Animals | Interview with the Author—Prof. Lorann Stallones

We recently had the opportunity to interview Prof. Lorann Stallones about her paper “Sustainability and the Thoroughbred Breeding and Racing Industries: An Enhanced One Welfare Perspective” which was published in Animals in 2023 and has received a significant amount of positive feedback from readers.

The following is an interview with Prof. Lorann Stallones:

1. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your current research?

I'm a professor in the Department of Psychology at Colorado State University and Director of the High Plains Intermountain Center for Agricultural Safety and Health. In addition, I serve as a Research Coordinator for Human–Animal Bond with the One Health Institute. I am an epidemiologist and specialize in human health, but my research interests are related to One Health, including the impact of euthanasia on the well-being of workers in the dairy and swine industries and understanding the relationships between humans and animals as related to well-being. Historically, my work on the human–animal bond started with companion animals and the development of a scale that has been widely used around the world, called the Lexington Attachment to Pets Scale. That work was published in the 1980s, and the scale is still being used today. My expertise is focused mainly on occupational health, and I have spent many years studying agriculture safety and health. That's what my background really is and that's how I came to be interested not only in the well-being of people working in the agriculture industry but also that of the animals that they work with. I met Dr. Paul McGreevy when he was visiting Colorado State University. We sat down and just shared our mutual interests, and what came out of that was the idea of using the One Welfare model to summarize the literature on the impact of Thoroughbred racing among humans and horses and within the environment. Paul brought in his colleague Dr. Phil McManus to work with us on that paper. One of the projects I am working on with colleagues in animal sciences is dairy cow end of life and looking at the dairy supply chain and assessing the welfare of the animals and people in different spaces in the dairy industry. The other area that I’ve been working on, as reflected in this paper, is that there really hasn't been a deep dive into how to measure human–equine attachment. I have a graduate student in psychology who is really interested in it. She developed a questionnaire called the human–equine attachment questionnaire using the psychological theory of attachment and well-developed methods to develop a survey instrument. We're hoping it will trigger a broader interest and be used in other studies. I have another graduate student who is very interested in empathy and did a study on human empathy among dairy workers. We are trying to understand how human–animal connections are really impacting the well-being of animals and people and how receptive workers may be to the issues of animal welfare.

2. What inspired you to conduct this research?

My interest in the area actually started by working with people interested in animal sciences. We did a lot of work trying to understand euthanasia in an agricultural setting; primarily, the work we have done is in the dairy industry and my role is again to focus on impacts on the workers who perform euthanasia or lose the animals they may be connected with. In the dairy industry, workers spend a lot of time with calves and cows and interact closely with them. I started working with animal scientists who are experts in the dairy industry, and I contributed by trying to understand the impact on humans. I have also been working with colleagues in occupational therapy who provide equine-assisted services. That work has been quite focused on the impact of therapy on human clients but with less work on volunteers, workers, and people providing services in that space. It became very clear to me that people who were concerned about horse welfare needed to communicate with those working on the well-being of the people engaged in equine-assisted services. Many equine therapy horses come out of other jobs—they have retired from something, people have decided they don't want to take care of them anymore, and so on. The horses come into equine-assisted services, but they are not raised to do that work. I got very interested partly because I'm sitting in Colorado State University where Temple Grandin is. The Temple Grandin Equine Center is located here at CSU and doing outstanding work. I had the opportunity to sit with people interested in equine welfare and equine behavior to try to get a better understanding of how these things relate to an overall One Welfare framework. Then, Dr. Paul McGreevy came to visit CSU and we were introduced to each other. We shared a lot of different ideas. He is clearly an expert in equine welfare. We were trying to find something to work together on and this is the thing that he was the most passionate about. I had no knowledge about Thoroughbred racing. It gave me the opportunity to explore a whole body of literature on the human side that I was unfamiliar with. Because, for the most part, people who work in agriculture safety and health don't include Thoroughbred racing as a part of their view of agricultural work, but when you think about the horses on the breeding farms, where they're pastured, it is agriculture. Broadening the definitions, how we think about occupations, helps to break down some barriers. There are so many similarities related to health risks between people working with large animals, whether it's bulls, cows, or horses, and some of the conditions that lead to more significant problems with humans are the same conditions that create welfare problems with animals.

