Discovery

Greener Pastures

• Partnered with the James River Corrections Facility to conduct research on the Greener Pastures Prison-Based Equine Program. 
• Program is designed to pair horses with imprisoned persons for the benefit of the horse and the inmate. 
• Program provided a Groom Elite program and certification, associated counseling for the inmates, facilitated community contact, and focused on re-entry support. 
• National rates of recodovosm are 67%, while Greener Pastures graduates have only a 3-5% rate of recidivism.  
• Factors of the program that were perceived as beneficial by the inmates were the teaching of marketable skills, participation in horse-human interspecies dialogue, experiencing attachment, having the barn as a safe environment, and the community built around the horse as a social bridge. 
• Inmate’s association with the horses reduced apparent stigmas towards offenders, while they simultaneously developed friendships based on shared social links and interests. 
• Association with the horses served to bridge the empathy gap between offenders, volunteers, staff, and community.

Pets and Healthy Aging

• Positive association have been documented between pet (dogs specifically) ownership and healthy aging in older adults. 
• Project is culminating in a doctoral thesis which seeks to identify and examine factors that facilitate or impair dog walking in older adults. 
• Research is part of an interdisciplinary graduate degree program that integrates Gerontology, Building and Construction, Veterinary Medicine, and Public Health.

Preliminary Assessment of Pet Ownership in Resudential Retirement Communities

• Collaboration with Biobuild, College of Architecture, and Center of Gerontology, and serves as a foundation for Carlisle Shealy’s PhD.
• Warm Hearth and the Crossings have agreed to participate in a pilot study. 
• Complete IRB during summer 2019, data collection Feb 2020.

Real-time Assessment of Equine Behavior

• Collaboration with Engineering, and is the thesis research topic for Nathan Jones’s and Jason Doyle’s Master Degree. 
• Project goal is to identify points on the animal’s body that define position (like eye and shoulder) and employ a continuous measure of the distance between points to develop a mathematical algorithm that describes body position.  
• Body position (body language) is then matched with physiological measures that are associated with the animal’s “state” such as avoidance/fear, aggression/anger, interactive/inquisitive, and know information about animal cuing to develop a method for real-time computer analysis of horse welfare.
• Video has been collected and analyzed.
• Research was supported by Racing Funds.

Biomarkers of Animal Welfare

• Initiating this research with study of hair cortisol concentrations as a measure of chronic stress in horses. 
• Hair samples have been collected over 18 months and are in the process of being analyzed. 
• Anticipate final data analysis in by winter 2022 as sample analysis has been delayed due to COVID.

Research Posters