What is Collaborative Care? And why should you train it?

Do you know that many animals find veterinary visits and in-home health care treatment stressful. For some animals, visiting the veterinary clinic is a traumatic experience, then when they get sick, their caregivers become anxious about taking them to the veterinary clinic, worried about the distress the visit will cause. In the hope of avoiding an animal being traumatised, pet owners may choose to delay their veterinary care. After all, sometimes, a problem resolves on its own. However…sometimes it won’t. It is better for the animal if its pain or illness is quickly resolved. Also, delayed veterinary care can make some problems worse due to chronic changes.

These situations can be avoided!

Animals learn from scary experiences and change their future behaviours to avoid those experiences. Your pet may start to show behavioural signs of fear, such as hiding, struggling, fleeing, trembling and/or aggression. As a result, sometimes veterinary staff use increased restraint, which can then increase the animal’s fear, and so the problem gets worse. From the animal’s perspective, veterinary treatments can be scary and/or painful and often don’t seem beneficial at all, so the whole experience can be horrible.

So, how can you help avoid this from happening?

You can teach your pet one or more “consent behaviours”, so that the animal is provided with the opportunity to collaborate allowing you and the veterinary staff to provide it with the care it needs.

Collaborative Care consultations aim to provide you with the skills to teach your pet how to offer a consent behaviour so that a veterinarian can examine your pet and so that you may also provide any in-home care that is needed.

Animal Progress is based in consulting rooms in Myrtleford. 

To schedule your consultation, click on the link that applies to you:

• Dog behaviour consultations
• Cat behaviour consultations
• Horse behaviour consultations
• Bird behaviour consultations
• Behaviour consultations for other animals (rabbits, guinea pigs and other small mammals, reptiles, production animals, and other species)
• Zoom behaviour consultations
• Collaborative Care consultations for veterinary treatments