In this blog I will be considering a particular methodological approach to caring for damaged life that can bring about new levels of insight and care for vulnerable populations of dogs.
As an applied Anthrozoologist, my frontline and academic work sits within the context of scholarly activism. As such, I’ve entitled this blog ‘shifting paradigms in
dog rescue’, and this is something that I very much advocate for. My research as an Anthrozoologist has always been focused on what happens when humans and dogs come together, and it has taken me to spaces where I can look at these transspecies encounters and comment on what I’ve found.
I have been looking at the case for why trauma can be a useful lens through which to care for
dogs who have undergone emotional, physical, or ancestral trauma. I have been asking questions through this lens; considering why trauma, what is trauma and why does trauma matter?
I will also explore how taking a ‘whole-dog approach’ is better than thinking mechanistically about only medical needs or behaviour traits. And also, how these dovetail with literature on the importance of considering the individual animal and their subjective needs, in opposition to homogenous understandings about groups of animals based on a limited set of taxonomic characteristics (e.g. breed).
The whole-dog approach explicitly recognises that each animal is, first and foremost, an individual. In this blog, the whole-dog approach is juxta positioned with some of the attempts by industrial animal production systems to homogenise and therefore erase the idea that animals are individuals. The conflict between foregrounding individuals and acknowledging the oppressive systems from which they have emerged is a theme that requires regular critical thought and contemplation.
I will finish by thinking about a new paradigm for helping
rescue dogs – ‘trauma-informed care’.
Like many, I started my own journey by volunteering for an adoption group and caring for dogs as they arrived at rescue centres. And like many, a chance meeting with a few individuals moved me to dedicate my work and my research to better serving them.
I discovered that many people who worked tirelessly to save, rehabilitate and re-home these dogs had very little real-life experiential knowledge about the environments that had birthed and then rejected them. And so, a big piece of the picture was missing.
I have had lots to say about rescuing dogs over the years and tried to highlight some of the challenges faced by both adopters and dogs. And I have also started to speak critically about normalizing the transition that these dogs are assumed to make when they are rescued.
I have used Snow and Benford’s ‘Collective action framing’ (Snow and Benford, 2000) to ask questions such as, ‘Is this a fair social life for these dogs?’ and ‘is it fair to expect greyhounds for example, to transition from a race dog to a companion dog?’
Specifically, in trying to better understand the lives
and experience of contemporary dogs I have been trying to make sense of:
1. What I was seeing (oddly passive, generally quiet
shutdown dogs)
2. What I was hearing (gentle sweet dogs, good with children,
ideal therapy dogs)
3. What I could never know (the full embodied history
of each dog)
4. What I wanted to know (more about the experiences
of dogs who came to rescue)
As I started to put these pieces together what has
emerged is the intention to craft a more
care-ful knowledge, in which
each piece can be informed by the other, to reveal a fuller picture – or even a
blueprint- of how to help these dogs.
Carol
Adams (2018) describes traumatic knowledge or experience as:
“...
a painful
knowledge—knowledge about everyday practices and everyday sufferings. Traumatic
knowledge makes us feel the suffering of animals acutely. It feels relentless.
It does not provide relief but intensifies our emotional connections to animals”.
I’m sure many of us can relate to that.
So, thinking more about trauma as a concept; it can be
useful to describe it in three ways.
Examples of physical and emotional trauma are well
documented, whereas ancestral trauma may be a new concept to some.
Physical
traumas may include injuries resulting from impact or collisions like RTAs,
which may cause internal bleeding as well as external limb or tissue damage.
Work to understand
emotional trauma has derived from
unethical and cruel laboratory experiments on animals such as the Harlow
maternal deprivation experiments with monkeys which started in the 1950s, and
Seligman’s in famous Shuttle Box experiments with dogs to understand how
control of one’s environment impacts our actions.
In what can only be considered a cruel irony, both
sets of experiments have laid the foundations for understanding than non-human
animals are emotional beings and can experience emotional trauma.
Ancestral trauma is perhaps a new concept in relation
to the experiences of dogs. It suggests that the past can influence the present
in both physical and psychological ways. We know from research with humans who
experience PTSD that the past can pervade the present in dark and frightening
ways. Though curiously, PTSD remains a contested term for dogs, despite a
growing body of research which suggests otherwise.
Research from fields as diverse as neuroscience,
cognitive ethology and anthropology have attested to the internal emotional
lives of animals. And so, we must start from the premise that dogs are
emotional beings. That they can feel sadness, joy, happiness, grief, anger,
despair.
