Assistance animals

The increasing news coverage of animal roles for humans has my ethical compass spinning.

Humans having animals for a purpose has a history as long as we have. And I’m not a vegan, I work in a medical field that uses animals for testing food and medicines and, yes, I have had brachycephalic pets.

So, I’m maybe not far up on a moral high ground to judge others, but let’s overlook that for now. As this is a huge area (yes there will be parts 2 and 3 coming up), I’ll focus this article on obvious and hidden financial gains from animals.

I’ll start with my successful animal welfare intervention win – puppy yoga. Last year, I found out that the university where my PhD supervisors are based was providing puppy yoga to students for free. I checked out the company providing the puppies and the yoga and was a little perturbed by what I found.

The red flags were all there… the puppies were pugs or shih tzus. They were used for puppy yoga for 8-12 weeks and therefore not fully vaccinated. The puppies were also being driven for more than an hour each way for the sessions and they then had four time one-hour sessions of yoga to go through. Oh, and the puppy yoga teachers were also the dogs’ breeders. Not just red flags, But an entire carnival.

Approach

I approached the organisers at uni who have now stopped hosting puppy yoga, but the health and welfare issues did not seem to register. This was a few weeks before the television documentary on the poor welfare for puppies in puppy yoga, so maybe I was a little in advance of the general info about puppy yoga being out there… but still, animal welfare was not on anyone’s radar apart from mine.

So a little success over puppy yoga. The financial gain from charging approximately £40 to each yoga class attendee with up to 40 people in one day is clearly monetising the presence of the puppies – £1,600 for a day’s work with puppies that may well sell for more than this per puppy a few weeks later is a financially astute move.

But there are places when financial gain is maybe not so obvious. The story of a squirrel and a racoon that were removed form their “owner” in the US created a lot of headlines. The squirrel had been in his possession for some time and he created social media content based around the squirrel.

This involved dressing the squirrel up and recording it eating human food. With a high enough amount of followers, earning money from social media platforms is not difficult so I would consider that there was a financial motivation in creating cowboy hats for a squirrel.

Is the squirrel’s welfare being met as a wild animal? Quite possibly not, and this case demonstrated the lack of understanding of what is suitable welfare for wildlife. Many more people were speaking out in favour of the person keeping the squirrel than questioning why he had it in the first place – or whether it was a good idea it was eating waffles.

It’s a complex area of animal welfare, but with increasingly public welfare issues combined with making money from animals, where do social media and general entertainment TV and movies draw the line?