Thanks for joining us today for the final installment of the CLSA webinar series for 2016, Aging in Place with Pets is pet ownership relevant to social participation and life satisfaction for older adults in Canada. I'm Laura Lawson, communications manager for the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging. Before I introduce our presenter, I just want to share a few reminders about today's presentation. The webinar will run for one hour with an opportunity to ask questions, with an opportunity for questions at the end of the presentation. You have a question, you can enter it in the chat window in the bottom right of the WebEx window at any point during the session. Be sure to select all participants from the drop-down menu. Questions are visible to all attendees and this presentation is recorded and will be posted to the CLSA website. So welcome to our presenter and to me is a doctoral candidate in the population and public health stream of the University of Calgary's department of community health services. With a focus on gerontology and human animal studies, Anne's doctoral research program explores older adults experience of aging in place with companion animals. Using a case study approach, her research seeks to understand contextual influences on the qualities of relationships older adults share with pets and how these may be shaped by individual circumstances as well as by structural factors. She considers the perspectives of both older adults and community providers while also drawing upon data from a nationally representative longitudinal cohort study, the Canadian longitudinal study on aging. She frames her findings in relation to aging in place policies, population health, and public health ethics. Okay, and now I will turn it over to Anne. Thank you for joining us. Hi, everybody. First, thank you Laura for the very kind introduction and I'd also just like to thank everybody who has been able to join the webinar today. I'm really pleased to be able to share with you some of my research specifically looking at aging in place with pets and exploring whether pet ownership is relevant to social participation and life satisfaction for older adults in Canada. I'm just going to give you a bit of insight into the way that I've organized my presentation today. I'm going to start by giving you some background into the study of aging in place with pets. After I've done that I'll give you a sense for how my dissertation fits into this area. I'll move into specifically the CLSA analysis that I've conducted on social participation in pets. And finally I'll spend a few minutes talking about some of the implications that I feel that these findings may have as we think about promoting age-friendly cities. And just before I move on I also wanted to say a couple of words about language conventions because I realized that I have quite a broad audience here listening in today. And so those of you who are familiar with the human animal studies literature will know that terms like companion animals versus pets or guardian versus pet owner are often used. But today throughout my presentation I am going to stick with the more conventional terms of pet and of owner. I'm doing this partly because I think it's just practical for communicating with a broader audience. But this terminology is also aligned with CLSA wording in their questionnaire. And it's also the dominant language around the responsible pet ownership municipal policies and practices. And so I just wanted to acknowledge that there is other terminology that is often used in this area of study. I also want to start by highlighting a specific case that happened in Calgary during the summer of August 2015. And here you can see national post coverage of a headline that says I'm not getting rid of my kitty. Calgary senior chooses homelessness over giving up kitten. And by way of the backstory behind this headline this photo shows an older long time tenant who had moved into an affordable apartment with puppies some years back or a dog. The dog had died and eventually she really wanted to add another companion animal to her life. So she adopted a kitten but she hadn't realized that in the meantime her apartment had adopted a no pets policy. So essentially she was asked to get rid of her kitten or else vacate the premises which is ultimately what she chose to do. And so just kind of thinking about the situation if we find that some older people who are otherwise capable of caring for and providing a good home for an animal need to choose between housing and pets well what else can we learn more broadly about the ways that we're currently promoting aging in place. So just thinking about that. I also want to introduce to you a theoretical framework that's been proposed for ways that relationships with pets may influence the health of people. And so looking at this diagram a common factor might be as an example having a higher socio-economic status. So we know that having a higher socio-economic status tends to lead to having a better mental physical health and it might also be a factor that determines one's decision to have a pet. So we see these things both working in tandem. The indirect effect of pet ownership could be something like dog walking. So a person has a dog as they walk a dog they have social interactions with others and they're physically active and both of these things together might help to support health. And then the third proposed pathway is the direct effect of pet ownership and this would be something like some researchers have found that older adults experience reduced blood pressure when they're petting a patch a familiar pet. Now while sorry in reality all three of these factors are probably at play. For the purposes of managing the scope of my analysis today I'm going to be focusing in particular on this indirect effect as we think about matters of social isolation versus social participation as we think about companionship versus loneliness and in particularly as we consider aging in place. I also wanted to let you know that we know that over a third of older Canadians who are over the age of 65 years report living with a household pet that offers companionship companionship. So that's quite a substantial proportion of our aging population. And I'm going to spend a few minutes giving you an overview about what current research tells us about aging in place. And I do just want to mention that while I'm not going to touch on it today I have included a suggested reading list at the end of my slide presentation. So those of you who are interested in reading more of the evidence that I'm presenting today you can either download the presentation from the CLSA or you're welcome to contact me directly as well. Not surprisingly there's a fairly robust evidence that suggests that for older adults there are many benefits to pet ownership and some of these might include the observation that pets may contribute to maintaining physical function as people age. So maintaining their abilities to go through their activities of daily living. Not surprisingly they may provide companionship and a sense of purpose. And also as I mentioned earlier dogs in particular but cats as well can help to facilitate social interactions and even lead to a heightened sense of community. So these are all positive things as we think about aging in place. But it's also important to highlight that there are contradictory and counterintuitive or even surprising findings. So for instance there are a number of studies that have shown that older adults with pets may actually be lonelier than non-pet owners or less satisfied with life or show various other indications of just having poorer mental health. But at the same time those researchers who have drilled a little bit deeper and investigated mechanisms that are happening have also found that in some situations having a pet can also buffer some of the negative consequences of experiencing things like loneliness or of having lower levels of support. In particular attachment to pets has been explored as one of the keys to understanding why for some people pets seem to have this relationship with healthier successful aging. And in fact some older adults have even credited their pets with contributing to their own successful aging. So if we think about this idea of attachment we tend to be focusing on the individual level and really trying to understand that there's something about the quality of relationships. And this has captivated the attention of researchers in this area. But at the same time the focus on attachment has led to certain critiques of pets for older adults. And this has included a concern with extreme attachments that play out in fact to the detriment of participating in social life and of neglecting self-care. So again these critiques have tended to focus on individual level factors so things like attachment. But to date there are not a lot of researchers who have really considered how structural or systemic factors that shape individual situations might also be playing out. In terms of my underlying rationale as I've put forward there are very few studies that have sought to understand pets in relation to the ways that we actively promote aging in place. And in this slide I do highlight the Global Age Friendly Cities Guide which has shaped a lot of efforts around the world to start to think through ways that we can make our cities and communities more age friendly. So in essence there seems to be a real absence of social ecological approaches to understanding pets and aging in place. And these are approaches that consider influences that lie outside of the individual characteristics and ways that these external influences are also shaping the quality of relationships and may have implications in relation to aging in place. And on top of that there's very little research that I'm aware of that has tried to more empirically the extent to which levels of social participation may also be reduced for some older pet owners. And so just my interest in social participation really does stem from the WHO Age Friendly Cities Guide. And in this guide social participation is highlighted as one of the key elements for promoting age friendly cities. So within the guide social participation is defined as being engaged with social recreational and other types of activities that involve people. And these activities will generally be taking place outside of one's own home. And as we heard for those of you who are able to attend the last CLSA webinar that was presented by Nancy Newell and Verena Menek, social participation is viewed as almost an anecdote to social isolation or we can conceive of the two sitting at opposite ends of a continuum with social isolation at one end and social participation at the other end. And finally this brings me to my own research which is a mixed methods case study of aging in place with pets in my city which is Calgary and a city that's regarded as a particularly pet friendly city. And so as you can see I have three different components of my case study although today I'm going to focus specifically on the CLSA analysis that I've done. And for my case study I just wanted to take a moment to share what my main theoretical proposition is which is that pets may play an especially pivotal role in the lives of older adults who are socially isolated and especially those who are living in lower income circumstances. But at the same time these are the very older adults who also might face the most challenges in terms of having pets and these challenges may also be compounding their susceptibility to experiencing worse mental and physical health. And I also just want to note that older adults living in these types of more marginalized circumstances their experiences are often also virtually