Suporting Behaviour Change in Animal Owners

This course is designed for anyone working in animal health, care, or welfare with direct contact with owners, and others who need to make behaviour changes for the welfare of their animals. 

The course will help those who need to have difficult conversations with animal owners, and others, about issues such as weight, euthanasia, breeding, general care and health, numbers of animals, including animal hoarding and with re-homers or guardians and repeat welfare reporters.

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This course is currently being delivered online via Zoom due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and has been redesigned for this method of teaching and learning. The learning outcomes and experiences are the same as our face-to-face training.

Motivational Interviewing is a well-researched, evidence based method of working with people to support human behaviour change in the most difficult areas such as addictions, but it has been found to be useful across a range of human behaviours. 

Only a handful of people have been using motivational interviewing to support behaviour change in animal owners. Bronwen is one and is an experienced teacher of Motivational Interviewing to NHS and other staff, working with difficult to manage human behaviours, as well as several national animal charities. She also used Motivational Interviewing in her own equine voluntary welfare, as well as her clinical and teaching work. She has written about human mental health and animal ownership, including bereavement in animal owners and animal hoarding. 

Bronwen will be joined in delivering the course by other experienced mental health professionals who use and teach Motivational Interviewing. 

The course is practical and interactive; attendees will be practicing skills on each of the days, and experimenting with Motivational Interviewing as an approach. To better understand behaviour change in others we will work with our own behaviours. This helps us to understand why others make, or don’t make, changes. Many participants find they too make changes during or after the course and you may finish the course having made some behaviour changes for yourself, or be ready to do so!

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This training has been used as a research project in collaboration with a recognised equine welfare charity and the results published:

Williams, B, Harris, P. & Gordon, C. (2020)  What is equine hoarding and can ‘motivational interviewing’ training be implemented to help enable behavioural change in animal owners? Equine Veterinary Education. 


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