- A new collection of essays focuses on animal emotions and how to offer each individual a good life.
- The enjoyment, distress and suffering that animals can experience come in a vast array of forms.
- It may be no different from how we want to care for our own children.
Source: Mark Stebnicki/Pexels.
There is ever-growing interest in the ways in which a wide variety of nonhuman animals (animals) deal with the ups and downs of their lived experiences in many different contexts. In his new edited book, a third edition of Mental Health and Well-being in Animals, veterinarian Frank McMillan and his colleagues summarize how recent research has yielded an enormous amount of information about animal mental health and well-being across many different species. The book’s description aptly summarizes what this valuable collection is all about: “Studies on animal stress, distress, emotions, psychological trauma, and mental disorders have brought to light insights on how to care for and treat the animal mind.”
Here’s what Dr. McMillan told me about this landmark book, a collection of incredibly valuable essays on diverse animals with wide-ranging appeal to those who work on the ground with animals in need and those with more academic leanings.
Marc Bekoff: Why did you assemble the essays for Mental Health and Well-being in Animals, and how did you select the contributors?
Franklin McMillan: The original idea for the book came from there being a glaring lack of attention to the emotional well-being of animals, particularly within the veterinary profession. A specialty of clinical animal behavior had been established in the U.S. in the 1990s and in Europe in the 2010s, but the focus was almost exclusively on correcting unwanted behavior in companion animals, with only minimal attention to the emotional distress and suffering underlying the behaviors. The harm of this approach is that many undesirable behaviors can be “corrected” without tending to the emotional troubles driving them. For example, a dog chained alone outside and barking for human attention and companionship can be “corrected” by using an anti-bark collar, but that does nothing to alleviate the emotional distress of the social deprivation, and may even make it worse. For myself and some colleagues, it had become evident that mental health and well-being should, as in humans, receive the attention they deserve.
