Aliah Wright:
I'm Aliah Wright, and this is Social Work Talks. Animals provide some of our most reliable, uncomplicated, and valued relationships, which contributes to our health and well-being. Professor Philip Tedeschi is Clinical Professor and Executive Director of the Institute for Human Animal Connection at the University of Denver's Graduate School of Social Work. We're going to chat with Professor Tedeschi about the benefits of animal assisted social work, and how social workers can incorporate animal therapy into their practices. Professor, thank you so very much for joining us.
Philip Tedeschi:
Well, thank you for having me.
Aliah Wright:
What is animal-assisted social work?
Philip Tedeschi:
Well, animal-assisted social work is a term that we have used here at the Graduate School of Social Work here at the University of Denver for quite some time to describe the work that we do. And probably one of the best ways for me to describe that is just to tell you how we define it in our mission statement. The field of social work, just to begin with, however, utilizes concepts like ecological theory and systems theories to understand human health and human well-being. And one of the things that's become clear, especially, I would say, and over the last decade, is that our relationship with non-human animals are really an important part of our systems. And as we start to study human health and well-being all over the world, one of the things that's absolutely clear is that we have to pay attention to these relationships. So we actually define our mission at the Institute for Human Animal Connection as intentionally elevating the value of the living world and its interrelationship and health of people, other animals, and the environment. And then we do this through the study of natural and social science informed education, applied knowledge, research, and advocacy. And we include all species in this because I think one, as you mentioned when you started this morning in this discussion, it's not always human beings that are our critical relationships. So that's how we define it.
Aliah Wright:
And can you give us some examples of effective uses of animal assisted therapy?
Philip Tedeschi:
The term animal assisted therapy originated as a way of describing animals incorporated often into visiting therapy programs. In fact, probably one of the most useful things in today's discussion would be to expand that terminology a little bit. And what we now use as an alternative to the term animal assisted therapy is what we call animal assisted interventions. It's often acronymed as AAI. So animal-assisted interventions include often three core areas. The first being what we call animal assisted activities. And animal assisted activities has, as subsets of it, numerous different dimensions of therapeutic intervention, including things like animal assisted crisis response. So, for example, we've seen that model used in things like the aftermath of school shootings where a therapeutic dog might be integrated into an incident debriefing. Things like therapeutic animal hospital visits also are animal assisted activity, or visits to institutional care environments like older adult care settings. Or, let's say, at risk youth institutional settings. We then have another category that's focused on animal assisted therapy. And animal assisted therapy is really where we integrate an animal into a formal treatment plan. And the person providing that care is also somebody professionally trained to provide those services. So that often is focused on things like animal assisted psychotherapy or trauma informed animal assisted therapies. Often, we also see this in other integrated health care settings like occupational and physical therapy, as well as speech and language therapies. And those are built right into a treatment plan and often offered as a dimension of a formal clinical intervention. And then also under animal assisted interventions, we also have what we call animal assisted education, where animals are incorporated into school settings. Things like humane education programs or reading programs that help improve reading skills. So we have animals working in a lot of educational settings. All of those fall under the broad category of animal assisted interventions and have expanded the traditional original term of animal assisted therapy.
Aliah Wright:
Professor, what do you love most about this field of study?
Philip Tedeschi:
You know, I have a brand new book that's coming out this June called Transforming Trauma. And this particular book is looking at the interpersonal neurobiology of our relationship with non-human animals and how animals are involved in trauma recovery. So I become really interested in this question about how animals can contribute to our capacity for health and well-being, and even healing from and overcoming trauma. And so that's been a really interesting investigation, and we have a lot of new science that informs why we think that actually is working.
Aliah Wright:
What do you think is the most challenging aspect of animal assisted therapy?
Philip Tedeschi:
I think the most challenging aspect of this particular area is really our ethics and responsibility to the animals themselves. And maybe unlike any other area of social work practice or even any clinical practice, there's almost no other areas where we're using a live, sentient being, an individual, and asking them to participate in the same way that we might be compelling an animal to work with us in these settings. And we have to realize that in the context of this decision to incorporate animals, we have a tremendous responsibility to ensuring that they're also benefiting from this relationship. It would be easy, for example, as we start to demonstrate the therapeutic and health promoting benefits of incorporating animals, it would be easy to forget that we're dealing with an ethics situation where we're compelling an animal to participate with us. And it would be easy to create another field where we inadvertently exploit animals in this process of trying to achieve these therapeutic outcomes. So I would say probably our biggest challenge going forward in the thing that our program is most interested in is ensuring that we have really good, ethical compass for ensuring animal well-being.
Aliah Wright:
What is the difference between service animals and emotional support animals?
