Gay A. Bradshaw

Gay A. Bradshaw is an American psychologist and ecologist, and director of The Kerulos Center for Nonviolence. Her work focuses on animal trauma recovery and wildlife self-determination. She is the author of Elephants on the Edge: What Animals Teach Us about Humanity, a book on PTSD in elephants.

Bradshaw's studies were the first to identify Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in non-human animals beginning with free living elephants. She is the author of a seminal series of articles on great ape psychology, trauma, civil rights, and consciousness. This work was expanded to parrots, bears, and domestic animals and led to her founding the field of trans-species psychology, the articulation of a vertebrate common model of brain, mind, and behavior that is supported by existing science. Her findings were further supported by neuroscience research stating that the brain structures affected by trauma (cortical and subcortical areas of the right brain) are highly conserved across species. The epidemic proportions of elephant PTSD signifies a critical point and portends imminent collapse of elephant societies in Asia and Africa.

Trans-species psychology

Trans-species psychology labels the entirety of standing science that describes a unitary model of brain, mind, and behavior for all animals. Bradshaw maintains that establishing trans-species psychology as a new field was only necessary to point out the selective use of science. A vast amount of theory and data accumulated since Charles Darwin shows that nonhuman animals are mentally and emotionally comparable to humans, and surpass human abilities in diverse ways. However, scientific theory does not explicitly acknowledge this understanding, nor does scientific practice implicitly reflect it. By ignoring human and other animal psychological comparability, the science community encourages cultural and legal subjugation of animals. The affix trans on psychology embeds the human species, without privilege, in the matrix of the animal kingdom. By recognizing human-animal comparability, trans-species psychology situates all species under a single conceptual umbrella - a unitary model of brain, mind, behavior and consciousness. In so doing, trans-species psychology revolutionizes a new scientific and ethical paradigm that has profound implications for human-animal relationships, culture, ethics, scientific research, and psychological practice. Bradshaw refers to this cultural movement as trans-species living, "learning to live like animals again.” Trans-species living embraces an ethic of being in service to animals in ways that promote animal self-determination and restores animal well-being by supporting their habitats, cultures, individual value, and agency. It disavows the exploitation of animals for profit, entertainment, research, or other gain.