R1 In-Person: Human-Animal Connection

Impactful Relationships: Understanding the Human-Animal Connection
One In-Person Session
Wed., Nov. 13, 2024, 6:30-8 pm MT
FREE

While approximately two thirds of U.S. households include pets, much remains unknown about how our interactions with other animals shape human health and well-being. DU’s Institute for Human-Animal Connection (IHAC) promotes understanding how these interactions affect humans, animals and the environment we share. As the only academic center focused on this topic that’s part of a school of social work, IHAC is a leader in understanding complex issues of interconnected health. In this lecture, Dr. Kevin Morris, IHAC’s executive director, offers an overview of the institute’s research on human health and well-being using examples from the institute’s portfolios focused on youth development, trauma, and animals and communities. These studies use innovative designs and methods to probe many topics, including how incorporating animals into clinical interventions within youth residential care improves outcomes, how pairing service dogs with military veterans with PTSD decreases symptoms, how participating in prison-based dog training programs impacts outcomes for those incarcerated, how dogs affect human stress responses, how increasing access to veterinary care in under-resourced communities improves individual and community health, and how families and animals in these same communities are impacted by animal law enforcement. The point: Our relationships with other animals and the environment are some of the most impactful, yet underappreciated, ones we all have every day.

Dr. Kevin Morris is the American Humane endowed chair and a research professor within the Graduate School of Social Work at the University of Denver. His research focuses on understanding how human-animal interactions affect individual and community health and welfare within a framework of equity for humans and other species.