At AkoVet, we bring together expertise in animal welfare science, behaviour change, and practice management to build the training, resources, and consulting services that help owners, veterinary teams, and organisations make better decisions for the animals in their care.
Veterinary medicine is good at treating sick animals, but less effective at understanding what animals actually experience across their whole lives, and at getting the people who care for them to change what they do on the basis of that understanding.
AkoVet exists because doing more of the same was never going to be enough. What we needed was a new approach to how we listen to what animals are telling us and how we bring that into the everyday conversations we have about their care.
We believe that animals deserve better and so do the people working hardest to care for them.
Veterinarians, researchers, and educators working toward better outcomes
Carolyn has spent her career designing research studies to build the evidence base for better animal care and developing training and resources grounded in behaviour change to help people act on it.
Kat's work has always pushed for a more complete picture of animal welfare, one that goes beyond clinical health to include what animals experience, what they need to thrive, and how we assess that in practice.
Seton brings extensive experience in how veterinary practices actually operate, what the profession needs to navigate the challenges of modern clinical practice, and how we build systems to support the profession.
Ako embraces the Maori philosophy that lives are made better when students and teachers learn from each other. We believe that meaningful change comes from shared understanding, so we work alongside the people closest to the problem.
We believe that everyone has knowledge that can improve animal care, whether that is an owner who knows their animal and their situation, a vet who knows the clinical picture, a researcher generating the evidence, or an organisation working at a broader level to support animals and the people who care for them. And that includes the animals themselves, whose behaviour and experience tells us more than we often stop to listen to. Our job is to help all of those voices be heard and understood, because that is where real change happens.
We don’t do cookie-cutter consultancy. We do co-creation, grounded in evidence.
Every project starts with a conversation. Tell us what you are trying to achieve and we will tell you honestly whether we can help and what that might look like.
Get in touch to book a free 30-minute discovery call.
Helping people understand animals and each other