Introducing Pets & People, a New Series Exploring the Impact of Animal Companionship on Human Health
Pets & People is an innovative new book series designed to ensure that the science behind the human-animal bond is accessible to the professionals who apply their understanding of this unique relationship to improve the health of humans and their companion animals.
Every day researchers gain new insights into the dynamic relationship between people and animals, discovering, for example, how dog ownership improves heart health or how interaction with guinea pigs helps socialize autistic children. However, up-to-date summaries of this evidence are difficult to access for the wide range of health professionals who could apply it to improve clinical practice, such as veterinarians, nurses, social workers, and therapists.
This is the challenge that Pets & People engages with, providing syntheses of the latest research and examples of best practice in the field. Topics and contributors are selected by the Steering Committee on Human-Animal Interactions of the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), which is also responsible for managing the review and selection process.
Thanks to an innovative publication process, sections will be made freely available online as soon as they are finished. This immediate availability free-of-charge to all readers is made possible by the HABRI Foundation which is subsidizing the production costs of the series as part of its commitment to stimulating innovation in the field.
When all sections are completed, final books will be published by Purdue University Press in affordable print and e-book formats. Contributions to the first volumes will start to appear online in 2014 and will focus on cardiovascular health, healthy ageing, and depression and anxiety, three areas of intense research activity.
Do you want to know more? Or do you have a success story about human-animal bond research or practice to share in these subject areas? If so, please contact the editors at petspeople@avma.org or stop by the forums.
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