Leadership
Board of Trustees · Founding Members
Board of Trustees
Christian Farber
Christian Farber founded the Association and serves as its President. He oversees registry standards, credential issuance, and the Association's correspondence with owners, and he signs every diploma the Association issues. He is the accountable officer of record and answers mail personally.
Dr. Bernard Gräber, DVM
Dr. Gräber is a Swiss-Canadian equine veterinarian with four decades of practice across Valais and southern Alberta. He came to companion animal welfare late and by way of horses, which he maintains taught him more about attentiveness than any small-animal rotation could have. He has chaired the Board since its formation and has never voted with the majority on a question he considered settled in advance.
Dr. Miriam Achebe-Lindqvist, DVM, DACVB
A board-certified veterinary behaviorist, Dr. Achebe-Lindqvist practiced for eleven years in Malmö before relocating to a referral hospital in the American Midwest. Her clinical interest is the so-called difficult dog: the reactive, the vocal, the poorly socialised. She chairs the committee that sets the Association's recognition criteria and has argued, in print, that temperament testing measures the tester at least as reliably as the dog.
Rosalind Whitmore Cray, JD
Ms. Cray practices animal welfare law and has appeared before legislative committees in nine states on questions of shelter funding, tethering statutes, and municipal breed restrictions. She advises the Association on the boundary between recognition and regulation, a line she considers widely misunderstood and which she will explain at length to anyone who asks.
Dr. Peter Nakagawa-Hollis, PhD
Dr. Nakagawa-Hollis holds a doctorate in comparative psychology and has spent twenty years studying attachment behaviour between people and domestic animals. His published work concerns what he terms everyday attendance: the ordinary, unremarkable business of one creature staying near another. He keeps his own field notes in fountain pen and has never lost a notebook.
Yolanda Restrepo-Bain, MSW
Ms. Restrepo-Bain coordinated animal visitation programmes for a regional hospital system for sixteen years, scheduling several thousand visits across paediatric, oncology and long-term care units. She advises the Association on the practical realities of programme administration and maintains that the paperwork is the part nobody plans for and everybody underestimates.
Dr. Aurelio Santangelo, DVM, MPH
Trained in veterinary epidemiology, Dr. Santangelo spent his career in population health and record systems before turning to credentialing. He reviews the Association's registry practices annually and reports to the Board on data quality. He holds the view, unpopular in his field, that a registry's credibility rests less on what it records than on what it declines to.
Constance Ilori-Brandt, CAE
A certified association executive, Ms. Ilori-Brandt has administered credentialing bodies in four professional fields and served two terms on a national standards council. She authored the Association's bylaws and its records retention schedule. In thirty-one years of board service across all of it, she has not missed a quorum.
Dr. Halvor Ness-Okonkwo, PhD
Dr. Ness-Okonkwo researches human-animal interaction with particular attention to households where the animal is the primary daily companion. His longitudinal study of single-person households entered its nineteenth year in 2025 and has retained the majority of its original participants, a rate his colleagues describe as implausible and he attributes to sending a card every Christmas.
Founding Members
The nine dogs whose registrations opened the registry. Their records are permanent and do not expire.
Addie The Caddie
Addie has one brown eye and one blue, which her household takes as fair notice: she arrives either playful and delighted or entirely serene, and there is no third setting. Which one is in effect is never in doubt.
Avon Barksdale
For years Avon held the position of youngest in the household, until a human infant arrived and took it from him without a vote. He has kept his composure about the demotion, which is more than was expected of him.
Buddy Woods
Buddy is fast. Open ground is an invitation he has never once declined, and the household has learned to let the sprint finish before expecting anything else of him.
Cha Cha Farber
Cha Cha is the smallest of her household and carries herself as though the ranking ran the other way. Nobody has corrected her, and at this point nobody intends to.
Chewie McLean
The register lists him as Chewie McLean. Elsewhere he is known as Chew Diamond Phillips, a title resting on a single consonant and the 1987 film La Bamba. The Association records the former and does not dispute the latter.
Jimi Corbin
Jimi is the intelligent one, which his household states as fact rather than opinion. He learns what he is taught, and a good deal he was not.
Kashisito Joulain
Nothing has ever hurried Kashisito. He arrives when he arrives and settles where he settles, and the household long ago stopped treating his pace as a problem to be solved.
Lily LaFromboise
Authority in Lily's household is not contested. She holds it, exercises it daily, and the people she lives with have arranged themselves around the fact.
Pickle Francisco
Pickle is a sweet little dog. He is glad to see everyone, every time, and that is the whole of it.