Project Summary/ Abstract
This R21 application provides a multidisciplinary One Health approach to developing and evaluating a novel
Cat Assisted Training (CAT) animal assisted intervention (AAI) for early adolescents with developmental
disabilities (DD) and their family cat. The novel CAT intervention will be a 6-week cat walking and training
program for youth 10 - 12 years old. Participants will learn how to respond appropriately to cat body language,
practice fear-free and positive reinforcement-based handling, and training skills, and how to fit a harness and
walk their cats on leash. For the human participants, skills and behaviors learned during the intervention are
expected to promote and support long-term physical activity, social wellbeing, and lasting feelings of
responsibility even after the intervention itself has concluded. We also expect these experiences to improve the
relationship between the child participant and household cat, and in turn, reduce cat stress in the child’s
presence and increase cat sociability and indicators of behavioral wellbeing. Because each child will
participate with a cat already living in their household, this program will create a unique active partnership
between child and cat that considers the health and wellbeing of both partners. Recent pilot work by PIs Udell
& MacDonald has revealed physical and social-emotional improvements in children with and without
developmental disabilities following a pet dog-partner based AAI. Dogs also showed increased sociability and
attachment towards their child partner after AAI participation. Work by PI Udell & Vitale has demonstrated that
many cats are highly social and form strong attachment bonds with humans, that cats can be successfully
trained a wide range of behaviors, including leash walking, and that cat training classes result in high
participant retention rates. Cat social behavior and welfare is also heavily influenced by human behavior and
training, making it highly likely that cats would also benefit from this program. There remains a critical need for
further empirical evaluation of AAI practices, especially those that target the specific needs of at-risk
populations and youth. Further extending the development and evaluation of activity-based AAIs beyond those
that include dogs and horses also helps address the critical need to consider and include diverse human
participants, creating new equitable opportunities for AAI involvement to those who may have access to cats,
but not dogs and horses (due to practical, health, cultural, socio-economic, or other personal reasons).