3. What do you think we can learn from your article?

The paper itself is a deep dive into the literature across three spaces—humans, horses, and the environment. And the model used was a logical extension of our interest in welfare and those different spaces. What I would say is that it would never have happened without the team. I'm not an expert in equine behavior or horse welfare, I’m not an environmental science person, I'm an epidemiologist working on human health. One lesson can be learned from the way the paper evolved. Paul went back to Australia and we met on Zoom calls on a regular basis to formulate how we wanted to approach the paper and who would write which pieces. It was team science in the international setting. It was great fun for me, and I learned so much. Creating a team that works well together, with a shared interest in the topic, is a marvelous way of being able to learn and expand and reach out to a wider audience, who might only have thought from their own disciplinary perspective, to really think about and across these different spaces.

4. What do you think made the academic community respond so well to your commentary?

I think partly because the commentary is addressing things people have not thought about together and have not been pulled together in quite the way that we did, with such an encompassing framework. The framework itself gives the opportunity for people to think about whether their work fits and whether there are gaps that need to be filled in order to improve Thoroughbred racing. I think it's such an interesting topic for people who are interested in horses, sports, and animal, human, and environmental welfare, even the impacts of gambling. It's a wide range of things that people may care about; they come in and the package is there for them to think about how it might impact their interests. It also covers what people may not think about, like the transport of the horses, the impact on the environment of moving the horses to take part in racing or breeding around the world, how that impacts climate change, and so on. It has so many different components that it's not a surprise that a wide range of people may be interested in it.

5. What challenges did you encounter while writing this commentary, and how did you overcome them?

What triggered the first idea of submitting it to Animals was the Special Issue on horse welfare. We were inspired to go ahead and get started. The time difference between Australia and the United States, everybody being on different schedules and sabbaticals, made it challenging, so we wanted to ensure that we were communicating well with each other, especially on language and how the different disciplines used words. Actually, the paper was rejected from the Special Issue due to its broader focus, but we decided to try again in a more general issue of the journal, and we were successful. It's important to talk across different disciplines and not just stay so focused that we cannot address broader approaches if we really want to change things in a positive way.

6. What do you think are the future directions for your research?

For me, at this stage of my career, the thing that drives the focus of my work is what my students are interested in. I would love to have a student interested in the human–equine attachment questionnaire and use it in a variety of different settings. It would be useful in a Thoroughbred racing space and equine-assisted service work and to see what human impacts are associated with human attachment to horses. If I find a student interested in that, that's probably one area that I would continue with. My research on end-of-life dairy work is in progress right now; depending on how that pans out we may identify work for the future. One of the manuscripts sitting on my desk and waiting to move forward is related to horse behavior and the use of helmets among riders. I'm planning my retirement, so I don't want to take on huge projects but really want to help support and make connections with people who are interested in similar things.

7. What advice would you give to young scholars seeking to get into academia or publish their work?

Persistence is really important. It is crucial to work on things that you care a lot about, even if other people may discourage you. When I started working in agriculture safety and health, it wasn't considered an important occupation in the United States because there weren't enough farmers working compared to all the other workers. Try finding people who share your passion and interests and work with them. I think it's really important to find people who are generous with their time and skills and aren’t driving you to their interests but instead are open to yours. That's what I had to strive to do in my mentoring. I know sometimes young people have the tendency not to be their authentic selves in the face of authority. If you can't, it's going to be a painful process to get into the academic world. Publishing is hard; there are a lot of journals available but so many of them are expensive. You have to be persistent and find the right home for the papers that you want to publish. I always tell my students to make a list of at least three journals. Don't worry if the first one doesn't take your manuscript. Send it to the second one, send it to the third one, and if you're still getting criticism, sit down and rework the paper, instead of trying for the journal that said no. Don't take rejections personally. Sometimes it's just a bad fit.

8. Why did you choose Animals as the platform for your work?

We had good success with our other work. The reviewers are very helpful and it feels like the right place because of the readership. This paper was a good fit for Animals. You see the work that it's published on humans, on the environment, and about animals across the journal and it's taking this One Health scale to One Welfare in an appropriate way. A lot of papers that we cited in our work were published in Animals, so that's another good way to pre-choose a journal.