absent from the literature on pets and aging. So with that in mind I'm going to move now into describing for you the CLSA component of my study. And essentially I had two objectives. The first is to describe the baseline characteristics of older Canadian pet owners and non-owners and this is using the first wave the CLSA tracking cohort. In terms of my second objective it was to explore various measures of social participation and life satisfaction for the older Canadian adults who participated in this the tracking cohort and to consider whether and how these differ for pet owners versus non-owners. So once again the CLSA component really offered me an opportunity to explore outcomes that are directly related to some of the age friendly frameworks such as the WHO work that I've highlighted. And the second objective in particular will allow for a social ecological interpretation that I think is relevant to the epidemiology of aging in place with pets but also is very relevant to thinking through policy approaches to promoting aging in place. And just a little bit of background into the CLSA tracking cohort for those of you who aren't familiar with it. The cohort involved a random sample of community dwelling adults who are residing in Canada that I am looking specifically at the group who are 65 years or older at the baseline. The data was collected via telephone interviews between September 2011 and May 2014 and the sampling was representative sampling of the different provinces across Canada. Some of the other inclusion criteria included being fluent in English or French and of course as we see with these types of studies the respondents needed to have a published telephone number and finally the interviewers were trained to identify the possibility of cognitive impairment and so if they detected this those respondents would not have been included in this cohort. In terms of the key variables that I was interested in was social participation and there were three particular dimensions of social participation that I explored. The first was frequent participation in various types of social, recreational and group activities over the past 12 months and in terms of ways that I defined frequent social participation I provided a reference that you could look at and basically for certain types of activity it was weekly participation but other activities it was monthly participation that we could consider to be frequent. I also examined those respondents who had wanted to participate in more social activities over the past 12 months and finally I spent some time exploring the barriers that the respondents identified that they felt had prevented more social participation so these were identified by the participants and then were coded by the CLSA personnel. As I mentioned I also looked at satisfaction with life and basically a level of agreement with several statements that was used to establish a score which I eventually dichotomized into either being satisfied with life or being less satisfied with life. Now this scale does have, it's been quite well tested for psychometric properties and it's found to have very long internal validity and good temporal stability so it was a pretty solid measure to use as well. And then finally in terms of how to assess pet ownership well the CLSA tracking questionnaire includes one question which asks do you have a household pet that provides you with companionship. And then moving into my analysis for establishing the baseline I created proportions that were stratified by pet ownership and used FTS to determine whether these were statistically significant. In terms of my second objective I used logistic regression models to compare pet owners and non-owners in terms of life satisfaction, the levels of social participation, barriers to social participation and finally associations between social participation and life satisfaction. And all of my models were controlled for socio-demographic variables and for probability reaching as well. Now I'm going to move on to sharing with you some of the findings. And so for instance what I found was that compared to non-owners, older pet owners were less likely to be in the older group of the cohort so older than 75 years. They were less likely to belong to a visible minority, they were less likely to live alone, to rent their homes and to have completed post-secondary education. Now I also wanted to highlight for you some of the findings that I think are interesting as we start to think about both vulnerability and diversity within our aging population. And so I think that these are important given that we can expect increasing proportions of older adults who are for instance new immigrants to Canada. And as we think through some of the increasing social acceptability of people who identify with leading alternative lifestyles I think it's also important to note that there's a pretty robust prevalence of pet ownership among lower income older adults. So as we think about promoting aging in place and trying to really promote social inclusion across the aging population, I think it's very interesting to keep in mind that there is this commonality of pet ownership that I think we need to take note of. In terms of life satisfaction within our sample we found that pet owners as a whole tend to indicate lower levels of life satisfaction. And this again is adjusted for socio demographics and for some people this might be a little bit of a surprising finding. As I mentioned in the earlier part of my presentation it's not unheard of within the literature and I do think that there are various explanations for this. And for instance the trend might reflect older adults who in fact seek the companionship of a pet when they find that their own human relationships are lacking or are unfulfilling. And so sometimes when you think of it that a person, an older person who is lonely seeks out a pet, some researchers have posed that this is actually reverse causation rather than the pet itself causing loneliness or in this case lower levels of life satisfaction. In terms of levels of social participation what I found was that as a whole pet owners were less likely to be frequent participators in one or more recreational or group activities than non-owners and you can see it's a substantially lower odds ratio. But at the same time pet owners and non-owners were equally likely to have wanted to be more socially active over the past year. So while on the one hand we found that pet owners were more likely to participate in no social activities they were no more likely to be dissatisfied with their current level of social participation. And so again in trying to think about what this means both from my interviews with the socioeconomic cross-section of pet owners but also supported within the current literature I think that there's a possibility that people do consciously decide to forgo what might otherwise be appealing recreational activities and opportunities to socialize because of their responsibilities for their pets. And yet it's also possible that they do still feel somewhat fulfilled and rewarded by the companionship that their pets are. Along with these lines we also had an interesting finding in terms of considering the levels of social participation. So one of the things we found was that the most socially active pet owners and those were the ones who were frequent participators in five or more social activities, they actually had highest levels of life satisfaction and this included being compared to similarly active non-pet owners. Now once again I think it's striking if we keep in mind that as a whole pet owners overall had lower life satisfaction so there's something about being more socially involved as well as having pets that seems to be particularly supportive. And this also seems to align with other studies that have reported that pet ownership is particularly advantageous for those older adults who also have established social connections. Now as I mentioned earlier we can't be certain that the increased likelihood of being satisfied is actually caused by the pet presence but I do think it's plausible that having a pet may contribute to some extent given that we have controlled for the various other socio-demographic factors. So now I want to move on and talk a little bit about the barriers to social participation. By way of quickly explaining this slide what I've done here is I've organized the barriers that the CLSA participants identified into a broader framework of categories that's identified within the global age-friendly city strategy. Now we explored barriers to social participation just for the subgroup of respondents who were not satisfied with their current levels of participation. So this was a subgroup of just over 2,000 respondents. And one of the things we found was that pet owners were more likely than non-pet owners to identify some of the different barriers that fell under the categories of accessible opportunities, of having an appropriate range of events and activities and also of encouraging social participation. So I think it's important to keep these in mind because these categories are all relevant to efforts that are being made to enhance opportunities for social participation across the aging population. But in particular I'd like to highlight three of these barriers because for me these are actually quite theoretically interesting. And what we found for these three barriers was that if we think about the conceptual links with social isolation and particularly for the barrier of not wanting to go alone in terms of preventing social participation, but also the barrier of having a health condition or a health limitation, we found that it was actually the non-pet owners who had indicated experiencing these barriers who had a lower life satisfaction level. And yet for pet owners, we didn't find any significant association. So the pet owners who identified these barriers didn't necessarily have a reduced life satisfaction compared to the pet owners who did not identify these barriers. And so this is where I suggest we might see some indication that the companionship of a pet may be offsetting some of the negative experiences of social isolation. And similarly you can see that I've included personal or family responsibilities in this sort of group of particularly interesting barriers. We didn't have information on what types of responsibilities our respondents had in mind when they identified this as a barrier. But once again we saw that those non-pet owners who identified this barrier actually had lower levels of life satisfaction than the pet owners who identified this barrier. So again I think it's reasonable and once more I'm drawing on my own interviews with older pet owners to see that while responsibilities for pets may be prohibitive for at least some of the pet owners who we spoke with or who responded to the CLSA survey, the impact of these responsibilities still may be offset to a certain extent by the contributions that pets may be making to their owners lives. So I'm going to just shift into a quick discussion of what some of the implications of these findings may be as we think through our efforts to promote age-friendly cities and aging in place. And so first of all, thinking about the baseline description, as I mentioned before, I think that we need to note that interests in pets may actually transcend socio-cultural and socio-economic differences. And they may also go as far as promoting opportunities for intergenerational interactions. So again I think that as we think through ways to enhance social participation across the aging population and to think about inclusion, this is just something that is important to take note of is this shared potential shared interest in pets. But I think it's