The Animalhood™ Project
animalhood (n.) — the state or period of being an animal (Oxford English Dictionary)
Learning through relationship, common ground, and care with non-domesticated animals.
Cross-sector experience
Beyond my work with animals, I'm a consultant and educator specialising in human health, wellbeing and belonging. Drawing on a background as a military Education Officer and years in learning and development, backed by a PhD and chartership in psychology, I focus on designing specialist practical learning experiences. Much of my career since my military service has centred on supporting people through demanding roles and the transitions that follow them.
My work is educational and developmental rather than clinical. I don’t treat people, I facilitate them to become their own greatest ally. I help people understand their responses to change and uncertainty by exploring how those responses live in their bodies, thoughts, feelings, and actions. The goal is to support them to choose more intentionally, and to build sustained resilience. You can learn more at jacquiwilmshurst.com.
Common Ground
The idea for this project, though, came to me away from classrooms, reading, and talking, and the bustle and screen-time of my usual working life. My hands-on caring roles with other animals adjusting to upheaval and new, unfamiliar lives have made something clear: the embodied, non-verbal conditions of safety, trust, time, and patience that they need to thrive are the very conditions that we are most often missing ourselves. We focus on talking and conscious sense-making ahead of being, presence, and deeper forms of learning and knowing.
This isn’t to be confused with Animal Assisted Therapy (AAT), in which the animal’s role is in service of human need. This is about caring relationships in which the benefits are reciprocal and mutual, and which participants come to recognise common ground with other species.
Animalhood
We are unmistakeably animals, yet we are excluded from definitions of "animalhood" much as other animals are denied the status of "personhood" Biology says one thing, culture and language say another.
We have also long treated human and animal wellbeing as separate worlds. For people, mind and body are divided into separate concerns with separate specialists. For animals, mental state is something usually inferred from the quality of their nutrition, environment, health and handling. Both leave relationship at the edge of the picture rather than at the centre, where I believe it belongs.
The Animalhood™ Project helps dismantle these artificial boundaries.
Shared Roots
Brought to life through collaborative pilots with sanctuaries, this project connects people navigating significant change with animals who are doing the same. Our first pilot is designed specifically for veterans moving from military service into civilian life; a shift that asks people to rebuild identity, routine, purpose and belonging, often all at once, and without the structures that previously held those things in place.
These animals are not individuals from domesticated species, and so the relationships cannot be built in the same way. There is a far greater requirement for patience, empathy, attunement, and finding common language and ground.
The animals in a sanctuary have arrived somewhere unfamiliar, without the roles, relationships and routines they knew. They are working out how to be safe, how to trust, to build new relationships, and how to live alongside others on new terms. Meeting them in that process creates an unusual and richly valuable way to work with the same process in ourselves.
Participants build resilience, empathy and self-awareness through what relating and caring across species boundaries actually asks of them: reading and using non-verbal communication, regulating the nervous system, slowing down thought, recognising and creating the conditions for safety, learning patience with a pace they do not control, and building trust that has to be earned rather than assumed. These are transferable capabilities, and they carry directly into relationships, work, and family life.
The project will be open to anyone leaving or recently left the Armed Forces who wants greater confidence and new skills as they build the next phase of their life and work.
What's Next
This project is currently under development in partnership with Morndyke Parrot Sanctuary, North Yorkshire. Following an initial pilot programme, we will be looking to expand.
If you're a sanctuary operator, or just interested in learning more, please feel free to get in touch.