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Lauren E Van Patter

Kim & Stu Lang Professor in Community and Shelter Medicine
Department of Clinical Studies
Ontario Veterinary College, University of Guelph
vanpattl@uoguelph.ca

Overview        

I’m the Kim & Stu Lang Professor in Community and Shelter Medicine in the Department of Clinical Studies at the Ontario Veterinary College, University of Guelph. I’m a settler researcher of Finnish and Dutch descent living on the treaty lands and territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, and within the ancestral territories of the Anishinnabe, Hodinöhsö:ni’, and Attawandaron peoples. As an interdisciplinary Animal Studies researcher, I bring my background in Environmental Sciences and Cultural Geographies together to explore questions of ‘living well’ in multispecies communities. My current research with the OVC Community Healthcare Partnerships Program (CHPP) lies at the intersection of human and animal wellbeing (One Health), bridges theory (posthuman, feminist, anti-colonial) and practice (community veterinary medicine), and feeds into real-world impacts, addressing social inequities and improving the lives of companion animals and their human families.

CHPP

CHPP aims to identify, understand, and remove barriers that impede access to healthcare for animals. This involves both delivery of companion animal healthcare services to communities that have traditionally been underserved by veterinary medicine, as well as delivering and assessing pedagogical opportunities for veterinary trainees to gain experience providing compassionate care to such communities in a manner that is anti-oppressive and respects self-determination. CHPP collaborates to deliver animal healthcare with partners from the Shelter Medicine community, communities experiencing housing precarity, and with five First Nations in Ontario.

Current Research

My research program has three primary areas of focus:

Characterizing and assessing access to veterinary care in Canada

A significant percentage of Canadian families experience barriers in accessing veterinary care, but we know little about the scale of the issue, current strategies being employed to improve access, or their impacts. As various grassroots actors across the country attempt to address geographic, financial, or other barriers, we need to understand: what strategies are being implemented; how, if at all, their outcomes are being assessed; and opportunities and priorities for collaboratively enhancing access to care in Canadian communities moving forward. A recent grant from PetSmart Charities Canada is supporting work to address these important question.

Community based participatory action research for animal and community wellbeing

I am collaborating with several of CHPP’s community partners to learn more about human-animal relationships and animal health needs with the aim of enhancing animal and community wellbeing in a manner that is sustainable, foregrounds community empowerment, and respects Indigenous sovereignty. I engage community based participatory action research (CBPAR) methodologies in which communities partner to delineate project aims, design, data collection, and analysis. The research is action-oriented, in that findings are translated back to build capacity and empowerment, usually in terms of addressing specific issues or goals the community has identified.

Veterinary pedagogies for social justice

The aims of this research are to assess pedagogical opportunities and career impacts of bringing social justice issues into veterinary training. I have several projects exploring opportunities, outcomes, and best practices in terms of:

  • Addressing implicit biases, cultivating cultural humility, and understanding social inequities;
  • Service-learning and community engagement in veterinary curricula;
  • Changing cultures of veterinary practice to improve service provision to underserved communities through anti-oppressive and trauma-informed practices and Indigenous cultural safety.

Past Research

My background is in Environmental Sciences and Geography. My SSHRC funded MA thesis at the University of Guelph explored community responses to, and the lives of, feral cats, generating strategies for mitigating competing values and management preferences. My SSHRC funded PhD thesis at Queen’s University engaged wildlife managers, local residents, and community scientists to understand human-coyote conflicts and paths to coexisting with urban animals.

As an action-oriented scholar, I have worked collaboratively with veterinarians, wildlife practitioners, biologists, philosophers, and political theorists to produce outputs which extend dialogues around policy and practice for a range of domestic and wild species. In recent collaborations, I have worked with members of the Lives of Animals Research Group, the Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law, and Ethics (APPLE) Research Cluster at Queen’s University, Coyote Watch Canada, and the Vital Geographies research group in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge.