Sharon Crowell-Davis grew up doing her best to live with and on horses. For her PhD dissertation at Cornell University she studied the maternal and developmental behavior of Welsh pony mares and their foals, spending about 2500 hours with the particular herds she studied. Since some of the ponies on the farm (not her subjects) were used to pull sleighs during the winter, she greatly enjoyed going on sleigh rides and subsequently trained her own Welsh pony in the basics of driving, as well as being ridden. She subsequently moved to Athens, GA to serve on the faculty of the University of Georgia College of Veterinary Medicine where she is now a Professor of Behavioral Medicine in the Department of Veterinary Biosciences and Diagnostic Imaging. During her early years at Georgia, she continued her studies of maternal and developmental behavior on several different breeds of horses, as well as mules. At UGA she developed a didactic and clinical program in behavioral medicine for the veterinary students, which has continued to flourish. She was one of the founding diplomates of the American College of Veterinary Behaviorists (along with Dr. Houpt and Dr. Voith, also present at this meeting). She has served as president of the ACVB and the AVSAB, as well as in many other offices in those two organization. Her research has branched into cat, dog and parrot behavior, but she is planning on going full circle back to the Welsh pony. She has so far made a trip to the Carneddau Mountains in Snowdonia National Park in northern Wales to do pilot work on the logistics of repeating her graduate studies on Welsh ponies living in their native habitat, where they have resided for thousands of years. She has since discovered that the group she briefly studied to assess the logistics of doing a longer term study on them is genetically unique from Welsh ponies in other parts of Wales. She currently has 15 cats, all rescues, who are teaching her a lot about cat behavior.
