A couple times a year, my husband, Matthew, and I put our heads together to strategize.
It’s always a bit of a production getting our dog, Gertie, and two cats, Hilde and Earl, to the vet. If our 3-year-old dog Gertie suspects a trip to the vet is in order, she’ll start flashing big doe eyes and try to slowly slink upstairs to hide.
Baby talk and peanut butter bribes are generally in order.
But for Hilde and Earl, there is always considerably more protesting. Try as we might, our cats still do not happily trot into their kennels for the car ride. When the carriers come out and they go in, we’re often given a front row seat to the most mournful and frustrated opera of meows ever performed.
We’re not alone.
A 2011 study found that about 60% of cat owners and about 40% of dog owners say their pet hates going to the vet. All that anxiety is making pet owners anxious, too. The same study found that 40% of cat owners and about 30% of dog owners reported that “just thinking about it [vet trips] is stressful.”
A growing “fear free” movement among veterinarians, trainers, pet sitters and owners hopes to upend those stats.
It’s an initiative focused on recognizing and preventing fear in pets and the people who care for them. It sounds simple enough, but what fear free requires is a major shift in how the humans in the exam room think about the animal experience, said Dr. Neala Boyer.
“The core of that is reading body language to understand when an animal says ‘No, I’m not okay with that, and I need you to step back and reconsider what you’re doing,’” Boyer said. “The core of these types of techniques is understanding how to interpret their body signals. And it really is more than just what the eyes are telling you, or the tail.”
Boyer is a board-certified vet and associate clinical professor at Kansas State University’s Hill’s Pet Health and Nutrition Center. In 2021, she received her elite Fear Free certification.
The ideas at the heart of the movement — that treating an animal’s physical health has to be hand-in-hand with treating their emotional health — go back decades. But a methodology of veterinary care wasn’t formalized until 2016, when Idaho-based veterinarian Dr. Marty Becker launched the company Fear Free.
Becker’s company developed a certification program that it pulls from the expertise of a 160-member advisory panel of veterinary behaviorists, anesthetists, practice managers and practitioners.
The online program is self-paced and takes participating vets through a series of courses. Certification is capped off with the signing of the Fear Free pledge, which calls vets to “recognize that Fear Free is a whole-lifestyle approach to pet care and belongs in the home, the car and places where pets receive professional services.”
In 2022, the company announced that more than 100,000 veterinarians and pet professionals have earned their Fear Free professional certification.
Boyer said she first heard about the concept a decade ago, while listening to a podcast about caring for cats. Boyer said she used to “be quite afraid of cats when they didn’t want to see us.”
The podcast flipped her entire view of felines, from “king of the jungle” to prey species. That reframing helped Boyer understand how that evolutionary role would cause cats to act anxiously when they feel exposed under the bright lights and big open spaces of typical exam rooms.
Now Boyer helps teach student veterinarians Fear Free techniques. At K-State’s clinic, students learn Fear Free techniques beginning in their first year with the program. Students put the techniques into practice and then take what they learn to other clinics during their externships.
It’s a big change from what Boyer said was the norm when she was starting as a veterinarian. Boyer said that for the first half of her career, she did what many vets learn to do — she’d sedate a worked-up pet or “just get things done.”
That kind of focus, on just getting done with the visit, can keep vets and their owners from noticing when their pets are trying to show them they’re at their limit. Like when a dog starts heavily panting, or a cat suddenly goes still and splays its whiskers.
“Sometimes people say, ‘Oh I had no indication that they were going to do that,’ but yet that animal was throwing out neon signs that it was afraid,” Boyer said.
Fear Free, Boyer said, requires vets to put together a much larger picture of how an animal is acting emotionally to its environment, its owner and its doctors. The Fear Free model focuses on needs versus wants.
When warning bells keep vets from being able to do a physical exam, Fear Free practitioners sometimes recommend patients come back later after taking medications like Trazodone or Gabapentin.
“With medication ahead of time for anxiety and using gentle handling and low-stress restraint, I can often perform things that could never be done before,” Boyer said of her most anxious patients. “Which means I can find disease states much earlier than they ever could have been found before.”
But before medication, Fear Free encourages vets to make environmental changes. That’s on full display at Wichita’s Pet Wellness clinic on Douglas.
Dr. Christy Rafferty is a board-certified vet and the owner of Wichita Pet Wellness, one of a handful of vet offices in Wichita with Fear Free certified staff.
At Wichita Pet Wellness, Fear Free has been built into the bones of the clinic. The walls of the exam rooms at the clinic are painted soft greens, blues and violets, which are soothing colors within cats’ and dogs’ visible range. The lobby has a separate area for cats, where carriers can be placed at eye-level with their owners and out of reach of curious dogs.
The floors are nonslip to give geriatric dogs better grip, and there are large couches in the exam rooms for dogs to lounge on during their visits. Diffusers in the room put out calming pheromones to help calm anxious cats, and there’s often gentle music playing to bring the stress down further.
Area rugs on the exam floors provide a soft space for both Rafferty and the "kiddos," as she calls them.
“I try and get down on their level, usually on the floor, as quickly as possible,” Rafferty said. “If they’re really scared, I’m coming in back first, backing in and then getting down low when we actually touch them.”
Rafferty said Fear Free is night-and-day from when she started practicing veterinary medicine. She graduated from the College of Veterinary Medicine at Texas A&M University in 1999 and began working at mixed animal practices — which handle animals like horses as well as dogs and cats — before moving into small animal practices in Wichita.
She was working at a local pet hospital with her now lead technician Marissa May, when May told her about Fear Free practices.
Rafferty said she was resistant at first, and worried that “I don’t have time to just baby everybody.” When she started putting the techniques into practice, she realized “it’s not taking any more time, and this is so much nicer for everybody.”
The entire staff at Wichita Pet Wellness has gone through the Fear Free certification program and uses the techniques as they greet patients in the lobby, conduct an initial check-up and perform more complex procedures
Making the clinic feel like a home, dolling out lots of treats and offering free “victory visits” — short trips where owners can bring their pets in to the clinic for a treat and positive reinforcement without any poking or prodding — helps pets change their outlook on the vet.
Pets like my cat Hilde, who only stops her frustrated meows when she realizes she’s going to see Rafferty and her team at the clinic. While my other cat Earl gets all the Cheese Whiz he can handle to distract him from his shots, Hilde gets her shots without much fussing — just a towel with some Feliway sprayed on it nearby.
After five-years running Wichita Pet Wellness Fear Free, Rafferty says the rewards come daily.
“It is so nice for us to never feel like we have to make a pet do something, to feel like we're going to have to hold down a cat who is trying to do the alligator roll … or having three people hold down a dog for a nail trim,” Rafferty said. “That doesn't have to happen ever again, and that is lovely.”
