Why and How to Use this Book

I want nothing less than to completely change how we practice veterinary medicine so that veterinarians and their staff are the driving force advocating for and enhancing patient welfare and for meeting the patient’s cognitive and mental health needs. We must address the single most important aspect of our patients’ well-being—their behavioral needs—using the same rigor and scientific approach that we use to vaccinate patients or treat them for diabetes.

Behavior is the core around which all other aspects of and specialties in veterinary medicine revolve, and it is the determining factor for which kind and how much veterinary care clients seek and patients receive. Behavioral change is how clients recognize that their dog or cat is physically ill and needs veterinary care, and yet most veterinarians are not sufficiently comfortable with their knowledge base in veterinary behavioral medicine to deliver any kind of behavioral care.

One of the reasons for this text is to help ensure every member of the veterinary team gains some comfort level with veterinary behavioral medicine, and that they do so using scientifically based findings as part of evidence-based medicine. By putting the behavioral needs of our patients first, we will also meet our own intellectual, physical, and emotional needs in a way that the modern routine practice of veterinary medicine may not currently permit.

At some point in their lives most people who became veterinarians realized that they liked to watch animals. I fear that we have forgotten how interesting watching cats and dogs can be and, as a result, in a sincere effort to deliver the most modern veterinary medical care, we have left from our business, teaching, and research models the concept of the well-being of our patients. I firmly believe that if we completely change our emphasis—and first focus on understanding our patients’ behaviors and meeting their needs—we shall find ourselves practicing more advanced, state-of-the-art care, we will experience fewer injuries and less burn-out, and we will make a humane difference in our communities, in the lives of our patients, and in the lives of the humans who love the animals with whose care we are charged and entrusted.

This manual will help the practitioner to develop a hands-on, practical approach for meeting the goal of practicing veterinary medicine in a behavior-centered manner. I believe that veterinarians can be a force for good and can consciously participate in effecting cultural change that can address recycled, abandoned, and throw-away pets, and the abuse, neglect, entrapment, and fear that is the burden of far too many dogs and cats. To do this, we must make an effort to understand the dog or cat from the evolutionary/ethological perspective of a dog or cat in a way that addresses their cognitive, social, and mental health needs. If we do this, we will engage in a partnership with our patients based on shared and clear communication.

For such an approach to succeed, we must understand that all of our interactions with animals are based on the animal’s ability to translate what we are signaling to them into a language or application that is meaningful to them. The animal then has to translate the resultant response back into signals that we, as humans, can understand. This is the rule for our interactions with our patients, and it is the rule for studies of the ability to “learn language” in primates and dogs (Aust et al., 2008; Conway and Christiansen, 2001; Hauser et al., 2001; Herman et al., 1984; Kaminski et al., 2004;Taglialatela et al., 2008; Petkov and Taglialatela, 2010; Pilley and Reid, 2011).

Understanding members of our own species can be difficult. Given the translations needed, understanding another species can mean that a lot goes wrong or is missed. This Manual is intended to: (1) decrease the number of interactions that go wrong with your patients, (2) humanely address the needs of dogs and cats whose behaviors are contributing to damaging their relationships with humans and other animals, and (3) help veterinarians to treat patients who are experiencing painful mental distress, and the behavioral, social, and emotional fallout from such mental distress.

Unfortunately, as was true when I wrote my first text 15 years before this one, veterinary schools have yet to make the commitment needed to encourage research in and teaching of veterinary behavioral medicine. Fewer than a dozen schools world-wide have dedicated, combined clinical, didactic, and active research programs in the field. I include research here because so few veterinary schools invest in those who can do rigorous research in this field, so progress using data-driven findings is slow. Yet the most common problems faced by veterinarians in general, community, and shelter medicine practice remain those associated with behavioral issues.

Whether they are primary—the dog destroys the house when left alone—or secondary—the cat needs expensive care and shreds the furniture—behavioral problems affecting our patients and problematic behaviors for clients result in the death or relinquishment of more dogs and cats than do neoplasia, cardiac, and endocrine disease combined (Marston et al., 2004, 2005; Miller et al., 1996; Patronek et al., 1996; Salman et al., 1998; Scarlett et al., 1999; Salman et al., 2000; Shore et al., 2003; Shore, 2005). A quick review of reasons for relinquishment in Melbourne shelters (Marston et al., 2005) (Table 1) shows that even the “owner-related” reasons are influenced by aspects of canine behavior.

Dead dogs and cats do not eat pet food, do not need annual vaccinations, and never have to worry about fleas and ticks and the diseases they carry. Given that most behavioral problems develop or become fully pronounced during social maturity (~1-4 years of age if we consider both cats and dogs), it’s a safe guess that dogs and cats euthanized or relinquished for behavioral reasons never use any complex veterinary services: they don’t live long enough to need treatment for neoplasia or endocrine disease, to warrant a consult with a cardiologist, or to benefit from physical rehabilitation or specialized nutritional care. The biggest untapped fiscal and intellectual “growth market” in veterinary medicine is in the pets lost from the veterinary population because of behavioral concerns.

At some point in their lives, most pets display behaviors that would result in their death or relinquishment, were they in some other household (see Figure 1). Puppies have been known to be killed or seriously injured because of the way they were “disciplined” during housetraining. As veterinarians we view such stories as extreme examples of abuse, but we relentlessly tolerate “corrective” and often coercive training regimens administered by untrained “professionals” (AVSAB Dominance Position Statement: www.avsabonline.org/avsabonline/images/stories/Position_Statements/dominance%20statement.pdf and the Dog Welfare Campaign position statement: www.dogwelfarecampaign.org/why-not-dominance.php). Rather than collaborating with well-schooled and educated, humane trainers, we often simply abdicate any veterinary role in our patients’ behaviors because we lack the expertise to intervene (Brammeier et al., 2006; www.avsabonline.org/avsabonline/images/stories/Position_Statements/how%20to%20choose%20a%20trainer.pdf).

Fortunately, we can change. If we wish to deliver the best and most modern care possible to our patients, we must stop feeding into a cycle where pets are disposable. We can and must lay the groundwork for an ongoing relationship that revolves around understanding and meeting the patient’s cognitive, behavioral and social needs. We can most effectively establish this basis during our first few visits with the patient. These first few visits are the times when we will most profit by learning what the clients actually know about their dog or cat, and where more or better information can help. In some practices, this need can be met by making licensed veterinary technicians responsible for behavioral assessment using standardized questionnaires on which they can...