Both Ends of the Leash: Animals in Australian Residential Aged Care Facilities, Views of Experienced Animal Trainers/handlers Working in Residential Aged Care Facilities

Abstract

ABSTRACT Research on animals in residential aged care facilities (RACFs) mainly focuses on the residents with little concern for animal welfare. Australian RACFs cannot care for residents, making it unlikely they can maintain animal welfare. The One-Health/One-Welfare frameworks support developing animal policies in RACFs. However, inadequate policies places residents and animals at risk. To understand animals’ lived experiences in RACFs, experienced dog-trainers who worked in RACFs were interviewed. These experts were recruited using snowball sampling, with nine participating in semi-structured interviews providing opinions and experiences of visiting and live-in animals in Australian RACFs. The initial inductive coding produced six themes (residents, animals, handlers, staff, facility and policy). However, they noted animal welfare issues and explored them further using deductive coding, re-coding the quotes into four areas: handler, environment, participants and intervention. When residents were the focus of animal interactions, animal welfare became compromised, with dogs being frightened and one accidentally poisoned. Animals in RACFs could suffer poor welfare because of inadequate staffing, training and oversight. To provide safe, ethical animal contact, legislation and guidelines must support policy development for animals in RACFs.