People and Animal Wellbeing at Work and in Society

Abstract: Promoting multispecies wellbeing is urgently needed through reforms and developing guidelines on how humans interact with animals on individual, organizational and societal levels. The One Welfare approach describes the interrelationships between animal welfare, human wellbeing, and the environment in society, and serves as a foundational framework for PAWWS. PAWWS fosters cross-disciplinary collaboration between Animal Organization Studies (AOS), Veterinary Science, and Social and Healthcare Sciences to study human and animal wellbeing at work in integrated and groundbreaking ways. Empirically, we will focus on human-dog working relations in organizations such as scent detection- or assistance-dogs. The ethical and legal perspective of working dogs needs scrutiny and development to ensure the work-life conditions for them. The employment, work and human relations literatures need to include animals to develop ethical and practical animal welfare frameworks for working dogs and multispecies best praxis at work. In PAWWS, we take a multifaceted approach to explore practical cases of dogs working in hospitals, airports, and companies. We focus on human-dog interactions in workplaces with a concern to how to better include multispecies concerns into discussions of work ethics and wellbeing. Data collected will use a variety of methods (ethnographic methods, interviews, surveys) and we will also develop multispecies methods that draw from cross-disciplinary best practices. PAWWS contributes to multiple fields, including AOS; Veterinary Science; and Sociology of work. Practical and societal impacts are considered, such as developing a DogWork logo and animal welfare certification, white paper for WHO, nonhuman employment contracts and guidelines (including for parliamentary level). We also develop courses and spearhead public discussion. This develops SDGs towards a less humancentric perspective of One Health/One Welfare. Better human wellbeing is also an important contribution, as we include pain alert-dogs as a novelty, and their impact of decreased opiate use, ambulance need, and hospital stays, and more open access to work for individuals with disabilities. Having an inclusive and healthy workforce is key in our future society. But most importantly, if animals are used as workers, then their health and wellbeing need to be at the forefront of any such human-animal interactions and in workplaces that include animals

A research project that combines the know-how from veterinary science, research in animal and human well-being, organization sciences in business and social sciences. We aim to take in the dogs as a workforce into society but we need to know that they are not treated badly or exploited and that they are happy working together with us. This is a totally novel way to write working agreements for business people and a totally new way to look at stress in animals for veterinarians and research in the areas are needed.

Dogs love to work with smell and already have over 30 smell related working duties. Many more are on the way, e.g dogs that warn their patient owners of upcoming pain attacks. Dogs are also very badly treated when used only as pieces in a machinery such as sledging in Finnish Lapland, where some operations are totally unethical while others are superb for the employed dogs.