ABSTRACT
I began preparing for new roles in Human-Animal Interaction (HAI) long before I knew that was where I was heading. Forty years ago, while serving as a live-in houseparent in a community mental health residential program when completing my master’s degree, I did my first intervention when one of the residents wanted to set up a fish tank. Later, even though my doctoral focus was on working with children and families, I took courses in ethology and read a great deal about animal behavior simply out of interest. During the first decades of my career, while conducting therapy with children and families in private practice (as a family psychologist and play therapist), setting up a new family program in a hospital, serving as clinical director of a large community mental health center, working with mid-sized manufacturing companies to establish self-managed work teams, and traveling throughout the world conducting play therapy trainings for mental health professionals, I continued my “pleasure reading” of everything I could find—fiction and nonfiction—about dogs and horses. I also took numerous trips to Alaska to photograph Alaskan brown bears in the wild, where I learned more about applied ethology, animal behavior, and bear body language—an important thing to know if you are walking in the woods on bear paths or hiking along salmon streams and can bump into bears at any time! Even so, I had no plans to become involved in HAI, mostly because I was unaware of anyone doing this type of work.