Philip Tedeschi:
Yeah, that's such an important question, and a really important one for social workers to understand. And there's a lot of information there that people can explore. And I will say, if they're interested in more in-depth training and/or resources in this area, please feel free to reach out to our institute. But in general, the difference is that service animals are covered under the Americans for Disability Act, and are identified as specialized animals that have unique training that contribute to providing support or services, often referred to as work, for that person with a disability. And they are covered under federal law, and as a feature of that, are allowed into public spaces, including places like restaurants and theaters and school classrooms and things like that. An emotional support animal is covered, actually, under the Fair Housing Act, which is also a federal statutory area that covers the opportunity for people to equally benefit from the housing that they live in. And so emotional support animals really are built off of the understanding that animals can contribute to improved functioning for persons with disabilities. And as a result of having them in their homes, are able to function and benefit from, let's say, an apartment or dorm room or house, the same way as somebody without a disability can benefit from those same settings. However, those animals are not specially trained and are really, in many ways, simply as they are meant as they're defined, a support to that person, and are not given or granted public access rights. So that's the primary ways that we distinguish the two.
Aliah Wright:
The Washington Post recently wrote an article about a couple who was living in a tent on the street, in part because the shelters would not allow them to bring their dog with them. Can you talk about co-sheltering what it is and why it's important?
Philip Tedeschi:
Absolutely. Well, I think all of us have seen that very image, right, of persons on the street who are experiencing homelessness and have an animal with them. And as it turns out, a large number of persons who experience homelessness choose to have animals in their lives, in part because those animals provide tremendous level of companionship and support. We could also apply this same terminology of co-sheltering to persons who are also, let's say, trying to escape or get away from family violence or interpersonal violence, intimate partner violence. And also persons who are displaced as a feature of natural disasters, who may be looking for shelter, or are trying to find a place to recuperate from a natural disaster. All of those individuals have this similar dimension in that they are choosing to have animals in their lives. And when we fail to understand that animals are an important part of people's support system and fail to provide for the importance of this relationship, in many cases, we'll see individuals who are not able to access those support services. So maybe the best example in the one that you're identifying here is that many homeless shelters don't allow for persons utilizing that sheltering space to bring their animals with them. And as a result, we'll elect not to use those services. And that happens in domestic violence shelters and safe houses and other settings where we're trying to respond to people in crisis. But when we fail to appreciate the nature of and the significance of this human animal connection, often people will not choose to utilize those services, unless we can really bring them and their animals into those safe spaces.
Aliah Wright:
Do you think that's something that should change?
Philip Tedeschi:
I do. I think it's an area that we really, as a field, as the social work field starts to understand the human animal connection and human animal bond, I think one of the things with the right kind of guidance and care, animals, in many cases can be included safely and ethically in these settings alongside the services that we provide for people. And one of the reasons for us to be interested in that is, it would allow us to do our work more successfully. In situations like the natural disaster that occurred during the Hurricane Katrina impacts to New Orleans, many people lost their lives because they were unwilling to leave their animals. And at that time, federal response services were unable to do that and underprepared, then, to respond to the scope of that disaster. So I think these are things that are changing incrementally, but unfortunately, we've seen many services underprepared in this area.
Aliah Wright:
Listeners, we're going to pause for just a moment and then we'll be right back.
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Aliah Wright:
And we're back. Professor, you're also interested in ecological justice. What is ecological justice, and how is it connected to animal assisted social work?
Philip Tedeschi:
Thanks for asking that question. At our program, one of the things that's become clear is that when we study human health and human security and human well-being, one of the dimensions of that is our relationship with other animals and the environment. So really, as we start to look at the importance of this intersectional understanding of well-being, one of the things that we'll find is that our interaction and treatment of other non-human animals in the environment are dimensions of social justice issues. I maybe can give an example of that. One of the primary causative features of things like disease across the planet, some of our most difficult and damaging pandemic diseases, are features of human animal conflict. Things like HIV, AIDS or Ebola or rabies. Often, they're vector points are poverty. And poverty will, at times, drive individuals into conflicts with animals, including consumptive use of those animals. So the eating of those animals in ways that end up becoming the actual origins of those diseases are dimensions of these intersectional areas of understanding for human health. Social work would really benefit from starting to, when we use the term ecological theory, to not just mean built environment or human environment, but the intersection between humans, animals and the green environment, the living environment.
Aliah Wright:
So what should we be teaching social work students about animals and ecological justice?
Philip Tedeschi:
I think we should be teaching students to have the same capacity when we're doing things like needs assessments or environmental assessment. When we use those terms, ecological assessment, to understand somebody's systems, we should be teaching social work students to be able to accurately investigate the conditions of the other animals in that environment. Non-human animals and the environment themselves. And what we're going to find if we do that, are really some of the most important building blocks for human health and human security. Things like access to clean water, for example, or food security issues that often are critical dimensions of stabilization of things like communities that have been displaced or refugee communities. Those are going to be increasingly part of the work that social workers have to be prepared to respond to. Climate change and climate justice issues that will impact our most vulnerable communities on the planet are part of our work as social workers. So I believe increasingly, we'll see social workers who also have to have expertise and ecological justice issues. And not just understanding them theoretically or intellectually, but actually understanding what out best strategies and solutions for interventions are as well. So I think those really will define the modern day education for social workers going forward.