also important to highlight ways that costs and the responsibilities of pet care may be prioritized over dedicating time or spending money on social activities, so on remaining socially engaged. And so if we think about time and access, for older adults who do have a sense of responsibility for their pets in a sense that they can't leave them for too long, they may not have the time to be able to for example take public transit to something that they would otherwise be interested in doing. And so location is really key as well as convenient access. And of course if we think about these things in relation to pet owners, well thinking about these in relation to non-pet owners and the broader population are important as well. Again, thinking about fixed incomes. So for pet owners, being on a fixed income may preclude affording some of the extras. So some of those activities that do have costs associated with them. And another aspect of affordability would involve the need for the occasional relief from pet care duties. So some people can afford to put their for instance their pet dogs into something like a doggy daycare for a couple of hours. I did have a research participant who did this on a weekly basis because she could not leave her dog in her apartment because it would bark. Now she had the means to be able to take this dog to a doggy daycare. But not all older pet owners are going to have this. So thinking through affordability is really going to be key, but also potentially thinking through ways that we can assist with relief from pet care. Now I think that different ways that we could consider this include building social networks and trying to think about ways that we really promote informal networks of support, whether within neighborhoods or within other types of interest groups. But I think there's also room for us to think about ways that volunteer and subsidized programs can both assist with some of the challenges of pet care that older adults may start to experience. But can even offer relief via opportunities for casual pet care. Just letting people get out of their homes for a little while and easing that worry about what might be happening with their pet. Finally, I guess the last implication that I'd like to talk a little bit about is offering more opportunities that in fact align with the interests that older adults may have in pets. And this might also involve rethinking ways that public spaces might become more pet friendly. So in terms of this, I think we could think about social activities that have themes that are interesting to pet owners. So whether it's themes around learning more about pets or ways to care for pets. But potentially I suggest that opportunities might also include pets at specified times and locations. And at the same time we could think through volunteer opportunities that are available for older adults that might appeal to people who have interests in pets. And so that could include volunteer opportunities where older adults can include their pets and help others in different ways. But it can also be volunteer opportunities for older adults who love companion animals but no longer have pets. Along similar lines I think that it's worth exploring the possibility of including pet related supervision during some of the activities that we offer to older adults so that people don't necessarily have to leave their pets in order to participate. And one particular, when we think about dog walking, I think there's a lot of unexplored potential in terms of organized dog walking groups. And in fact earlier this summer I had the privilege of speaking with some active aging program coordinators for one of our local seniors housing providers who are really quite interested in trying to pilot a dog walking program. Now in that situation it did not involve older adults who actually had dogs of their own. But it involved bringing in trained therapy dogs to be walks by these people. And again whether it's using dog walking for the interest of people who already have their own dogs as a way of pulling them out of their homes and building social networks or having opportunities to join up with people who have dogs. I do think that these can promote both physical activity but also really important and valuable opportunities for social participation. And I do want to highlight that by all means I'm not calling at all for a pet takeover and I need to acknowledge that it's not always appropriate to have pets in public venues and not everybody wishes to interact with other people's pets. And of course not all pets are able to be out in public in the public areas safely. But I do think that it's important to balance the needs of all older adults. And currently we tend to ignore or under emphasize pet owners' interests. So these are really missing from many of the organized efforts that are being made to promote age friendliness. In thinking through the results of my study there are some strengths and some limitations. And as I've mentioned throughout I do believe that the social ecological approach is a strength. There's been really little attention paid to ways that some of our systemic factors are shaping people's experiences with pets. And I think having a conceptual link with the age friendly cities framework is also really valuable as we think through ways to really promote aging in place in ways that are inclusive. But there are also some important limitations. For instance the CLSA data set doesn't offer species distinctions. And we know from the literature that dog owners and cat owners may have and experience different types of health outcomes. Dogs in particular often lead to higher levels of physical activity whereas cats don't necessarily do this. Once again, while I've looked at social participation we know that there are other indicators of social well-being. And in fact again thinking back to the last CLSA presentation by Nancy Newell and Verena Menek the cluster analysis that they presented that really considered not just social isolation loneliness but social participation. It drew together several measures of social well-being. Considering this would certainly give us a much fuller sense for sort of the social lives that pet owners versus non-owners are leading. Because I just have come in at the first wave of data collection my study is cross-sectional in design. So of course we can't make any decisive causation types of conclusions. But it does also set the stage for future longitudinal studies as the CLSA data collection continues. In particular I think it would be valuable to start to draw on the experiences of the 45 to 64 year olds in future analyses and to sort of explore their patterns of both pet ownership and social participation pre and post retirement. And to really think through the implications for aging in place. And of course in terms of the measures themselves I just want to highlight one of the findings that I found during my MSc research was around the activity of dog walking. So dog walking as I've talked about promotes physical activity but it also promotes a sense of community for older individuals. Now what's interesting as I look through the way that social participation questions were asked within the CLSA and other studies as well. Some of the steps Canada work. It's possible that activities like dog walking are actually not captured in our social participation measures because they're not always organized. So often a person will go out on their own with their dog and they will end up running into people but it's not necessarily captured by the ways that we're currently measuring social participation. And so our measures may actually be underestimating social participation for pet owners. I just wanted to send a moment to highlight that there is a growing recognition that we as researchers are missing something important when we fail to pay attention to the roles that pets play in people's lives. So it isn't just a critique of ways that some of our quantitative measures are conceptualized but even from the qualitative area of research I just wanted to highlight a quote that was put forward by researchers who are considering ways that people with pets are being interviewed. And they suggest that pets are often presented as important family members and yet researchers' responses to the presence or talk about pets was often markedly different from their reactions to other household members. So it's really just being more aware that there is something going on when we learn that a person is living with a companion animal and we need to be attentive to that, especially given that often over a third of our aging population does report having a pet. So I just wanted to quickly come back to the case that I highlighted at the start of my presentation. And again, this older adult who claimed that she would choose homelessness over giving up her kitten. And I wanted to share with you the outcome and it actually was a happy outcome. It turned out that there was vacancy available in our cities only to my knowledge cat-friendly subsidized seniors housing complex. And so this older woman and her kitten were able to move there and they've remained there together ever since. I also need to highlight that if she had a puppy she might not have been so lucky because again to the best of my knowledge in our city we have no subsidized seniors housing that will allow dogs of any size. And so really what the take-home point of this case is is that we know that a substantial number of older adults are going to choose to share their lives with the pet and they'll do what it takes to maintain these important relationships. So as we consider friendly cities I think that we can do a better job of addressing some of the structural elements that can enhance older adults' abilities to live better with their pets and ultimately to improve quality of life for both the people and for their companion animals. Now I've presented and talked about a lot of different things so I wanted to just quickly remind you of what I think the main conclusions of this particular study are. So the first is that many older adults have pets and these will include members of diverse and vulnerable subpopulations. Second, that having a pet is often associated with both lower life satisfaction and lower levels of social participation for older adults. And yet having a pet may also help to offset some of the negative outcomes of being socially isolated. That pet owners with higher levels of social participation may also have the highest level of life satisfaction. And finally that efforts to promote social participation that also consider pet owners needs and interests may contribute to the age friendly priority of enhancing social participation. And I just want to quickly acknowledge first of all that I've been very privileged to have a very interdisciplinary team of mentors both within my supervisory committee and beyond. My research has been privileged to have access to perspectives from social work, from public health, from sociology, veterinary medicine, geriatric medicine, epidemiology, and I think that this really reflects the complex reality of aging in place with pets. I would also like to thank the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging for granting access to this data set. And of course I'd like to acknowledge all of my case study research participants and the valuable information that I have received to support this area of research. And I also thank everybody for listening and thinking about what I've had to say. And I hope that people have some questions or some reflections on what I've shared with you today. And I also hope that the photo on this last slide sort of speaks to the idea that maybe we can have a whole bunch of cats together in a public space. We're