Kudos to winners of animal welfare and human-animal bond awards
Please join the AVMA community in congratulating and honoring three recipients of AVMA Excellence Awards related to animal welfare and the human-animal bond.
- Dr. Dani McVety-Leinen: Bustad Companion Animal Veterinarian of the Year Award
- Dr. Patricia Turner: AVMA Animal Welfare Award
- Suzanne Millman, PhD: AVMA Humane Award
The awards were announced as part of AVMA’s celebration of National Pet Week®, which takes place in the first full week of May each year. They are supported through educational funding from Merck Animal Health.
Dr. Dani McVety-Leinen, founder and CEO, Lap of Love
Dr. McVety-Leinen, a pioneer in end-of-life care, founded Lap of Love Veterinary Hospice in Florida in 2009 and has grown it into a nationwide network that has served nearly 500,000 families.
With her Lap of Love team, she has revolutionized the care of geriatric pets, end-stage management of terminal illnesses, and the handling of veterinary euthanasia. Lap of Love recently established a new Pet Loss Support Team to support and help people grieving the loss of a pet.
Dr. Patricia Turner, corporate vice president of global animal welfare, Charles River Laboratories
Dr. Turner was named to receive the Animal Welfare Award for her decades of work dedicated to improving farm and laboratory animal welfare through teaching, training, service, research, advocacy and policy development.
Dr. Turner’s passion for animal welfare education and training runs deep, and she has devoted countless volunteer hours promoting the ethical treatment of animals in science. As an educator, she has trained hundreds of veterinary peers and students, and developed three well-regarded post-graduate programs for veterinarians specializing in laboratory animal science.
In addition to her work with Charles River, she is a professor emerita and applied animal welfare scientist at the University of Guelph and Campbell Centre for the Study of Animal Welfare.
Read more about Dr. Turner and the AVMA Animal Welfare Award.
Suzanne Millman, PhD, professor of animal welfare, Iowa State University
Millman’s work has been extremely influential in shaping scientific understanding of how agricultural animals express pain and distress, how we recognize it, and the importance of finding practical, affordable, and effective ways of mitigating it.
Among her accomplishments, she has been instrumental in shaping agricultural animal producers’ considerations of ill and injured animals, and the opportunities to manage, mitigate and avoid suffering in their animal care practices. Her published works include more than 80 peer-reviewed articles on animal welfare, including ethical and scientific issues, and various aspects of animal behavior as a function of environmental conditions.
Read more about her work and the AVMA Humane Award.
The AVMA Excellence Awards program recognizes accomplishments in every aspect of veterinary medicine. The program honors the breadth of veterinary medicine, the diversity of veterinary careers, and the many ways in which veterinary professionals protect both animal and human health.
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