The Covid-19 pandemic raises questions about the role that relationships and interactions between humans and animals play in the context of widespread social distancing and isolation measures.

Researchers from the University of York, University College London and Queen’s University Belfast have investigated links between mental health and loneliness, companion animal ownership, the human-animal bond, and human-animal interactions; and explored animal owners’ perceptions related to the role of their animals during lockdown.

A link to the findings from this research can be found here.

Despite us being a nation of animal lovers, with companies including Google welcoming dogs into the workplace, 55% of private landlords (1) still fly in the face of Government guidelines with a ‘no pets’ policy.

On the latest episode of A DOG’S LIFE, host and ‘dog guru’, Anna Webb and Gabby Kuehn, Founder of PAAW (Pets Are Always Welcome) House discuss concerns that many ‘lockdown’ puppies may face homelessness due to private Landlords either misinterpreting or ignoring pet clauses and replacing them with blanket bans.

A recent paper introduces the new LEAD Risk Assessment Toolkit which provides urgently needed unified guidelines on best practice in relation to risk assessment, safeguarding and animal welfare priorities in Animal-Assisted Intervention (AAI) practice. The authors also provide the first comprehensive risk assessment and animal welfare tools to achieve consistent welfare and safety standards for best practice across educational and other settings around the world.

COVID-19 is a newly emerged coronavirus.  SARS and MERS, other recently emerged human coronaviruses, originated in horseshoe bats and passed through other species, such as palm civet and camels.  The definitive source of COVID-19 has still to be determined, but it is also thought to have originated in a bat, and then passed through an intermediate host, possibly a pangolin.  This probably occurred at a wet market in Wuhan, China, where many animal species were kept close together, in unhygienic circumstances.

With the creation of the Wallis Annenberg PetSpace Leadership Institute in 2017, a group of seventeen scholars from numerous academic principles met in California to discuss the historical perspective of the human-dog relationship. The resulting paper develops a broad new multi-disciplinary framework for human-animal-environmental research. “At a time when we are contending with the COVID-19 pandemic and witnessing first-hand the inherent risk of zoonotic disease when we have close contact with another species, it is important to recognize that the human-dog relationship has withstood the test of time and been mutually beneficial”, said Donna Fernandes, Director at the Wallis Annenberg PetSpace.