Conference To Celebrate The Company Of Animals

THE NEW ZEALAND COMPANION ANIMAL COUNCIL INC.
Conference To Celebrate The Company Of Animals

The nature, benefits and pitfalls of the ever-closer bonds between humans
and their animal pets are to be examined and debated at next week's NZ Companion Animal Conference in Christchurch (see bottom of release for times and contact details).

Delivering the gathering's keynote address on Human/Animal Interaction in the Modern World, will be an internationally celebrated expert on the subject, Professor James Serpell, author and editor of several books, including In the Company of Animals and Companion Animals & Us.

Professor Serpell holds the chair of Humane Ethics and Animal Welfare at the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also directs the Center for the Interaction of Animals and Society.

He says there's been a fourfold increase in the dog and cat populations of the United States in the last 40 years. Even accounting for human population increase, this represents an approximate doubling of the numbers of dogs and cats per person. Similar trends are observable in a range of other developed nations, including countries in East Asia, where pet ownership is still a new phenomenon.

"Amongst the factors driving this surge is the role of companion animals in providing social support, now that most of the traditional human forms of support are in decline. People are having fewer children, marriages are lasting less well and friendships seem more transient. So it appears we're turning to animals to replace what we're losing in human relationships.

"Medical research has convincingly demonstrated that humans do better when they have strong attachments and social networks. In all probability, people are responding to the deficits in their lives by simply using animals as an alternative. That's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just the way we are.

"Moreover, a number of studies strongly suggest that companion animals are very effective at providing social support. Unlike human companions, they don't challenge you, criticise what you wear or disagree with your political views," he says.

Professor Serpell adds, however, that human/animal relationships can also carry the risk of anthropomorphism,with humans failing to recognise or respect the differences between themselves and animals. Common consequences can be the over-feeding of companion animals, leading to health problems, or a reluctance to contemplate euthanasing a sick animal even when that's clearly in the animal's best interest.

As well as delivering his keynote address, Professor Serpell will lead the conference through a session on the history of human/animal relationships.

He points out that humans in hunter-gatherer cultures often have attitudes to pets remarkably similar to those of people in highly developed contemporary societies.

"We often find that hunters will capture a baby animal, take it home and care for it. And once they've made a pet out of an animal it's exempt from being killed or eaten, even though they're happy to kill and eat other animals of the same species.

"Assuming that modern hunter-gatherers are anything like the hunter-gatherers from whom the rest of us are descended,pet-keeping would seem to be a very old human activity.

"Attitudes to animals seemed to change, though, with the development of farming. Treating animals as livestock requires a certain degree of emotional detachment from them. In Medieval Europe, pet-keeping was widely seen as immoral and as incompatible with the prevailing view of animals as created to serve humans, either as beasts of burden or as a food source," he adds.

Professor Serpell says that a further change in attitudes started to emerge in the eighteenth century European Enlightenment, when an increasing rejection of medieval religious teaching coincided with the emergence of an urban middle class, not involved in the day-to-day business of rearing livestock and more open to the idea of keeping animals as companions. This initiated a trend that has continued and intensified to this day.

The NZ Companion Animal Conference is an annual event organised by the New Zealand Companion Animal Council (NZCAC) , an organisation that bring together welfare bodies, veterinarians, academic researchers, animal control agencies, breeder organisations and others involved with companion animals.

"This will be our twenty-first annual conference and we're delighted to be marking our coming-of-age in Christchurch, where we've held several very successful gatherings in past years and where we've always been made to feel very welcome," says the NZCAC's Chair, Bob Kerridge.

"We're very conscious of the difficult times Cantabrians are going through as a result of the earthquake and hope, though our presence, to express our solidarity with them.

"The last 21 years have witnessed great changes in our attitudes to animals. We're becoming much more appreciative both of our responsibilities and of the huge benefits we gain from sharing our lives and homes with them.

"We're very much looking forward to Professor Serpell's contributions to the conference, as he's been studying the relationship between humans and animals for over thirty years and is a lucid and entertaining speaker, as well as a learned one," Mr Kerridge adds.

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