used to seeing this for dogs but I thought this was an amazing way to reflect on just thinking through things a little bit differently. So thank you. Thank you very much Ann. It's a great presentation and I love that photo as well. So now I would like to open it up to questions. Just a reminder you can enter your questions into the chat window in the bottom right hand corner of WebEx. So while we wait for a few questions to come in, I just had one of my own. So you mentioned for your analysis of the CLSA data that you looked in particular at life satisfaction and social participation. But you mentioned that pet ownership is often associated with lower life satisfaction and you alluded that maybe due to fewer human relationships. I just wanted to ask you a thought about looking at loneliness at all as a measure or even perhaps depression. Yeah, well those are two measures that have received quite a bit of attention within the existing literature. And so again what's a little bit tricky with the evidence on pets and aging is that there tend to be both huge methodological inconsistencies and fairly mixed findings. So for instance with loneliness there's some really interesting work that does confirm that older women in particular with pets may be lonelier but that those who are lonely are less likely to actually become depressed if they're pet owners compared to non-owners. So I think what happens is the complexity of relationships with pets that they hinge on both individual characteristics of both the human and the companion animal side of the bond but also the socio economic circumstances, some of the systemic barriers, so things like living in insecure housing situation so having a pet but realizing that you can no longer afford to pay your rent and you're not sure where you're going to be able to move with this very important companion in your life. They're just such a complex array of factors that might play into things like loneliness and depression but we're not necessarily going to see the contributions that pets are making by simply looking at pets as an exposure that leads to an outcome. So I hope that answers your question to some degree Laura. It really is, there are many different factors that merit our attention. It does, it's obviously very kind of complicated to tease out the different factors. So we have a few questions that have come through. So one is the first one's from Alana. I was wondering whether you found a difference in life satisfaction among seniors who both owned a pet and lived with at least one other person versus those who owned a pet but otherwise lived alone? Right, you know I have not yet stratified in that way just if I'm just going to take a quick look through some of my data tables I think that I will agree with you that I think it's very interesting to look at the impact of life circumstances and interestingly enough when I recruited for older adults in Calgary to participate in my in-depth interviews I almost exclusively had respondents who lived alone with pets and I think that it's really important to consider that. But once again based on what I have analyzed to date it does tend to be complicated and so it's not quite as straightforward as saying that an older adult with a pet is more or less satisfied with life. There are just so many other factors that seem to play in and I think again as I think through some of the inspiring work in terms of the cluster analysis that considers both it combines measures of social isolation perhaps marital status so being single versus being married or being divorced. Things like that you do start to see just how complicated the impact situation as well as having a companion animal can be and I did just quickly want to point out that there is a study that's included in my reading list that was conducted by Hemsworth and Rock that looked at life satisfaction and stratified by marital status and one of the most interesting findings was that it was actually older adults who were divorced or separated and living by themselves where we did start to see a bit of a effect modification with pet ownership so they were more likely to have a higher level of satisfaction with life. So there's still a lot more work to do along those lines and I really appreciate you highlighting that because it's definitely one of the subpopulations that's obviously at risk of social isolation and for whom a pet might be a particularly pivotal life line. Okay, thank you. So the next question is from Denise. I assume this is referring to the case study or the newspaper article that you mentioned. Why are pets not accepted in housing spaces? Barking, should we look into this issue also? Well, yes. Thank you for highlighting that, Denise. I think that especially when we start looking at apartment style living noise is a huge issue as well as the reality that people who have cats will tend to keep their cats within their own personal living space. Whereas, while not all older adults with dogs actually walk their dogs, those who do will need to be using some of the shared public spaces as well. So there are just more opportunities for interactions with other people, for instance people whose pets might use the public spaces as their bathroom areas and if people aren't picking up after their pets. So noise and some of these other types of nuisance tend to come up. I do think having looked, I'm looking quite a bit at this housing issue within other dimensions of my case study. And there isn't a whole lot of evidence that supports the no pets rules and regulations that do tend to prevail. But there are also in situations where there are difficulties, they can be very, very hard on the housing managers to have to deal with and often take them above and beyond really what their duties to manage the housing should be. So in some of my other work, I am proposing some strategies to try and draw more coordination among, for instance, animal welfare agencies with housing providers, with other social support providers to try and address some of these types of issues. So thank you for asking about that. Okay, from Audrey Anne, do you know whether there is research to support the notion that level of engagement with the pet impacts life satisfaction? You know what, there is fairly recent research that I think has some really valuable findings that looks not so much at, let me see at level of social participation, but it asked older adults to keep track of how much time they were spending with their pets and what they were doing. And the interesting findings for that was that it wasn't older adults who were spending dedicated time to pet-related activities whose mental health was actually being supported by their pets, but it was those older adults who were just going through their daily routines with sort of with their pets by their sides. So whether it was reading a book with a pet or making a meal and having the cat or the dog kicking around in the kitchen with you, they did find that just the amount of time that older adults were spending with their pets in these sort of non-dedicated activities did seem to really support their mental well-being. So that's what I have seen so far and I do think that that is an area that's worth further investigation because again just trying to unpack some of the complex ways that these relationships are playing out for people in both positive and potentially negative ways. Okay, thank you. So from Natasha, is it correct to interpret from your presentation that current measures place more value on human interactions versus companion animal interactions? I do, you know, from my knowledge of the literature I would say yes, and to a certain extent for good reason there are certain ways that people can support one another that are highly necessary and highly important, but there's also a real resistance to accepting that for some people and in some circumstances relationships with companion animals can be absolutely the pivotal. There is the constant companionship and the acceptance and sort of the ease of not being judged or, you know, there are different ways that relationships with pets can be extremely meaningful for people and there's a lot of evidence that shows that increasingly people view pets as sort of family members and they do have familial types of relationships with pets, but overall there does still tend to be an undervaluing of what this relationship means in some people's lives. So yes, I think that's a really great point that you bring up. Okay, so we have just a comment and then a final question. So Ann, this is from Ye Ping. I just wanted to congratulate you for an interesting and excellent study, well done. This is really from a friend. Hello, great presentation. I wonder if you look at an experiment of non-owners, then you randomized select for pet owners versus non-pet and thus over time you will look for life satisfaction and social participation for the two groups. So have you thought about doing sort of what's the future of your research look like? Right, sorry, I'm just trying to think through the randomized. I'm not sure if this will answer your question, but it can be very difficult to look at that type of experimental design when it comes to pet, asking somebody to take on the commitment of having a pet, because whether it comes to housing circumstances or an inability or an inexperience in terms of really knowing what you're getting into when you commit to having a companion animal, this can have really troubling consequences both on a person's life but also on the animal welfare. So there has been a little bit of work that I've seen that has taken, you know, gone to great lengths to try and randomize adopting pets and trying to follow various outcomes of interest for these samples, but these types of experimental designs are really, really difficult with pet ownership. So we do tend to focus on sometimes natural experiments and being able to follow people who have naturally chosen to have a pet. But I think what your question really highlights is just the complexity, and that people will get pets for various reasons and that these pets will have various impacts on people's lives. So it's just a really difficult effect to try and tease out and isolate when it's happening in the context of daily lives and of the cities and the homes in which we live. So thank you again, though, for your ideas. Okay, we've just had one final question come in and I think that we'll have just enough time to squeeze and answer it for this one. So Amit says, I might have missed this. Is there an increase in falls for older adults of pets? For example, do they trip more of their pets, especially for frail older adults? Yeah, and I didn't actually present on that. I've looked very preliminary at the falls data in the CLSA data just out of interest. And I can tell you, first of all, there were very few people who did report more severe falls and I saw no difference between pet owners and non-owners. But it is important to flag that tripping over one's pet, especially as a person's mobility begins to diminish, is definitely a concern. And thinking through the inner spaces of people's homes is merit's attention as well. So thank you for bringing that up. Okay, thank you very much again, Anne, for an excellent presentation and obviously many aspects to consider when talking about pet ownership. So thank you again for everyone who attended today's webinar. Our next one is scheduled for Tuesday, January 17th at 11 a.m. Eastern Time. Dr. Martin Huseman will tell us more about his work as Scientific Director of the Launch Tunnel Aging Study Amsterdam. Registration will be open next week. So thank you again for attending today's presentation. You can learn more about the CLSA in accessing data by visiting www.clsa-elcb.ca. Thanks again.


