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What Your Clients Want
The way you house animals speaks volumes to your clients about how their companions are being treated in all aspects of their care. First impressions do matter!
Even if they do not say anything, your clients are likely to be comparing the way their animals are treated in your facility to the way they treat them at home. With new research and a better understanding of the needs of animals, perhaps it is time to put the same level of planning and analysis into the design of your animal holding enclosures that you have put into the rest of your facility.
Creating a Better Environment for Animals
Environment significantly affects the behaviour and stress level of both animals and humans. Imagining how you would feel if you were put into a noisy, uncomfortable, crowded space, might start to give you a clearer impression of what dogs and cats feel like when they taken from their homes and put into runs and cages. They do not know that your intentions are good or that the situation is temporary.
In today's progressive facilities, the design of animal enclosures is changing from an engineering approach to a performance approach. Design goals have shifted from caring for the maximum number of animals with the least amount of effort, to creating facilities that consider the behavioural, biological, psychological, and social health of the animals.
Well-Designed Housing
Traditional runs are stressful and promote undesirable behaviour in dogs, such as barking, fence fighting, lunging at gates, and soiling the enclosures. Well-designed enclosures can appreciably reduce the stress levels for individual dogs, promoting a calmer atmosphere for all the dogs and staff.
Cats are particularly susceptible to contracting disease when they are stressed. Primary stressors for cats include noise, new experience, moving from one enclosure to another, unpredictability, loss of control of personal space, uncomfortable surroundings, and unnatural social situations. It is in the feline nature to consider every new environment as potentially hostile. Therefore, your housing design should work to prevent the situations that produce stress responses.
Familiar Environments
Animals are stressed by being exposed to unfamiliar environments. Therefore, the environment within a holding enclosure should be as familiar and comfortable as possible. Below are some ideas for creating environments that reduce stress:
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Avoid crowding of too many animals in one room.
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Separate animals by species.
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Provide natural light.
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Provide pleasant views, such as to outside spaces.
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Provide raised resting areas.
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Reduce odour and provide good air quality. If possible, provide the animals with access to fresh outside air.
Noise Control
One of the major questions to be answered in the design of any facility is how to effectively control noise from barking dogs. The conventional focus has been absorbing reverberant sound, and secondarily on keeping the noise from being broadcast throughout the rest of the facility. While all of the traditional sound control techniques still need to be employed, it is most important to prevent the factors that cause dogs to bark.
Some of the causes to be considered are territorial rivalry, excitement at feeding times, people and animals passing enclosures, the social facilitation that spreads barking, and sound being generated within the facility that is beyond the range audible to humans.
By working with smaller wards, avoiding long straight corridors, using enclosed housing units, and providing the dogs with some choice over their environment, such as furnishing hiding places, less stressful surroundings can be created. Keeping services and mechanical areas separate from housing can help minimise the impact of the very high and low frequency sounds that only dogs can hear.
Don't forget that dog noise affects cats. Cats should be housed in areas that are physically separate from dog areas and away from other loud areas of the facility. Even caging design is an important consideration. Stainless-steel caging may be the most cleanable, but it has the disadvantage of being loud.
Companionship
Safety and disease control are critical for the animals in your care. However, social isolation is stressful especially for dogs who are pack animals by nature. Given the right type of enclosure, housing dogs together has a calming effect and encourages exercise and play.
Most dog housing is designed to minimise labour cost by eliminating as much animal handling as possible. As a consequence, most staff time is spent cleaning up messes, with little time spent socialising with and exercising the dogs. It is better for both people and animals alike if the dogs are taken out on a regular schedule to relieve themselves. This allows the dogs time to socialise with the staff and to get some exercise. Human companionship is a major stress reliever for many companion animals. Taking a fresh look at your whole housing philosophy could be the best way to get the most out of your labour dollar.
It is best to design several small cat housing areas rather than one large one. This is better for disease control and also allows you to separate cats into different life stages and into smaller groups, which is less stressful for each individual cat. Even in the smallest facility, it is important to house cats in a different room from dogs.
Design housing areas so routines are established and observed. Cats should be able to see what is coming before it arrives, so it is helpful if they have views into other spaces or into the food prep area.
Reducing the Spread of Disease
While it is important for animal enclosures to be enriched, the traditional studies of disease control are no less valuable. The last thing you or your client wants is a pet contracting a disease while in your care. This does not reflect well on your staff or your facility and may make clients reluctant to return. Therefore, it is important to fully understand which factors are most likely to spread diseases in animal housing areas. New research from UC Davis challenges our shared assumptions and industry standard knowledge. Below is a list of the most common causes for the spread of disease based on scientific studies, in order of highest to lowest importance:
Remarkably, these studies conclude that aerosolisation of disease, which is commonly believed to be the most important factor, is not as prevalent as we once thought. It is especially unlikely in cat housing areas, because cats' lungs are not large enough to expel particles more than a couple of feet. Instead, it is fromites that are the number one culprit for disease spread. Caretakers' hands and clothing can become fromites, effectively transferring disease from one cage to another.
This new research should not discourage you from crating social opportunities for dogs and cats. In fact, social housing and interaction with caretakers does not normally increase disease risk in health populations. Rather, this research creates awareness and methods for handling risky populations, such as animals that are already sick and cats that are stressed and nervous. In these cases, it is important that the environment itself is as enriched as possible to reduce stress and reduce the need to manhandle stressed animals. Ironically, it is often these most-at-risk are normally too small to be cleaned without moving the animals. During the process of cleaning these cages, a staff member's hands and clothing can become contaminated, making disease transfer to healthy animals a likely result.
Summary
Just as veterinary medicine has changed dramatically in recent years, so have standards for animal housing. The way you house animals communicates a lot to your clients about your values and standards. A successful facility is one that considers all aspects of animal care. By focusing on a performance approach to animal enclosures, you can help to create environments that reduce your patients' stress levels, make them happier, and encourage better behaviour.
Source: Heather E Lewis Hospital Design Conference 2009
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