Great. Thank you so much.

I want to start by acknowledging the land that we're sharing across the country today and any animals that you might have around you, given that a lot of us are working from home.

Thank you for this opportunity to share the expertise from our office. For five years, we've been doing research with service dogs specifically, and for 10 years with animals in a general therapeutic manner.

We're going to make five key points today and hopefully they will help contribute to the committee's discussion. I want you to keep in mind what MP Doherty said in his observations about the emotion attached to service dogs, because we're going to return to that. There's something really important to note about it.

Our first point is the research question that's really important to our team: What is the extent to which service dogs are beneficial to veterans' wellness and how are they beneficial? This is similar to the past work of our office on the role of indigenous culture in helping people heal from addictions. It's about how it works; it's not about questioning if it works. That would be disrespectful. This approach also recognizes the lived and living experience alongside scientific evidence, which we know is emerging in the service dog field.

In asking this research question, we know that service dogs are one distinct category of canines with a job. However, they're also domesticated animals that live with us in our households. The domestication of dogs has occurred over thousands of years, and there are really solid implications from this that we can't negate. For example, the vast majority of Canadian households identify and treat pets as family members. This is even more likely among veterans who are paired with a service dog. This cannot be lost in the discussion. We often refer to this as a human-animal relationship or bond, or in academia we call it “zooeyia”, and this connection is incredibly powerful. Even in the pandemic we could see it beyond veterans.

That's the important question to us.

Second, research is still emerging, as we know, on service dogs and their benefits, and our team has produced quite a fair amount here in Canada over the past several years. What we've concluded to date is that this issue is very complex and that service dogs are a source of personalized support and a complement to treatment.

How does this happen? Service dogs are sentient beings with the ability to bond with humans, and they're task-trained to have technical skills to assist veterans. It's in this former role that service dogs generally provide what humans cannot or choose not to provide. We found this in our work with people in recovery generally from problematic substance use with their pets. It's also emerging in our current study with veterans.

We focus on substance use because it is a high risk factor—substance-use disorder from having a PTSD diagnosis. In a couple of our findings, we found that service dogs are a source of personalized support, as I said, and a complement to treatment. In a 2016 qualitative study, we saw that they assisted with decreasing the problematic use of substances and prescribed medications. They also supported physical health, a sense of psychological acceptance, a social connection and a spiritual purpose, which today we refer to as “moral injury”.

In an exploratory study in 2017, we identified a decrease in problematic substance abuse again, decrease in PTSD symptoms and a decrease or stabilization in use of medications that usually have reported negative effects, such as psychiatric medications. In phase one of our pilot study in 2019, we saw a reduction in problematic alcohol and opioid use and PTSD symptoms.

Underlying all of this is the human-animal bond. It's not just the technical skills the dogs have. This is what's emerging from the American research as well. Right now we have a SUAP grant from Health Canada, and we're working alongside 12 service dog organizations to help them learn about problematic substance use with their veterans, to use evidence-based practices and to look at peer support.

We have done several studies with veterans and have a lot of findings from them that we can discuss later, but I'm going to turn it over to Darlene now.

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