Aliah Wright:
The field of animal assisted interventions has grown so much over the last 25 years. How has the practice evolved over time?
Philip Tedeschi:
Yeah, it's really changed, and it's a fantastic area for social workers who are interested in the intersection between people and other animals. I think they'll find this an exciting new area that has a lot going on in it. In part, one of the things that's really happened is that the research has started to help us understand and explain things that for many years, we didn't really have an explanation for. To give a little bit of historical context, going all the way back to the 1960s with a child psychologist named Boris Levinson, who, as a therapist, started to document the fact that his child clients would respond differently and participate differently, in fact, would participate almost twice as actively in a therapeutic session, with the presence of his own dogs in the room.
Aliah Wright:
Really?
Philip Tedeschi:
Yeah. It was really an interesting observation, probably one many of us could relate to. But when these children were in the office with them, they would do things like sit on the floor and interact with his dogs and begin to pet his dogs. And he would find himself doing things like getting out of his own chair and sitting on the floor and interacting differently, in a qualitatively distinct way. We now know that the presence of a safe animal, in fact, changes the neurobiology of individuals in such a way that allows them to have many of the necessary shifts in neurological functioning that allow them to, in fact, do things like engage in more trust with their care providers. So it's not uncommon when you have a dog, a safe dog in the room, you'll have somebody who will see their therapist or their social worker as more trustworthy. Which is why we're seeing the involvement of animals in settings where people have been harmed or don't trust other people. So I think the interesting question is, what's it like to not be able to trust? And when that trust has been harmed by another person, doesn't mean that those persons are uninterested in relationship. It may mean that they have a difficulty trusting human beings. And animals can help us build back some of those connections. And so you'll see therapeutic animals now being deployed in all different types of trauma informed settings. Everything from early childhood settings all the way across the human lifespan. But in critical settings like forensic interview settings or court environments or in the treatment of post traumatic stress, animals can play a significant role in the assistance of recovery from those impacts.
Aliah Wright:
And so these animals actually help people improve their relationships with other people.
Philip Tedeschi:
That's right. Yeah. I mean, to the degree that we would say that the changes in the brain might even allow that individual, pre-consciously, even before they have a clear cognition about the issue of safety or lack of safety, the presence of a safe animal begins to inform and alter that environment. We refer to this at times as the polyvagal theory, and referring to the vagus nerve that influences not only the brain, but almost all the other dimensions of the human physiology. So that somebody starts to feel different in the presence of that safety, and that safety then allows the neurology, that changed neurology, to do things like allow somebody to be more optimistic, to be more trusting, to be more talkative, to be more confident in their social relationships. Even things like how do we predict, or how do we determine, who are safe friends to have? Or who are safe people to interact with? Well, one of the ways we do that is through this polyvagal systemic alteration of our neurobiology that allows us to determine if we're in a safe situation or not.
Aliah Wright:
What would you like our listeners to take away from our discussion today?
Philip Tedeschi:
Well, I think there's lots of different levels to our relationship with other animals. And I think the first thing is, as a social worker myself, I would say that one of the opportunities to create good outcomes in the work that we do as social work practitioners is to consider the living world, both animals and the natural environment. Those are tools for us to improve outcomes in almost every domain of social work now as we speak.
I would say the second thing I hope people will take away from this discussion is to think about even the animals in their own lives. I mean, the prevalence of companion animals in our lives. Nearly 80 million own dogs, and probably more cats than dogs, for example. Those relationships are significant contributors to our social capital and social support system. When we learn to utilize animals as methods for successful integration, but at the same time elevate that animal to being an important part of our lives, so that we treat them ethically and responsibly and humanely, then I think we have really an outstanding opportunity to alter the communities that we live in, families and homes that we live in. For example, I think these are tools for teaching good parenting and early childhood compassion and humane education. Even are probably one of the most peculiar and heartbreaking dimensions we're dealing with in the United States. Especially here in Colorado, has been the school shootings and community violence. These are opportunities to begin to address many of those kinds of dimensions of our own families and communities. So I would say, I hope people take away from this discussion an understanding that animals are really our partners on this planet and in our communities. And when we are interested in them, they're interested in us, and they provide opportunities for tremendous therapeutic opportunity for change.
Aliah Wright:
Professor Tedeschi, we'd like to thank you so very much for taking the time to chat with us today.
Philip Tedeschi:
My pleasure. Yeah, thank you for inviting us to talk about our work here, and please feel free to reach out and get to know us here at the Graduate School of Social Work at the University of Denver. And you can find our institute at the Institute For Human Animal Connection.
Aliah Wright:
And thank you so much, listeners. We'll have a list of resources for you on our show notes page. Please be sure to leave us an iTunes review.
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