Animal-assisted interventions (AAIs)in situ, relationship, and context: AAI as adjunct practice in healthcare and animal-informed education

Abstract

Animal-assisted interventions (AAIs) include and promote multisensory and somatic experiences in therapeutic, educational, and activity-based contexts. Sensory experiences, however, for animal co-workers and others in AAI practice, including the spaces in which AAI takes place, need further exploration not only to facilitate formalized animal and client safety in place-based contexts, but also to illuminate future directions for improved non-anthropocentric ‘animal-informed’ AAI. In Canada, where there is no coordinated professional AAI sector or ‘industry’ as it is referred in the USA, AAI is not a harmonized adjunct health service. Availability is linked to the locations of professional health and allied practitioners with AAI training and interested individuals who sustain the voluntarism needed to provide AAIs that a typically funded in ad hoc and limited capacities. Compared to related fields, like veterinarian medicine and zoology, there remains in general more to be known about the ways AAI relates to larger service contexts and the types of interactions (if any) with other health and mental health service providers. This article explores AAI locales within the Canadian province of Nova Scotia to highlight the occupational experiences of practitioners and their animal-companions/co-workers (from the perspective of practitioners). Through interviews and animal-informed critical theory, this study finds AAI locales boast opportunities despite challenges to access and delivery. We elucidate AAI’s potential of becoming a guide for collective interspecies (companionable-) relations. Some AAI locales are underutilized or mismanaged, others remote, all with untapped potential to contribute to their communities through more diverse (e.g. interspecies) interprofessional service environments and as part of local economies. Leveraged proactively with AAI practitioners as educators for universal relational well-being, AAI could potentially transform therapeutic practice, ideally fostering novel identities beyond the unsustainable humanized and bounded self.