NAIA Official Blog

Congratulations to Kate Eldredge, dog writer extraordinaire and contributor to NAIA’s Discover Animals, for winning the AKC Responsible Dog Ownership Public Service Award with her article The First 24 Hours with Your New Dog. Not only is her piece a great little read, it is full of helpful advice that lays the groundwork for a happy, lifelong bond with your dog. Hard to beat that combo!

Way to go, Kate, and to all of the Dog Writers Association of America nominees and winners.

Here’s a thoughtful article about compassion fatigue as an occupational hazard for veterinarians, its contributing factors, and suggestions for combating it.

Compassion fatigue is defined as:

fatigue, emotional distress, or apathy resulting from the constant demands of caring for others or from constant appeals from charities: “compassion fatigue experienced by doctors and nurses.”

It is most commonly applied to (human) healthcare practitioners and individuals who have gone past the point of saturation with pleas for and/or sensationalist tragedies, but it doesn’t take a leap to see how it could affect veterinarians as well. Long hours, stressed and occasionally abusive owners, not being able to save every animal — even a labor of love can be emotionally taxing.

When we published “Burnout: The Monster in the Rescue Closet” back in 2003, which dealt with the stress, anger, and guilt that can accumulate in those who devote their lives to rescue, it was amazing how many readers wrote us to say “That’s ME in that article!” and gratifying to hear how Vicki DeGruy’s suggestions helped people find balance in their life while still helping animals.

The existence of compassion fatigue (or more simply: “burnout”) has been known in the medical community for a long, long time (it was officially diagnosed way back in the 1950s), so it is doubtful there will be a flurry of epiphanies among veterinarians as there was among people in the rescue community 12 years ago. But the above article is important for spreading awareness to people outside the field. As an outsider, when you see somebody who is intelligent, capable, and lucky enough to be pursuing their life’s dream, it can easy to dismiss the emotional toll of their job.

What happened when Cornell University tried to reign in an out of control deer population by performing tubal ligations on the does?

Well, as you’d expect, the birth rate went down, but the problem wasn’t solved: the population stayed the same, as it was maintained by mature bucks …

Something was attracting an abnormal number of mature bucks. Cornell’s biologists realized that the reproductive cycle of the ligated does was to blame.

Under normal conditions, all female whitetails go into heat within several weeks of each other and become pregnant at around the same time. This annual event is called the rut. However, if a doe is not impregnated during the rut, it will enter heat again the following month and again the month after that. Because the ligated does were unable to become pregnant, they continued to produce chemical signals of readiness to reproduce — signals that can attract bucks from miles away.

At $1,200 per doe, that’s an expensive surprise!

Cute, but catastrophic when mixed with traffic.

Volunteer hunters (who would eat or donate deer meat) are a proven inexpensive and effective way to reduce the population, but the university continued to seek out a nonlethal solution to the “deer problem.” So they began surgically removing ovaries from does, and were yet again quickly met with another unbelievable surprise:

Even after the surgical removal of their ovaries, one of the three deer became pregnant again. It is not clear how this was possible. One supposition is that some ovarian tissue may have escaped the scalpel and regrown into a functioning ovary.

Of course, this reproductive tenacity is probably a lot more fascinating (and amusing) to people who don’t have to deal with deer eating their gardens, causing auto accidents, or Lyme disease, but it does serve as a valuable lesson of the things that can go wrong when we try to outsmart nature. The ovaries win this round!

Most kids love dogs, but not all kids love reading aloud. For some children, reading in front of adults or peers makes them extremely anxious or embarrassed, and can contribute to them falling behind in reading fluency — a very dangerous road to go down.

A student who can’t read on grade level by 3rd grade is four times less likely to graduate by age 19 than a child who does read proficiently by that time.

But again: most kids love dogs. So here’s where Ghost, a champion show dog and great listener comes into the story.  Ghost’s owner Dawn Eliot-Johnson brings him to Harrison Elementary School every two weeks, where third and fourth-grade students read to him as he dutifully listens (and often sleeps) while curled up beside them. Ghost, along with many other dogs across the country perform this duty for kids who could use a bit of help reading aloud, and it’s not just a fun break from classroom routine… it works!

Kids who were once too shy or embarrassed about their skill level to read out loud are blossoming. They know that Ghost just wants to listen to a good story — no criticism, no corrections. It doesn’t take long for fear and anxiety to go out the window.

The idea is simple: it’s a privilege to read to a dog. Instead of reading aloud while focused on avoiding mistakes, they’re reading to an adoring, completely non-judgmental audience. Reading becomes a positive, rather than nerve-wracking experience; they gain confidence and an enjoyment in reading, which in turn improves comprehension and fluency. The dogs love it, too: it takes a special, gentle dog who doesn’t just tolerate, but truly enjoys children to thrive in this setting. And as a side-benefit, it also serves as a great opportunity to teach children another life-skill: how to behave safely and respectfully around dogs. Win-win!

Dogs often make the best listeners!

Having kids read to pets to avoid anxiety and fear of judgment by adults or peers is not a new tactic — groups like R.E.A.D. and Reading with Rover have been around for years, but in case there are still any doubters out there, research is now demonstrating an improvement in reading fluency, showing that they’ve had the right idea all along.

The world of animal welfare can be such a battlefield at times, it would be a shame not to look up from the trenches from time to time to celebrate great ideas like this!

NAIA is home to some of the top animal health, husbandry, welfare and performance experts in the United States. As experts, we view it as our responsibility to challenge popular, but incorrect information about animals that is presented by the media or stakeholder groups, including the many animal rights fundraising groups who dominate the conversation in popular culture today.

False notions are difficult to counter. Because of their appeal to our empathy, intuition, or personal prejudice, they are easily accepted as true and made part of a larger worldview. And with modern media, they can catch fire, spreading far and wide within seconds.

So how do most people determine the veracity of what they are hearing? In the absence of  contrary evidence and critical thinking, they don’t.

But at NAIA when we recognize that so-called “designer dogs” are being hyped as genetically healthier than pure-bred dogs without supporting evidence, we don’t turn to our neighbor, hairdresser, astrologer, or Oprah, but to the leading experts for additional information to put the subject in perspective. We reach out to top breeders, veterinarians, animal geneticists, and trainers – people with subject matter knowledge gained through formal education and hands-on experience – to see what they have to say.

Once investigated, it often becomes clear that the story isn’t complete at all – and it always ends up being more nuanced and complex than an email forward or Facebook feed. In the end, we may not prove any particular point, but that’s okay. Our goal is simply to provide better sources of information than we started with, information that lays the foundation for improved policies and practices.

This is what we do. In the end, you may not like our conclusions, but whenever an animal issue is clouded by hype or propaganda – be it views on animal husbandry, pet overpopulation, conformation policies, shelter dynamics, or contentious practices – you can be sure we will seek out the experts before setting our own policies.

If you’re not yet familiar with us yet, please check out our website, and if you like what you see, please support our efforts.  We’re here for you and need your help to fulfill our mission!