Teaching Gentle Canine and Feline Handling as a Veterinary Clinical Skill

Abstract

Gentle animal handling techniques decrease the fear, anxiety, and stress (FAS) felt by companion animals during veterinary visits. These techniques, relatively new in the veterinary field, can be taught to veterinary students in a progressive clinical skills curriculum using models and live animals. This article includes a series of comprehensive lesson plans that are simple to adopt and easy to modify to fit the needs of individual institutions teaching these skills. These laboratories, each reviewing and building on content previously presented, are meant to be accompanied with specific feedback offered by instructors overseeing student performance of skills. Students’ deliberate practice of these techniques is meant to build, refine, and reinforce gentle animal handling from the start of their veterinary education to prepare them to handle animals using these techniques during their clinical training and beyond.

Keywords

• gentle animal handling
• fear free
• low stress
• clinical skills
• veterinary education
• simulation
• models