How much translation is needed?

I've been working on a tantrum lately about how little the animal body therapy world is doing to develop itself as a unique industry. Rather than approaching the quadruped's body and mind as unique and requiring it's own approach, we too often just take the work being done with humans and assume that they'll work with animals--by this I mean animal quadrupeds.
In the past I worried that animal massage therapists were simply taking human techniques and applying them to animals without any translation for the structural and nervous control differences of between the species. Anthropomorphism in body therapy if you will. This even goes so far as to have the ridiculous measure of time--a marketing measure, not a therapeutic one--applied to the animal in the same way it is to the human. I mean where did 1 hour come about as anything more than a possible way to sell oneself? Chiropractors don't sell their services by time! Neither do medical doctors or dentists or farriers... but the animal therapist copying the human therapist sells their services by the hour, rather than the benefit or by surface area of the animal. OR, perhaps more appropriately the animal's ability to remain focused on the work.
The latest contribution to my tantrum is an article I read on "Pilates" for horses. This was a report on how one of my favorite researchers has fallen into the trance of thinking that work developed for humans--in this case core stabilization, which I'm not sure about--can be used with horses with translation. This requires that the quadruped's transverse abdominus acts the same in both species. The the quadrupedal "core" is the same as the human "core". (It seems to this simpe Rolfer that standing on two legs is more difficult than standing on four, and that human back pain may be caused by a completely different action than bi-pedal pain is.)
I'm really concerned that unless we animal therapists start to do our own research and develop our own methods that we'll be marginalized.
It's time to feed the horses and walk in the mud.