Current Rules and Regulations for Dogs Working in Assistance, Service, and Support Roles.

The legal landscape for dogs working in assistance, service, and support roles is complicated and contradictory. Regulations permit access to public places, allow subsets of dogs' emergency transport and treatment, provide elevated protections for K-9s and assistance animals from criminal acts, and make it a crime to fraudulently represent a service animal. Federal and state agencies provide different regulations for dogs to access public places. Identification and verification of the working animal are not standardized. Working dog legislation is a changing landscape that requires veterinarians to be up to date on laws and regulatory guidance.

A multidisciplinary investigation of chronic animal abuse: Collaboration between veterinary forensics and forensic anthropology.

An unknown juvenile female mixed breed dog was found non-ambulatory on a dead-end street in an urban setting adjacent to a public park. During initial veterinary examination, she was assessed to have untreatable injuries and was humanely euthanized. The forensic veterinarian requested consultation from a forensic anthropologist to assist with documenting antemortem skeletal trauma. Analyses of skeletal tissues indicated numerous injuries in various stages of healing diagnostic of non-accidental injuries. Veterinary forensic cases may benefit from collaborative analysis of bony remains by forensic anthropologists.

Animal Abuse as a Type of Trauma: Lessons for Human and Animal Service Professionals.

Animal abuse frequently occurs at the same time and the same place as other types of violence, particularly family violence. Because of that close association, this article proposes that it is the responsibility of both animal service and human service professionals to be aware of its occurrence, understand its significance, and promote appropriate professional and policy responses to it. Research literature addressing the link between animal abuse and other forms of violence ("the link") is discussed. Articles selected for review were published in a peer-reviewed journal, relevant to some aspect of the link between animal abuse and child abuse and/or domestic violence, used either a national or a longitudinal database, or relied on random sampling or a comparison group. If a study was retrospective or drawn from a convenience sample, it had to have been replicated by another study for inclusion. Finally, any measurement instruments used by the study under review must have had acceptable reliability and validity. Legal databases, such as LexisNexis, were used to identify legislation that has been passed and/or court cases that have been decided that were relevant to the topic of "the link." Strong associations were found between domestic violence, child abuse, and animal abuse; animal abuse, whether witnessed or committed, is a form of trauma. Severe animal abuse as a predictor for severe domestic violence recently emerged as a promising association. However, some of these findings on "the link" have not been translated into practice, for example, domestic violence advocates and child protection workers frequently do not ask questions about pets in the family. At the same time, the past 20 years have seen an increase in state and federal legislation and policies that have been enacted, in part, because of the growing body of evidence on the link. Knowledge of the link also has influenced a number of court cases deciding parental rights. Moreover, awareness of the link is illustrated by the passage of pet protection orders for victims of domestic violence as well as the inclusion of pet abuse as a form of domestic violence. Human service and animal service professionals should articulate more ways in which they can communicate with one another, thus adding more information and resources to any intervention or treatment of family violence.

Animal shelters: managing heartworms in resource-scarce environments.

Animal shelters must frequently make difficult decisions regarding the allocation of limited resources to appropriately care for the millions of dogs and cats that enter their doors annually. Insufficient staffing, expertise, and guidance on heartworm management in animal shelters creates significant confusion on how these facilities should appropriately address heartworm infection in dogs and cats. The American Heartworm Society (AHS) issues comprehensive guidelines for the diagnosis, prevention, and management of heartworm infection in pets, but shelters are often unable to fully comply with these guidelines due to resource constraints. In response, shelter staff is forced to either ignore the disease or implement compromised management practices. Such compromises lead to suboptimal treatment of infected animals, adoption of infected animals to the public, and subsequent backlash from community veterinarians, as well as increased risk of disease transmission throughout the shelter and community. Unfortunately, when shelters lack the resources to address heartworm infection appropriately, this treatable condition may serve as grounds for automatic euthanasia in infected yet adoptable animals. The AHS guidelines must be tailored to the needs of sheltering agencies or additional resources created to appropriately address the dilemmas faced by shelter professionals when managing heartworm disease.