Doctoral Dissertation Research: Veterinary Medicine in Anthropological Perspective: Ethnoveterinary Care and Human - Animal Relationships

人类和动物有着长期的、与进化相关的、持续相互作用的历史。事实上，数千年来证明的人类和宠物的共同进化开启了一个有趣的问题，涉及人类和动物相互提供或索取的成本和收益。这个博士论文研究项目调查与业主的决定，以提供昂贵的兽医护理，以了解动物的概念如何影响兽医护理相关的因素。除了培训人类学研究的博士生外，该项目的研究结果还可以通过更好地理解和预测人类客户如何感知和与患病动物互动，为兽医有效拦截疾病传播提供信息和便利。该项目将其研究结果广泛传播给学术界、非专业人士和动物医生。该项目提供了新颖的人类学研究，研究动物护理文化，即，民族兽医学。该研究测试人类学理论和概念，关于医学（医学人类学）和人与动物的相互作用（民族动物学或人类动物学），并使用认知人类学，以确定突出的文化模式（思维框架）关于动物疾病和健康。它使用人种学观察和访谈方法，包括调查，自由列表，半结构化访谈，动物剪影的身体映射，以及自我管理的视频日志。这些数据揭示了不同的人类-动物活动如何与不同的文化模式或概念倾向联系起来，关于动物疾病，包括人们如何看待疾病的原因，生理和症状，以及适当的治疗反应。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

Humans and animals have long, evolutionarily relevant, histories of sustained interactions. Indeed, millennia-long demonstrated co-evolution of humans and their pets opens fascinating questions involving the costs and benefits that humans and animals provide to or exact from each other. This doctoral dissertation research project investigates factors associated with owners’ decisions to provide costly veterinary care to their animals to understand how concepts of animals impact veterinary care. In addition to training a doctoral student in anthropological research, this project’s findings can inform and facilitate veterinarians’ effective interception in disease spread, by better understanding and anticipating how their human clients perceive and interact with their sick animals. The project disseminates its findings broadly to academic, lay, and animal physician audiences. This project offers novel anthropological research examining the culture of animal care, i.e., ethnoveterinary medicine. The research tests anthropological theories and concepts regarding medicine (medical anthropology) and human-animal interaction (ethnozoology or anthrozoology), and uses cognitive anthropology to identify salient cultural models (frameworks for thinking) about animal disease and wellness. It uses ethnographic observational and interview methods, including surveying, free-listing, semi-structured interviews, body mapping with animal silhouettes, and self-administered video journaling. The data reveal how differing human-animal activities connect with different cultural models, or conceptual tendencies, about animal sickness, including how people conceive of disease causes, physiology and symptoms, and the appropriate treatment responses.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.