of companion animal or pet law and policy in Canada and the United States by political scientists. The authors examine how people and governments classify three species of pets or companion animals-cats, dogs, and horses-for various degrees of legal protection. They then detail how interest groups shape the agenda for companion animal legislation and regulation, and the legislative and administrative formulation of anticruelty, kennel licensing, horse slaughter, feral and roaming cat, and breed ban policies. Finally, they examine the enforcement of these laws and policies by agencies and the courts. Using an eclectic mix of original empirical data, original case studies, and interviews-and relying on general theories and research about the policy process and the sociopolitical function of legality-the authors illustrate that pet policy is a unique field of political struggle, a conflict that originates from differing perspectives about whether pets are property or autonomous beings, and clashing norms about the care of animals. The result of the political struggle, the authors argue, is difficulty in the enactment of policies and especially in the implementation and enforcement of laws that might improve the welfare of companion animals.
On Dogs and Dying
Dogs know when we are feeling down. They love it when we are happy and seeking friendship and fun, and they understand when we are feeling sad and desperate. This book presents a series of real-life tales of the positive effects dogs have had on people at the end of their lives, chronicling the visits by two therapy dogs, Woody and Katie, to patients in a south Florida hospice facility. Through twenty-one stories, infused with humor amidst the sadness, Michelle Rivera, an experienced animal therapist, explores the many ways in which animals can ease human suffering. Her book begins with the deeply personal story of her own mother Katherine's illness and dying appeal to have the company of a dog, and proceeds to tell the stories of patients young and old who the author was inspired to visit with her «hospice hounds.» As well as demonstrating many of the techniques of animal therapy, Rivera argues powerfully that not allowing pets in health care facilities is a counterproductive policy that deprives patients of comfort at the time they need it most.Some of the stories were previously published in Hospice Hounds (2001), but the author has substantially expanded her introduction and added an invaluable final section that gives practical tips on training and certifying your dog to be a therapy animal.