Ann Hemingway
This keynote paper will introduce the international literature related to animal assisted interventions for those with mental health and behavioural issues and will then focus specifically on equine assisted interventions designed to address mental health and behavioural issues. Though long alluded to there is now an accumulation of evidence of the vital contribution that emotion makes to learning and behaviour. Within this broad advance in understanding is a growing body of research emphasising the embodied nature of this emotion based learning. This paper will share initial hetero phenomenological research findings (combining neurological, physiological and experiential methodologies) to give a picture of the emotional ‘landscape’ of people’s learning through the equine assisted intervention under study. Using this methodology has allowed the researchers to explore the impact of applying the concept of embodied emotional learning to understanding therapeutic activities. Specifically in this case the intervention under study is used with young people with chronic mental health and behavioural problems for whom talk based interventions are not working. This paper reports on on-going research focusing on the emotional experience of learning to communicate with horses. Research findings will also be presented which demonstrate mental health and wellbeing benefits in recipients of the intervention. Through our research to date us now hypothesise that the success of this intervention is due to emotion based learning, measurable by somatic psychophysiological changes and further elucidated through electroencephalogram analysis and experiential interview data. This paper will offer two novel contributions (1) description of a new methodology for investigating the mechanism of action occurring in this type of intervention (2) the findings from the exploration of the intervention via neurological, psychophysiological and experiential mechanisms. Flimsy Sow Syndrome is a conduct seen in slowed down sows that is like AA where a few sows after early pregnancy are incredibly dynamic, eat pretty much nothing, and die, coming about all the time in death. They experience the ill effects of anorexia, hypothermia, a corrupted hunger, eagerness, and hyperactivity. The condition may for the most part be identified with social and natural stressors. Worry in slowed down sows is regularly seen as the result of the restriction of creatures that occurs in concentrated creation units. The sows that endure the most controlling conditions are those lactating or pregnant as they have next to no space to move around on the grounds that they are kept in banned development boxes or fastened for the four months of pregnancy which forestalls characteristic and social practices. In any case, expanded development and opportunity is likewise upsetting for grown-up plants, which is typically the situation in the wake of weaning. At the point when put into bunches they battle overwhelmingly, with one predominant sow rising that eats unquenchably. Almost certainly, two subordinate sows make up some portion of the gathering that effectively maintain a strategic distance from serious taking care of circumstances and are harassed by the predominant sow. Influenced plants have poor hunger however regularly show pica, over the top water admission (polydipsia) and are frail.