Evan Thomas is a fabulous author and has captured the spirit of this these times in probably the most gripping of ways. We've asked him to take the leader. Evan can I turn it over to you? You bet. David's wonderful speech begs the question, shouts the question of when when the leaders, particularly military leaders in a civilian control system, disagree, dissent, challenge, higher authority. I want to answer that of each of the group, but let me first let me start with you, Admiral Mullen. Could Arlie Burke survive today? I guess in the way David captures him so well, I would say he'd have figured out a way to do it. Given those that he routinely challenged and the description I think of the word interesting and how he would draw individuals in, even as they got mad and even at that level and clearly want to hear from him again. So I suspect he could and that he would have figured out a way to adjust to the circumstances that exist today and very much so. Can you address the larger question of when, particularly a military officer in a civilian control system, when and how and under what circumstances, what are the rules of the road on challenging higher authority and dissenting? Well I think actually I think not unlike what what Admiral Burke did in the sense that that in discussions that are would be routine with your boss, your civilian boss and then those that you could when you when you disagree and feel strongly about it even as we can now right up to the president and it's not just me even though I have routinely more access to the president than the other chiefs but certainly they have they have the option and that it's done privately and it's done in a way that that I think in a timely fashion if you will and and that you have a president you know I the other examples I think that are there tied to what David's talking about is you had senior individuals who wanted to listen, presidents senior officers even if that maddened them they were they were also willing to listen and I think that's an important for anybody in any senior position military and civilian that you want to listen and having that opportunity give that advice and then as was the case in a couple of examples he didn't win them all and I'm sure that he marched off and did whatever the you know whatever the senior civilian leadership said and that's what we do now and so that both opportunity certainly I have it I had it with President Bush I have it with President Obama and I think it's a very important part of our system and opportunity to do that and then when the president makes the decision we're off and more of that let me just pick up with the last verse what's the line when you don't go any further how do you know when you're supposed to salute and keep going what's that moment I really think that as you have thought the problem through as you have tried as as David mentioned about Arlie Burke have made the arguments interesting that you have explored those areas and have had a thorough vetting of your position and in the society and in the system and with in which we work when the civilian authority makes a decision that's it I think you can't go in superficially you have to have thought the problem through yourself but when the decision is made that's it if it if at some point it is contrary to your your sense of honor or your ethics then at that time you have other options I mean at one point at least one point Admiral Burke basically went over the heads of others in the military to make a point to civilian authority and his eyes an hour took him aside and said don't don't do that again but is that is that can you imagine a circumstance in which you're a senior military officer military officers more senior to you have basically gone along with the president you say well no under what circumstances might you do that what what you talked about honor and ethics but can you be a little bit more specific about a moment in which you think that your senior military officers have just got it wrong or aren't challenging not to to dodge I mean I I think it has to be driven by the circumstances that you are in the issue that you're dealing with and and and the receptivity of your arguments as you put them forth and then and then you as an individual have to make that decision and and I do not believe that anything fits a mold because of the many facets of every issue in the in the complex nature of what we're dealing with let me ask you just one more question on this line what do you tell your your subordinates about this do you discuss this together when you with senior admiral's and and talk about the limits of dissent and are these conversations that happen at the highest level and I think that it's very very clear that the that the expectations of civilian control of military is is is unquestioned I think everyone that is subordinate to me understands the strength of my convictions in that regard I do believe it is important as a senior of that you foster the opportunities for your subordinates to feel comfortable and free and having the open discussions as opposed to having been held in check and then trying to release everything at the final moment and I think that that in in the ability to have that organization comfortable coming forward that that there is an expectation that opinions can be offered positions can be taken and and I think that that that is for the best of the institution and we're on now you are actually a teacher by Admiral Ronda as a president of the National Defense University what do you teach about this whole obligation or duty or limitation on speaking truth to power so to speak let's bring Burke as our example to the answer to the question Burke was absolutely able to constantly reframe the problem or reframe his mind around a new problem and so the notion of strategic reframing is an intellectual pre-disposition that either you have or that you learn and so what we do at NDU or what any of the defense education entities seek to do is to help us to reframe out from where we have been to something more that that that we should be thinking about and so what Burke was able to do and what we seek to do in the spirit of Burke is constantly seek to reframe mindsets and mindfulness about the issues are in front of us or Burke was able to do was be comfortable thinking eight to ten twenty years out we seek to do that as as well but it's it's about setting a mindset and the mindfulness about what you are in and the environment if I might say though in echoing also the chairman and the C&O Eisenhower was a leader who also knew what he had and so the respect the respecting of the mind of the leaders who are who are subordinate to you is also part of this so Burke was was allowed to be Burke and what of and one of the key things that that we seek to teach is to be respectful of the intellect of those who are junior to you because they may indeed have a have have an insight or a reframing that you do not have and so every good leader would seek that but we seek to to reframe and and to teach the ability to be comfortable in a different environment. Senator you've been watching this balance for a long time. Talk to us a little bit as you watch it over the years whether you think that the modern military has the balance right on its willingness to challenge the civilian authority or to challenge even within the military their own superiors. Do you have a sense of how that balances? Let's step back 41 years when I was privileged to be in the Pentagon in the Navy Secretary at the Melbourne Laird with Secretary and Dave Packard Deputy Secretary and we used to get in the rooms with the Chiefs and Larry would always start let's take off the stars and bars and let's just have it and listen to one another I want to know your opinion that's the same way I was privileged and I say with a deep sense of humility to be Secretary of the Navy always asked everybody for their view but maybe I could like to return to your first question to the Chief and partially answered over here but first to you David Abshar well done we are saying the Navy at a boy but you know as long as I've known you you've made one mistake in life rather than West Point you should have gone to Annapolis. I want to go back these many years I was gone to the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean and I'd met Burke. Burke had a protocol he would when you joined the Navy Secretary it would come a time he'd send a little note now it's the time I'd like to meet you and you'd go over and see him in his home and lovely wife and that's where I first got to know him but we're out on the Sixth Fleet so I did a little research my aid at that time wonderful man was Tom Hayward he later became Chief of Naval Operations but this one incident might have cost him that. I found that the ship that Burke had in his squadron was still a part of our active fleet so I went aboard we had a little breaches buoy that transferred me from a cruiser over to the ship and as a custom I always went down to the engine room as a part of any business board operating ship and I was just with the senior chief down there. There was no Chief Petty Officer Boiler Man down there operating that steam plant. I said do you think you could drive this thing at 41 I mean 31 knots like Burke he looked at me he looked at the other chief he said you betcha you know what I said crank it up and he looked at me and he said I usually take my orders from the captain but you're the secretary? Civilian authority controls. This is a true story and for those of us who've been aboard ship there's an exhilaration of when that steam plant throws full thrust to the screws and that rotating powertrain the ship trembles so I thought I'd better get back up to the bridge because it's gonna be a little consternation so I got up to the bridge and I had this program that I knew where Burke was and I called him from the bridge the captain ships there and Hayward standing there I got him on the phone thinking he'd be just exhilarating to know that his ship I said Admiral she's right at 31 knots right now and ladies and gentlemen I cannot tell you the response but it was a verbal heel hauling I mean he dressed me down I turned to the captain said the Admiral says bring her back and in later years we met and had a wonderful relationship I'm deeply humbled to join this distinguished panel and all others today truly someone who's idolized to this day by anyone who's fortunate enough to wear the Navy uniform. Admiral let me ask you a history question do you when you talk to your colleagues about these difficult issues about dealing with civilian authority and how far you can go do you talk about history you talk about Admiral Burke do you talk about how was done in past wars are you informed by history I think I'm informed by history probably for me more recently than than those times when I actually was much to my surprise selected to be the CNO I did some research then on Admiral Burke and I was actually stunned that in just that period of