What is a Clinical Animal Behaviourist?
On veterinary referral, a Clinical Animal Behaviourist works one-on-one with an animal and their caregiver, often in their home environment or in a clinic. They take a detailed case history and assess the reasons behind the animal’s behaviour problem. This leads to a behaviour treatment plan, which the clinician then helps the animal and their caregivers work through over a period of time, ranging from a few weeks to several months.
How do I become a Clinical Animal Behaviourist?
There are many different routes available for becoming a clinical animal behaviourist – practitioners have come to the job through many different paths. Essentially, though, there are two sides to the job that you need to develop to practise as a clinical animal behaviourist: academic knowledge and practical experience. We have followed the CCAB route because we found it to be very structured and transparent, plus it is currently the only independent accreditation scheme in the UK for vet and non-vet behaviourists.
We do encourage our students to work towards CCAB, too, but it is not an essential requirement for being mentored by us. If you’re starting out, we can discuss the different options that would work specifically for you, depending on your background, what’s going on in your life, and what you’re aspiring to.
Whatever you need or whatever point you are in your career, we can brainstorm with you and point you in the right direction.
I’d like to start seeing cases today – can you help me?
Generally, we expect our mentees to have some academic knowledge of the field before we allow them to sit in on our cases or shadow our work. It is generally recommended to attain ‘CCAB Pre-Certification’ or graduate from a course recognised by CCAB Certification or ABTC before considering any form of clinical practice yourself. That doesn’t stop you from working on gaining any of the important practical handling and training skills needed for any work with animals, such as through helping at training classes or at a local rescue centre.
Once you have gained the academic knowledge necessary for the job, we offer two key forms of clinical supervision to help you gain the required practical knowledge: either you can sit in with one of us, or one of our mentors can sit in on your cases!
If you have just graduated and are starting out, we recommend that you sit in and observe us conduct a range of cases first. Then, you can start leading on certain cases under our supervision at a rate that commiserates with your abilities. When you start leading, your mentor may well pipe up and join in the consultation with you quite a bit, but as your clinical skills grow, your mentor will gradually take more of a backstep and eventually just give you feedback at the end of the consultation.