Mark Bekoff writes prolifically on the lives of dogs
and reminds us that canine emotional states are subjectively experienced by
them. And that rather than look for human-centric ‘tick lists’ of internal
states, we must measure other animals using their own yardsticks.
This perhaps points to some of the trouble we have in
identifying emotional trauma – we can’t help but look at it through
anthropocentric eyes.
Anthropologist Barbara King speaks about this in her work
examining grief in other animals. She writes:
“
We shouldn’t fall
into the trap of making universality a criterion for the existence of a
phenomenon – by which I mean, we shouldn’t require every dog to grieve in order
to believe that some dogs do.” King (2013; 29).
Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp also believes that the
cognitive consequences of the internal emotional states of animals vary from
animal to animal.
So therefore, it’s not a case of asking if they feel, but
more a case of thinking more thoroughly about what they may feel and crucially,
how might they express this, and how we can better recognise what they are
telling us.
Emotional trauma may be so often missed in other
species because we don’t understand how it is being expressed.
Seligman’s pain-inducing shock experiments with dogs
in the 1970s uncovered the significance of what he termed “uncontrollable
traumatic events”.
This describes how dogs operantly learn that responding to
external stimuli controls rewards and punishments. However, the same dog may
cease responding if they have experience of inescapable and uncontrollable
trauma. In his experiments, two thirds of dogs who have previously experienced
uncontrollable shocks, did not try to escape the shocks, even when exit routes
were offered, but instead gave up whining and howling and sat or lay down
quietly.
Seligman termed this interference with adaptive
responding to aversive events, ‘Learned helplessness’, as the dogs in his
experiment seemed to give up and passively accept the shocks they were
receiving.
In his 1972 chapter entitled ‘Learned Helplessness’,
he wrote:|
“
Not
only do we face events that we can control by our actions, but we also face
many events about which we can do nothing at all. Such uncontrollable events
can significantly debilitate organisms: they produce passivity in the face of
trauma, inability to learn that responding is effective, and emotional stress
in animals…” (p140).
He suggested that there were 3 basic effects of
uncontrollable trauma:
Passivity in the face of trauma. I am reminded here of haunting images I’ve seen
of oddly calm looking, even catatonic, dogs in the meat trucks on the way
to slaughterhouses in China.
Being slow to learn that their responses control
trauma. Here I am thinking of the
propensity for former battery hens to ‘plant’ in their cages when offered
the freedom of a grassy expanse.
Experiencing high levels of stress. This is a more ambiguous measure and more
challenging to detect. Though I guess it goes without saying that being
unable to escape something which causes you pain or fear, would be an
incredibly stressful experience.
Traumatised dogs would adopt a passive position if
presented with any attempts to engage them.
The case for ancestral trauma asks the question: Could
trauma be stored in the genetics of the dogs alive today? Moreover, HOW is this
trauma of ancestors stored genetically in the bodies and minds of living dogs?
These are fledgling questions when it comes to
understanding non-human animal experience. Yet they are inspired by Rachel
Yehuda’s neurobiological work on human PTSD patients at the Mount Sinai School
of Medicine in New York. She discovered that the children of Holocaust
survivors who had PTSD were born with low cortisol levels like their parents,
predisposing them to relive the PTSD symptoms of the previous generation.
Mark
Wolynn of the Family Constellation Institute has further explored what he terms
‘inherited family trauma’ or ‘transgenerational trauma’ which describes the
fragments of trauma ‘sleeping inside’ individuals and that are too great to be
resolved in one generation.
These are prickly issues, but if we consider this
together with Seligman’s disturbing findings, we begin to ask ourselves; do we
have a whole population of companion dogs who are ancestrally as well as, in
some cases, physically and emotionally traumatized?
Taking a whole-dog approach to helping dogs who have
experienced trauma involves stepping outside of the mechanistic understandings
of behaviour and criteria that often preoccupy trainers and behaviourists and
thinking more globally about the forces which have acted on the lives of our
companion dogs.
It reminds us that we must really step back to see
both the embodied experience and long-term consequences of trauma. And that we
must couple this conscious knowledge of the systemic oppressive practices which
have contributed to the life of the individual we have in front of us.
This is
far from a simple process. It requires accepting that helping these dogs
requires care packages, ways of thinking and speaking about these dogs, which
fully reflect this.