time his time as CNO which I recall was six years longest serving and what he was able to accomplish and I was one of the things I looked at that and I was wondering how I was going to even come close to matching up to anything like that to be able to accomplish so much in that period of time and I use that I use it from that standpoint from the civilian control piece I'm I guess I'm much more driven and informed by current times and by current times I'd say the last 20 years or so and you know my goal as a leader is to to be strictly apolitical strictly neutral and the in fact the state of the union or this week I've had you know many many comments since that about you know the chiefs when we stand up when we don't stand up in the in the aftermath of the the president's speech and and but but the goal there really literally is to certainly respond in a way that is supportive of those national security and military issues but other than that stay completely neutral in that and so amongst my colleagues and actually with my juniors I do talk a lot about the need to stay be completely apolitical and where that has where that is different from Burke's time I think is in though in the situation where the there is this seeking of news the vast exposure to media certainly in the media as you know as always looking for for the kinds of differentials to to in many cases sharpen issues but where I think it has gotten out of bounds is quite frankly is when we take the uniform off and there's tension between those who have worn the uniform on their whole life and then they they they take it off and there's tension between free speech which is nothing that I certainly would ever take on but I think in ways it can be a very difficult to understand certainly I I frame a lot of this from the in terms of the farmer in Peoria who's really talking on the news cycle or who's writing because generally speaking they're still called that role or general on the one hand in the other hand that we're training in that regard many of our young officers in particular but not exclusively that that it's it's okay to speak up and it's okay to disagree publicly and constantly and I worry a great deal about that in terms of the apolitical position that the military is in and so and actually one of the things I've asked Admiral Rondo to do is address this issue actually all the war in all the war colleges to our young ones because I think we do need to make sure we have it right and because you're both encouraging them to speak up at the same time saying watch it but they have to they have to do it correctly and they really the treasure here is the apolitical military and it is in my view what we have to I think ensure we guard and retain at all more at all costs in this democracy and it goes back to who we are who we work for it very clear civilian control and when and when as I think Admiral Ruff had said you know when we disagree and it gets to a point of ethics or morals or when we actually are working for somebody and they don't have confidence in us then it's that our only choice isn't to speak up at quite frankly is to move on let me ask you more specifically and you've been asked about this before but but at the most recent example of this when I got in the news was general McChrystal's sure statements this sure how do you think he handled that well I wouldn't I don't want to how do you think he had it was you know very difficult position obviously very early in his tour in in what was certainly if not then but rapidly becoming the most visible four-star position in the United States military and it was one that was made much more challenging because it was it was public and actually one of the things and this is part of us growing as an institution growing is both as an individual and General Chris and I talked a long time about moving into the four-star realm it's different and then he was going to do it on the world stage and that's a real challenge so you know all in all I thought he did handle it well it was a very very difficult it made the the challenge of the review that much more difficult and certainly I would have preferred to not do it as publicly as it as as we did and we all learned a lot in that regard and certainly I would hope that you know in further strategic reviews we can avoid that particular model and well let me ask you a question about the Navy in particular by tradition captain of a ship has tremendous authority the old days complete authority because there was no communication but even today where you can talk to there is a tradition of a captain of a ship having all this authority and yet when he gets on land he's got to learn how to he's not not Admiral you keep putting like Nelson putting his spyglass up and saying I really cannot see the signal how do you balance this this tradition of authority and command authority on a ship with deference to civilian authority what do you what do you tell your captain well as you pointed out one of my favorite Burke quotes and I identify with it a great deal was you do have the autonomy on a ship as he pointed out going to see used to be fun and then they gave us radios and I think that that even translates up in our current connectivity that we enjoy but I think for me and one of the great things about our Navy and something that I place tremendous value upon with all who serve and wear this uniform and Burke articulated this himself and that the Navy is a culture of command it is not a culture of staff and and that simple concept makes us who we are the willingness to step forward when something needs to be done the willingness to accept accountability which is oftentimes judged to be a bit extreme in the Navy but that is what our culture is and I find that that culture of command translates ashore as well because it is about the willingness to take on the hard things the willingness to lead and most importantly when things are good or bad you accept the accountability and and so I do not see a distinction I see it as this great strength of this service and I am extraordinarily proud of the men and women who live that culture so let me go back and ask you this question again because you've been you're in a position having to serve this for a long time from a wonderful perspective where you're dealing with it with the military do you think that there is any evolution here for better or for worse on military willingness to stand up to civilian authority either good or bad in that direction or that it is a fairly even progression I found that particularly the individuals in the military that get the flag right in the Navy with a general rank in the Army they know at that time to accept a special response or they'd be very candid throughout my career in 30 years in the Senate I had of course on the Armed Services Committee regular contact with the senior officers and I always had a policy very often to leave the aides in the anti-room and just sit with that officer with none of my own staff and just exchange views I found it very productive and I'm sure I've had it with you and I've had it with you in my office on that basis by the way I remember when you came up to CNO I asked you when I was Navy Secretary did we ever meet and you rather define me said no and you said you added this you said I was a lieutenant at JG I was on the gunline this is during Vietnam War he said I did everything I could never get to the area and I never wanted to go there well what goes around comes around you own it now but Evan I got to tell you the American citizen should be grateful for the young men and women who all volunteer now and come up into these ranks and work their way up and give their lives and their career together their families and when they get there it's always been my experience whether it's been in the Senate or the five years I was in the Navy Secretary they shot straight with you and we're on down let me ask you this is really the same question do you see any evolution here the military getting more or less willing to stand up to or to challenge for again for better or worse civilian authority is there any trend I think that the questions framed interestingly because it's at the edge it is at the edge I think that young people or older people I think that what determines the leader who can do this responsibly is a one who's intellectually curious and the one who was able to ask questions of him or her herself and of their environment so this is not at some edge of the first act you go about your your professional life and you ask questions you try to understand you try to analyze and at some point you come to a to an aggregation point where where you would say this does not make sense or this is a better way and you come to that in an analytical mature professional manner then by that time you also have understood where you are on point then you go through the chain and you bring it up to your leadership and usually the leaders are going to let you air that because you thought it through and you've done a very good job at that so our job is when we're educators is to try to help the individual officer or sailor or airman soldier marine to get there so that they can come to an analytical understanding of what's going on once you do that your boss your leader is going to be grateful and for the most part they're going to let you they they will help you carry their right argument they may even help you shape it better so that it will be successfully argued so in my mind this is not not about the edge point of when you must take on somebody at some point of adversary it's about being compelling and good and competent and coherent so that everybody else is then compelled this was Bert's gift and this is the gift of good leaders is to be able to do that and know where you are intellectually so the intellectual curiosity of a young person today is to understand their access to information is is without precedence our job as leaders is is to help them get there so they feel as though they're being heard so that we are listening this is about a conversation and not just about being at the edge of being the adversary if that is happening and it happens every day then you have a really healthy military and a healthy environment I had a point these fine officers are managers but bottom line they're all commanders and foremost in their minds at all time is the fact that they're responsible for the life and the limb of those in the ranks their decisions put them in harm's way their decisions direct them to perform those duties that that's a special burden that none of us in private life or politics or business or whatever we don't have that on our conscience that's why I always feel they give it their best amen to that let's take a question from the audience David do we have time for a couple of questions all right let's take it anybody want to ask a question that there's their mics there just stand up to it now's the time yes ma'am I have a question for Admiral Roth had this experience in Haiti with the