Abstract
As new editors, Michael and I are keen to understand the interests of our readership. One way of doing this has been to look at which papers are our most popular downloads.
I noticed recently that two papers about Animal-Assisted Therapy (AAT) appear among the top 10 on the site list, and I was prompted to explore the topic further. My reading led me to consider how involvement with animals and creature talk has been an unacknowledged and little-explored part of my own clinical practice and personal history. I have enjoyed taking a look at the literature and reflecting on aspects of my own history and clinical work that had hitherto passed my notice. I hope readers will be prompted to do likewise.
As a child growing up we had the usual (in the UK) pet hamsters and a rabbit, and eventually, after much persuasion (dad was worried about the birds in the garden), a much-loved black cat who remained at ‘home’ years after we children had moved on. I married a man whose young sons were fascinated by creatures, so trips to zoos and wildlife parks were a frequent part of our early family life. These kinds of trips still play a part in our lives; the two boys’ childhood interest in the natural world has grown into an enduring passion and professional careers for them both.
I shan’t forget the awe I felt many years ago as we all watched a family of gorillas as they played and looked after their young, albeit in a very large cage in a wildlife park. We were spellbound and watched in silence for almost an hour: talking afterwards for a long time about our experience; our excited reactions tempered by mixed feelings about seeing wild animals in captivity.
Already, in this brief personal reflection, a mixed picture of human relationships with animals is emerging; enjoyed as pets, protected in the garden, looked and wondered at in captivity, studied and conserved in the wild. A fuller exploration of this complex and often paradoxical relationship is beyond the scope of this editorial but can be found in John Berger’s essay (2009) ‘Why Look at Animals’ and Erica Fudge’s (2002) ‘Animal’.
As a psychologist in training, I remember a piece of couples work, carried out with a supervisor, that were conducted almost entirely through talking about the relationship between the couples’ two dogs. Later in training, I remember a parent letting me know that although our meetings had been helpful, the purchase of a puppy had brought about a real transformation in family life.
In my current practice, working with families and medical teams in a large teaching hospital, I would have said have said I don’t use animals. Nevertheless, in my consulting room I have a much-handled bag of puppets including a fox, a bear, a rabbit and a box of plastic creepy crawlies, which include flies, spiders and beetles. The books on my shelves also include many children’s titles with animals as key figures. I use animal imagery in guided relaxation, if children ask, and always enquire about family pets. The younger children I meet as in-patients on the medical wards will almost always have a cuddly toy with them, often a creature. Such companions are always acknowledged and, if appropriate invited to take part in a consultation. (For a lovely example of a toy bear’s involvement in a reflecting team intervention see Fredman and Christie (2007)). The play staff I work with in the hospital can often be found, at children’s request, making a bandage, catheter or long line for ‘Smudge’ or ‘Milly’. So it seems that talking about and with creatures and their representations has become so embedded in my practice that I have hardly noticed. This exercise has provided a welcome opportunity for me to pick this apart a little and reflect upon the everyday nature of my engagement with different kinds of creature talk.
Almost all the elements above – family life with our own pets, how pets and animals come up in everyday family work and the wider ethics of human relationships with the animal and natural world – are explored in Walsh (2009). She offers her perspective on the role of pets in family functioning, how they can become part of family rituals and can present children with challenges about care taking, rule setting, roles and authority. She also describes the roles that pets can have at times of family crisis. In my own practice I have heard many stories about the comfort that a pet can bring to a very sick child; families commonly report the apparent sensitivity of pet animals to these challenging situations. Walsh also draws our attention to the way in which the death of a pet can impact on a child. She outlines a framework for thinking about children’s reactions to this particular kind of loss and for building capacity and resilience in children through acknowledging and sharing these experiences.
However, all the above is different from actually involving live animals as part of a planned therapeutic intervention. Kruger and Serpel (2006) provide a theoretical overview of the field and highlight the challenge of bringing together a very wide ranging and diverse literature. They suggest that “animal-assisted interventions are best described as a category of promising and complimentary practices that are still struggling to demonstrate their efficacy and validity” (p. 21). So it is good to see that we are publishing papers in this field that are of interest to readers, and that we can play a part in moving our understanding in this area forward.
The two papers that made popular reading (Bach, 2011; Parish-Plass, 2008), or at least popular downloading, both considered the role of AAT with at-risk and very troubled children, and offered an attachment focussed rationale for their work. The two papers reminded me of a third in our archive describing the Bee Kind Garden (Worsham & Goodvin, 2007), which also explored the use of the natural world in helping children who have experienced maltreatment. These three papers offer different perspectives; however, all three invite us to think about the potential impact that the use of animals and other elements of the natural world can have on building relationship capacities in children and young people who have been neglected and abused. While the papers all make reference to attachment theories as part of their underlying rationale, several themes also emerged for me that were particularly related to the use of animals.
The context in which the work takes place is necessarily different from the usual therapy setting. It may be a stable, a field, a garden or a room that has been adapted to be animal friendly. Some of these environments will be new to children and young people, and in themselves may offer challenges and opportunities for discovery. However, engaging with an adapted environment also introduces a child or young person to the experience of care-giving and care-receiving right from the outset. Such environments have rules for the safety and care of both humans and animals, which establish important boundaries. In a stable, for example, there will be rules about running and shouting, and also about putting things away and cleaning up. These provide active learning opportunities in a more acceptable way for children and young people who have not had experience of this kind of containment. There will also be rules about how the animals must be treated. These boundaries are clearly important therapeutically, but also important for both human and animal welfare; for a fuller discussion about ethical practices and the safeguarding of creatures in AAT see Evans and Gray (2012).
What animals are was another theme that emerged from my reading: Fudge (2002) suggests that we humans have a fascination for animals that is, in part, born of their similarity and difference to us. Like us, they are born, they live, they breathe and they die, and they communicate, yet they don’t speak. In all three papers we hear how the coexistence of this living similarity and living difference brings an element to the therapeutic encounter that is somehow at the heart of the work undertaken. There is another life to be considered – that of the animal – whose very nature seems to make a new encounter more possible.
There are differences too, between what each animal can bring. A horse, for example, is a large, responsive and very powerful animal that can be ridden, led, driven and groomed. A horse’s behaviour will depend on how it is handled, and will give fairly immediate and potentially dangerous feedback if not handled well. Horses can also be trained, they respond to individuals and appear to get to know particular people. In contrast, a small rodent may be vulnerable, afraid, may need to stay in its cage, or will need considerable coaxing to eat from a hand, or climb up an arm held still.
Animals come with life stories of their own; they can be responsive but can also be unpredictable. Rescue animals may have been badly treated and need special care. In different ways animals’ stories may resonate with those of the children and young people. In the case examples provided, the reaction of the animal to its past treatment and its current needs provided different opportunities for young people to engage with their own stories at a distance and in new way. This was done through their active interaction and / or care of the animal in the context of a set of reciprocal relationships; the young person with the animal, the therapist with the young person and the animal with the therapist.
All together, animals have been used in a range of contexts to help provide consistency, connection, trust and acceptance. The animals’ different kind of livingness, together with the therapists’ frame, facilitates the possibility of new ways of relating.
I am aware that the themes and stories in these papers unexpectedly captured my imagination; I liked the rich ideas presented for working with a hard-to-reach and often worrying group of children and young people. The authors call our attention to methods and analysis that are well suited to exploring this area in terms of developing theoretical rationale and describing outcome. It is this combination of clinical thinking and attention to rationale and the use of appropriate tools of enquiry that is the hallmark of the two most popular papers. Maybe it is this, together with our common fascination with human/animal relationships that has seen these papers find enduring interest in our readership.