GUELPH – Ontario Veterinary College Professor and forensic veterinarian Dr. Shane Bateman will be hosting a webinar and workshop to continue his advocacy regarding animal abuse/neglect – with a strong focus on the equine industry.
“This is a two-part educational opportunity for practicing equine veterinarians,” Bateman told the Advertiser.
The project has been funded in part by the Campbell Centre for the Study of Animal Welfare, based at the University of Guelph.
Webinar
The webinar is scheduled for Sept. 18 and is expected to be an hour and a half in duration, costing $25 per person.
The webinar will focus on “bringing people up to speed on the general landscape around animal cruelty and neglect, “making sure people understand what the warning signs might be when things don’t seem quite right,” he said.
Participants will also learn who to report to and how when concerns arise.
According to Bateman, 90 per cent or higher of veterinarians suspect they’ve seen a harmed patient.
But only 30 to 40% report these cases due to lack of training and confidence.
“We’ve tried to develop the webinar to be applicable to veterinarians across Canada,” he said.
During the presentation, Bateman will use case-based examples including sexual abuse among animals and “how we might become aware of those situations,” he said.
Sexual abuse with animals “probably happens more commonly,” he said.
Larger size animals may not gain injuries related to sexual touching or penetration compared to smaller animals due to their size.
“The injury to them may not be as severe therefore these kinds of things may go more undetected,” Bateman said.
He hopes the webinar can bring attention to these issues and make people understand the need to ask more questions if there is any suspicion.
“It’ll be a good strong introduction to identifying animal maltreatment, especially as it relates to horses,” Bateman said.
The webinar will be hosted through the Equine Guelph learning platform on thehorseportal.ca.
“There will be a fairly large collection of additional resources available to people who’ve joined the webinar to do some self-study online learning of their own,” he added.
Workshop
The second part of Bateman’s educational experience is the $300 one-day workshop set for Oct. 1 at the UofG campus.
“We’ll spend a bit of time in the morning doing some classroom-style learning and some different interactive activities,” Bateman said.
During the afternoon, the group will move into more experiential learning activities.
The workshop includes four educational stations.
“One will be around forensic photography,” he said.
“How to photograph specific issues appropriately so that the evidence is clear and clean and easily admissible into court if needed.”
The second station will focus on collecting different kinds of evidence and creating a “chain of custody” making the pieces of evidence “move cleanly and smoothly into investigations or prosecutions,” Bateman said.
The last two will focus on client communication.
Two paid actors will simulate different animal abuse cases.
“We’ll have a communications coach present that can help the veterinarians … approach talking to a client around some of these often very difficult conversations,” he explained.
Bateman hopes participants will be mostly equine vets or veterinarians who have horses part of their practice.
The workshop has a capacity of 16 people and can be accessed through The Horse Portal mentioned above.
“Our hope would be that behaviours and confidence would change over time when these things happen in a veterinarian’s practice,” he said.