One practical way in which we can achieve a whole dog
approach to helping traumatized dogs is to frame our support as
‘trauma-informed care’. Again, this is an established approach to working with
humans who have experienced acute or complex traumas and is inspired by trauma
theory, of which much is written.
For a helpful overview of trauma in humans, I
would recommend ‘The Body Keeps the Score’ by Bassel van del Kolk, which is on
the reading list for this blog.
Trauma-informed care places value on non-therapeutic
environments as being spaces of potential healing and resilience. The three
pillars model is derived from work with children who have experienced complex
trauma (see for example, Bath, 2008; 18).
It is also reminiscent of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which reflects
the diversity of humans needs.
Back to dogs now, one of the greatest challenges that many
dogs face in companion homes is managing their arousal to stimuli.
Therefore, in companion homes, rescue dogs are often
hypervigilant and deeply sensitive to environmental stimuli. They may
constantly scan the horizon for signs of danger and their reactions to these
things may be on a hair trigger. Or they may suppress behaviours relating to
their emotional states to passively cope with the things they find
overwhelming.
Suppressed or inhibited dogs can be of great concern, since they
may not give overt signs of their distress, pain or anxiety and thus, important
clues to their inner emotional states may be missed.
Utilising the three pillars approach would involve a
fusion of cognitive knowledge and embodied empathy approaches, to care for traumatized
rescue dogs with conscious attention to what they may need in addition to what
they have been through.
I have adapted the language here to reflect that which
may resonate with caregivers of dogs.
The first pillar will be
safety. This can be as
simple as removal from a potentially life-threatening situation (e.g., serious
injury after a RTA) or may refer to the holistic assessment of a traumatized
dog to understand what they need in order to be safe.
The second pillar relates to the
relationships and
connections that traumatized dogs can build with others; this may be with
humans, conspecifics, or other animals. We must remember that, like humans,
dogs are a social species, with highly complex and nuanced relationships with
others. We must satiate this need for traumatized dogs to build relationships
with others, without forcing them to ‘be social’ in a home too quickly.
And the third pillar, relates more to the efforts to
support recovery and resilience-building, as it pays attention to the
support a dog would need to process and work through their current and former
traumas.
In language that most dog trainers and behaviourists understand, this
may include a programme of gradual desensitization and counter conditioning to
environmental stimuli. It can also mean taking positive action around the
emotional setpoint of any dog at any current time.
I would like to come back full circle and propose a
new paradigm for supporting rescue dogs. I would also like to end by posing
some questions that I would like you to contemplate, since the design of
trauma-informed care packages involves what we say as much as what we do.
Namely, I’d like to ask:
- How can we practically craft more comfortable narratives to help
traumatized dogs?
- How can we communicate the needs of traumatized dogs to an adoptive
public who are heavily emotionally invested in saving dogs’ lives?
- How can we create care regimes which pay conscious attention to keeping
traumatized populations of dogs safe and connected so that they can begin to
heal and ask new questions of the world?
So, I’ll leave these with you and look forward to
hearing your thoughts and ideas around how trauma-informed care can work for
the dogs whom you support.
References
Adams,
C. (2018). Traumatic Knowledge and Animal Exploitation Part 1: What is it?
Available from: https://caroljadams.com/carol-adams-blog/traumatic-knowledge
Accessed 08 August 2020 Accessed 15 August 2020
Bath,
H. (2008). The Three Pillars of Trauma-Informed Care. Reclaiming Children
and Youth, 17 (3), pp 17-21
Benford, R. D. and Snow, D. A. (2000). ‘Framing
Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment’. Annual
Review Sociology Vol 26, pp 611 – 639.
King,
B. J. (2013). How Animals Grieve. US: University of Chicago Press.
Seligman,
M. (1972). Learned Helplessness. Ann. Rev. Med, 23, pp 407-412.
Suggested
reading
Bath,
H. (2008). The Three Pillars of Trauma-Informed Care. Reclaiming Children and
Youth, 17 (3), pp 17-21 Available from: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/cxl/backup/prod/cxl/gklugiewicz/media/507188fa-30b7-8fd4-aa5f-ca6bb629a442.pdf
Bath,
H. (2015). The Three Pillars of TraumaWise care: Healing in the Other 23 Hours.
Reclaiming Children and Youth, 23 (4), pp 5-11 Available from: https://www.traumebevisst.no/kompetanseutvikling/filer/23_4_Bath3pillars.pdf
