, they start to associate interactions with people with pain or fear, simply because we are performing normal care activities like giving vaccinations, trimming nails, or cleaning their kennel. Many of these animals don’t have the capacity to put their trust in us right away. They’re generally terrified in the shelter environment. Houghton: We’re usually anxious about things we don’t know about, and dogs are the same. You have to go from what a dog is used to, to gradually expose the dog to something different. It’s really easy to further traumatize these dogs. For a dog who has never lived in a home, a home is traumatizing. For many, many dogs, just going into a shelter is a traumatic event. Segurson: The dog meat trade is an extreme example. They are communicating with us and it’s on us to listen. What is he asking us to do or not do, based on his body language and response to our presence? It can be a long road to build enough trust to share space and have physical contact with them, and until that occurs, it’s important that we don’t push them over threshold and put them in a position that may cause them to react defensively. All of us have that desire to comfort the animal, but we observe carefully and ask ourselves what this particular dog wants. ![]() They don’t want to be touched, so we don’t touch them. ![]() , sometimes it’s almost like we’re working with captive wild animals. Some of these dogs want nothing to do with people. We don’t know how any of them will respond even if we know that they came to us having experienced trauma. It’s looking at the individual rather than the herd and evaluating how that dog is coping in the environment. Houghton: We know something happened, but we don’t necessarily need to know what it was. It’s putting the pieces together and helping the animal feel safe. I don’t know what they did to him with water, but every time he got exposed to water, he ran away and hid. For example, there was a dog from a dogfighting situation who’d been kept in a dark basement. An animal with a traumatized past might have a much more exaggerated response to stimuli. ![]() Segurson: It’s really a foundation of thinking, recognizing that these animals have experienced something. Photo courtesy of Sheila Segurson How would you describe the trauma-informed approach? Sheila Segurson, director of research for Maddie’s Fund, with her son and dog. We are taught to believe that repetition is what animals need to learn, but something that’s scary doesn’t need repetition for them to learn from it-if you touch a hot stove, you don’t need to do it again. (To learn more, check out the downloadable materials available from their presentation at Animal Care Expo in April.) Sheila Segurson, director of research for Maddie’s Fund, talk about the trauma-informed philosophy and the fear-free approach, which puts that philosophy into practice-enabling shelter staff to treat traumatized animals in a way that eventually frees them from a constant state of fight or flight. In this edited Q&A, Audra Houghton of the HSUS, director of operations for the Animal Rescue Team, and Dr. These days, experts know that by recognizing and addressing the trauma and fear animals may bring to shelters-from their genes, stress in the womb, early separation from mothers or a stressful environment, such as a dog meat farm, a puppy mill or an abuse situation-we can save their lives. In the past, dogs exhibiting these behaviors might have difficulty finding homes, or even be euthanized. Shelter and rescue folks know that traumatized dogs are more likely to excessively bark, show fearfulness on walks, react in an extreme way to noises, and display food and toy possessiveness and attention-seeking behavior. Ask the expert: Treating trauma How these HSUS and Maddie’s Fund experts practice the trauma-informed philosophy and save dogs’ livesĭogs at a former dog meat farm in Yongin, South Korea, in 2021.
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