military going in and offering relief have there been any lessons that we've learned from it in the future on how we might be able to get about that faster I think there are as you may recall there have been a couple of responses similar to this the tsunami of 2004 in the Pacific the Indian the earthquake in Pakistan and and so we're always looking at how we can do this better and at the end of of the experience in Haiti whenever that may be we will have learned much from how we respond how we stage the types of skills and equipment we may need and and I think that's one of the great things about not just humanitarian relief or anything else that that the military has a wonderful culture of learning from our past and from our mistakes and we are willing to expose things that perhaps weren't done as well as we would have liked and analyzing why that happened and how we can be better we are constantly renewing and reexamining ourselves any thought so far as to what you might change I think that the one of the things that has been very important to me and what we've been working on for several years post tsunami is is the continued integration of non-governmental organizations and our military forces and other agencies we have come a long way I think that we have to continue to work on that because when you pitch into one of these relief operations of this magnitude it is not one entity that will pull the whole thing off it's the integration of that see Dick Solomon here we've been working very closely with his organization and I think there are going to be a lot of opportunities there to continue to develop those types of relationships and and protocols that allow allow us to come together more quickly thank you thank you can I just comment I'm have been both intimately involved and I think the response has been remarkable given the one the suddenness of it to the scope of it and the ability for us to both muster resources and get them there in the in the in the mass that is required as opposed to the individual piece and I did I thought some of the most remarkable stories were some of the rescue units I mean there was a rescue unit from China which got there in 33 hours out of Beijing the Israeli hospital that got there and and all of those are really an important part of this but and we had units you know we had our Coast Guard was magnificent literally as as the right after the earthquake it is however it it has taken much more than that to get some structure in place to be able to handle the scope and the volume of the tragedy and it really has come in many ways as a result of our our assistance in Indonesia and Pakistan even Katrina here where you couldn't get there fast enough even there you never can in these and and yet and I'll just use an example of the comfort which got there in record time you can't you can't beam a thousand foot ship in you know with all its people you'd like to be able to do that but it but still based on previous experience comfort got there in record time and look what she's doing now and that's just one example getting the other forces on the ground so we clearly will learn and we're much better than we were but from my perspective the response has been magnificent from NGOs USA ID from our government and from many other countries as well in addition to the men and women in the military sir hi I'm Al Pesson from Voice of America have a question for Admiral Mullen on this theme of leadership and what you consider as you chart a course in a complex situation towards a destination that's been determined by the commander-in-chief what sort of factors you have to consider and I'll give you two to talk about one is don't ask don't tell and the other is relations with China because the Taiwan armsale just announced last couple of hours so how do you try to balance you know this commitment to Taiwan and a decision is made but the imperative of remaining engaged with China but now that I've talked about China don't forget about the first point that I actually be happy to answer the second question I'll answer the first question Tuesday at the hearing the the issue from a from a leadership perspective with China I think is one that I have I and others have responsibility from a military to military perspective and opportunities as has been the case with many many countries I actually find it a little bit ironic that we're talking about Admiral Burke who put the Polaris program in place and I literally last week was in Moscow in negotiations with my counterpart with respect to the start follow-on treaty and which which has an awful lot to do with the vision that he had even though he didn't win all of that which to decisions that we make and how long they last sometimes we think of them in the short term so I actually try to think about how I handle myself and approach this from the long-term perspective you're here and what after you're here in Washington a while at least there is an opportunity to look out more than just tomorrow and what does it mean and the reason I bring that up in China and particularly on the mill-to-mill because my thoughts are very much not anywhere not not even close to just the senior leadership perspective because I really want our younger officers to meet each other because that's the future that's going to be the relationship that's what we lost more than anything else in Pakistan when we sanctioned them for 12 years is those mid-grade officers who are now generals that don't know anything about the United States and so I always have that in mind even in the discussion earlier in terms of both accountability and being a political I'm half of my mind goes to our young ones so that in the long run that change can be made and I feel that way with China and I'll I'll save Tuesday Tuesday's answers for Tuesday on don't ask don't tell I certainly recognize the question and I and I understand that this issue was moving very rapidly thank you and tomorrow with session here you know I think what's so overarch is civilian military and Burke understood this is the power of ideas and I'm going to take two examples one John with my naval hat we're not going to anapolis because I served on the board of the Naval War College and then my army hat with a visit long visit I had privately with David Petraeus last week but you know here are two cases of a whole change of strategic tactical doctrine one by the pen and ink sailor that bupers constantly tried to sink as he he went to history Petraeus went to the lessons of Iraq both learn both got their acolytes so David Petraeus described this how they got the buy-in the puzzle they put together out at Leavenworth I remember I went to I'm mentioning the White House that Petraeus was at Leavenworth they ought to bring him back you said you know in the penitentiary I said no I won't say who said that in the White House now last administration but the that that Mahan got his acolytes TR Roosevelt who then became assistant secretary but before they were going up the Naval War College the chairman of the the Foreign Relations Committee John Hay became Secretary of State Elliot Root and they when they came then to Washington there was a whole strategic vision in the move into the Pacific the only reason the only thing we had prepared in World War one with the Navy to support the army over there was due to one this one guy and his thought process in the acolyte Petraeus did the same and you know they they changed a mindset in the way you fight in asymmetrical war and I told him you know this is very similar very different than my and then when you get into this it blurs civilian military people are moving forward on on ideas and and doctrine and of course the other thing that I've always said I've said this my last book this civilian George Marshall great Secretary of State as well as defense and and the National Security Advisor this mix is good this military experience mixed with civilian State Department slept learn to appreciate that we need engineers former four stars in USAID today and so for so but I think this has been a been a wonderful session and it really we're indebted to to all of you John here so we I think we better wrap it up wrap it up and and but but I really thank you all for being with us and echoing the one and only Admiral Artie Burke thank you very much I'd love to just get together and have one sometime you'd like to do that thanks and all on my face


Hi everyone and welcome to this talk on NVMe emulation performance optimizations. I am Jin Hao Fan from the Institute of Computing Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Over the summer, I have been working on the emulated NVMe device as a Google Summer of Code intern with the QEMIM project. At school, I am a second year master's student doing research on starved systems. I use the QEMIM device a lot during research, so I am super interested in how such a system really works and how they are built by open source developers. I applied for GSOP and got accepted to work on it. I am mentored by Klaus and Keith who are the maintainers of the NVMe device, but I also received valuable input from Stefan and the QEMIM community in general. The project proposal was originally suggested in 2018 by Huai Cheng Li and Paulo Vanzini, but was not picked up until this year. Currently, the emulated NVMe device is mainly used by developers and researchers to prototype new NVMe features and experiment with drivers and systems interacting with NVMe devices. The device is PCIE based and supports all mandatory features of NVMe version 1.4. While the device model does a good job as a research and test platform, the performance is surprisingly low compared to the Vertioblock device. So basically, the goal of our work is to make QEMIM's performance at least comparable to Vertioblock. The optimizations to implement was already pretty well-defined by the project. First, reduce the amount of memory mapped writes causing VM access by adding support for so-called shadow doorbell buffers. Second, reduce the impact of the remaining MMIOs by making them cheaper using the IO event FD mechanism. Third, run the emulation in a dedicated thread using an IO thread. Finally, introduce Pauling's submission cues to reduce latency. Some work has already been done on the first two steps, but the third and final step had, to our knowledge, not been experimented with before. Like all successful software projects, some surprises showed up. Most notably, that IO thread support requires a thread safe interrupt delivery mechanism based on event FD. To understand why the performance suffers in the current NVME device, a little background on NVME and the implementation in QEMU is required. Like Vertioblock, NVME uses pairs of lock-free cues for command submissions and conditions. The cues are described by two pointers, the head and the tail. The producer will update the tail pointer and the consumer will update the head pointer. While the device can notify the host about new entries in the completion cue through interrupts, the