Pet Den

Pets used in therapy

Everyone of us has bad days in life. When you had a bad day, and were feeling sad, lonely and depressed, how did your dearest pet help you to recover? Did petting it, talking to it and spending more time with it help you relax? I'm sure your pet would have made you feel calm and relaxed.

Though this is just a day-to-day experience for most of us, it has proved to be a successful method in treating patients. Nowadays, in many Western countries, animals like dogs, cats, hamsters, horses and dolphins are used in Animal-Assisted Therapies (AAT).

According to many researches, having a pet in a house keeps elder people occupied and happy, which leads to them enjoying a healthy life.

Pets are also used to treat children who are disabled as well as children who are unruly, aggressive and backward in their studies.

The love these pets share with such children can do miracles, contributing vastly to let them be normal children again.

Using pets for therapy started during the World War II. A soldier adopted a Yorkshire terrier named Smoky during the war. It was a great help to the soldier in many ways. Once, when the soldier got injured, his friends took Smoky to the hospital with them. All the other injured soldiers too loved Smoky, and the doctors noticed that their rate of recovery increased, thanks to the dog. So, Smoky was allowed to stay in the hospital, and served as a therapy dog for almost 12 years.

There are several pet therapy methods,visitation therapy, ownership therapy and animal-assisted therapy. Visitation therapy is the most familiar type of animal therapy and involves pets being taken to hospitals and nursing homes to visit patients and residents. This is an ideal therapy method for people who don't have the capacity to have their own pets. In many countries, there are agencies who provide pets for these services.

As the name suggests, ownership therapy is where the patient owns the pet. Patients are kept occupied by allowing them to attend to the pets. On the other hand, AAT is used for patients who are in need of extreme rehabilitation. These patients are paired with sensitive animals like dolphins and horses to aid the recovery process.

Dogs play a key role in Animal-Assisted Therapies. These dogs are trained to provide affection and comfort to people in hospitals, retirement homes, nursing homes, mental institutions, schools and stressful situations such as disaster areas. They come in all sizes and breeds. The most important characteristic is its temperance; good therapy dogs must be friendly, patient, confident, at ease in all situations and gentle.

They must enjoy human contact and be content to be petted and handled, sometimes, even clumsily. Not only dogs, other animals should also have similar characteristics to be used as therapy animals.Animal-Assisted Therapy helps us to uplift our lives in many ways. Dogs don't just guard our households, they do more than that. This applies to other animals too!

-Janani Amarasekara