host relies on writing to a so-called doorbell to inform the device that it has produced entries in the submission cues or consumed entries in the completion cues. In the context of PCI devices, a doorbell register is the common name for memory mapping register located on the device. Naturally, recall the action of writing the register as ringing the doorbell. In other words, to execute a single command, the host must ring the doorbell twice. Once to inform the device that the command has been placed in the cue and once to inform the device that the completion entry had successfully been processed. The NVME protocol allows the number of doorbell writes to be reduced significantly by the host themselves. The host can cue several commands before ringing the doorbell and it can process several completion entries before writing the completion doorbell. However, the device has no control over this and it is entirely up to the device driver or application to do this. If the application is latency sensitive, it may not be interested in delaying the execution of commands and will actively ring the doorbell on each submitted commands. In any case, each of these memory mapped writes are expensive under virtualization because the NVME devices use the traditional trap and emulate mechanism to process commands. That is, the memory access will cause a VM exit that suspense the guest while the MMI handler is executing. While the NVME device defer processing of cue entries to the main loop thread, so it can exit the MMI handler as quickly as possible. This VM access are still the prime suspect for the low performance. To reduce the number of VM access, Shadow Doorbell Buffer, a pair virtualization feature was introduced in NVME version 1.3. This feature is strikingly similar to the event index feature in VertiO. Two additional buffers are introduced, namely the doorbell buffer, which is managed by the host, and the event index buffer, which is updated by the emulated controller. When these buffers are configured by the host, the host is required to update the buffers instead of the memory mapped doorbell registers. Luckily, writing these buffers does not cause VM access. With Shadow Doorbell, the host only writes the doorbell registers if the Shadow Doorbell values is struggling or falling behind the event index buffer value. The Shadow Doorbell mechanism results in a very decent performance gain on its own. However, even when the Shadow Doorbell buffers, there are still some MMIOs. If updating the Shadow Doorbell value causes the value to become greater than the event index. This indicates that the device is in an idle state and not currently consuming cue entries. The host is then required to kick or wake up the device by issuing a normal memory mapped doorbell register write. For these MMIOs, we make use of QEMU's IO Event FD mechanism. With IO Event FD, the VM access handler just writes to an event FD and resumes running guest code without returning control to QEMU. This enables handling VM access caused by MMIOs in lightweight fashion. Importantly, IO Event FD cannot be used as a general replacement for doorbell register writes because it only signals when a memory location is written. It does not tell us what value is written. However, Paolo noticed that if Shadow Doorbells are used, the MMIO handler does not need the value written to the register anyway, since it is already written to the Shadow Doorbell Buffer. So, instead, to know the exact head and tail doorbell values, we make use of the Shadow Doorbell features and checks the value in Shadow Doorbell Buffer when IO Event FD is signal. With IO Event FD, we are already close to Word IO block, but there is potentially more to be gained. We want IO Emulation in a dedicated thread without interference from other devices. We also want to pull the submission queue for new entries to bring command submission latency to a minimum. To give you a background on why a dedicated thread is important, let's use an example with multiple devices. In the current architecture, the devices are all emulated in QEMU's main loop thread, which makes it a bottleneck. However, with QEMU's IO thread feature, we are able to use one thread for each device without interference between these devices. However, to enable emulation in a separated IO thread, we first need to solve some thread safety issues. QEMU's default interrupt injection emulation is unfortunately not thread safe. This was not a problem when all devices were emulated in the main loop thread, but it does not work for IO thread. Solving these issues required a deep dive into how Word IO deals with it, and we learned about two approaches to get around this problem. Both of them are Event FD based. First, there is a feature in KVM called IRQFD that supports IMSAX interrupt assertion via an Event FD. This approach bypasses QEMU's interrupt emulation. We use this approach when IRQFD is available. When IRQFD is not available, we register a normal Event Notifier to handle the actual work of interrupt assertion and de-assertion in the main loop thread. IRQFD does not bring a substantial change in performance. In fact, as Stefan told us that although IRQFD bypasses QEMU's interrupt emulation, it is not necessarily faster. However, it does solve the thread safety issues. With Event FD based interrupts, we are finally able to add IO thread support. We do not emulate all commands in the IO thread. We found that admin commands such as QCreation and Doorbell Buffer configuration usually involve memory region transactions, which require we hold the big QEMU lock. Therefore, we keep the admin Q emulation in the main loop thread. Also, since the admin commands are not in the fast path, there is nothing to be gained anyway. Luckily, we can easily change the emulation thread by changing AIO contacts during Event Notifier, Timer, and Bottom Half setup. Just remember to hook up the correct AIO contacts when you use these functions. With IO thread, we solve some performance improvements at low QD. We suspect this is because IO thread has a more lightweight event loop. But the most important thing is that we are able to scale linearly with the number of devices. The next and final step is polling support for low latency NVMe emulation. With polling, we can start processing immediately when the command is available. We can also eliminate the need for MMIO because we are proactively checking the Doorbell. QEMU already has good support for AIO contacts polling. For NVMe, we only need to provide our own parlor functions. The NVMe submission queue parlor pause submission queue tail shadow Doorbell registers to check new submission queue entries. With all these optimizations, we achieved our goal of bringing QEMU NVMe's performance on par with Vertile Block. Under some settings, we are even better than Vertile Block. Since the mechanisms we used are similar, we suspect this could be because the kernel NVMe driver is better optimized than that of Vertile Block. 700 lines of code are changed to reach a peak gain of 11x in IOPS. We are surprised to find that polling results in lower IOPS at high queue depth were still investigating the cause. We were also appreciated if any audience can help us figure out the reason. Next are some hard lessons we learned. First, we found that some important APIs are lacking a bit on introductory documentation. For example, for Threadsafe interrupts, you need an event have debased approach. For RQF debased interrupts to work correctly, you need to set up MSIX vector masking and unmasking notifiers. We have to dig into the code and ask the maintainers why they originally did this. Luckily, Vertile source code is extremely well written, readable, and relatively easy to follow. Vertile source code used to be the only documentation for these mechanisms. Now we have NVMe, which, at least subjectively, might be a bit simpler. But it will be nice to have these conventions documented, and we will attempt to contribute documentation or some introductory blog posts on this subject. By the way, if you want to incorporate IO Thread into your device, here are the things you might want to check. First, make sure your MMO handlers work on the right thread. This means you need to attach the correct AIO contacts for each event notifier, timer, and bottom half. Second, make sure your interrupt delivery is thread safe. The de facto standard approach is to use an event have debased notifier to schedule all the interruptor assertions and deer assertions on the same thread. We also found an interesting violation of NVMe spec in the wild. The NVMe spec states that doorbell buffers should be used on all queues, including the admin queue. However, for all existing drivers, like Linux kernel, SPDK, and emulated devices like the SPDK VFIO user target, none of them uses shadow doorbell for the admin queue. If a device expects the driver to update the shadow doorbell value, and it does not happen, chaos. This behavior simply cannot be fixed in drivers now. There is no way of telling if the device is spec compliant or not. And if the driver implements the spec compliant behavior, then it might not issue the memory mapped right, causing non-compliant devices to not pick up the commands. And if we, as the device, insist on following the spec, then we break this non-compliant drivers. What to do? The final hack brought up by Keith, who is a co-maintainer for both the kernel NVMe driver and queue-email NVMe, was to override the shadow doorbell buffer value with the doorbell register value in the MMIO handler. This is safe because we are in the VM exit context. In the end, we managed to work for both compliant and non-compliant drivers. However, drivers are, unfortunately, still not spec compliant. And it is probably something we have to live with in the long term. The performance optimization presented in this talk potentially enables the NVMe device to be a viable alternative for a virtual block in cloud deployments. But since the original aim of queue-email NVMe was for development and testing, we still need more features to support the cloud use case. For instance, the device lacks live migration support. And a thorough security audit is definitely required to even consider deploying this at scale. Another point is more versatile IO thread support. Currently, we use one IO thread per emulated controller. But this is probably not enough for emulating high-end SSDs. Therefore, we may consider adding options for an IO thread per namespace and even per submission queue. However, since submission queues are not tied to individual namespaces and this underlying block device, this is not trivial. The last page lists the patches for all these works. Shadow Doorbell and IO Event FD support is already included in queue-email 7.1. And IRQFD, IO threads and polling is currently under review. Hopefully, the code itself and the discussions can help other system developers learn how to use these techniques. That's all from my talk. Thank you.


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