Therapy Dogs
Therapy dogs do a variety of community-service jobs. The term used to apply to dogs that visited nursing homes, but now the medical profession has found that therapy dogs are helpful in much broader applications.
People who are disoriented, such as Alzheimer's patients, or those who have problems with focus, such as children with high-functioning autism or learning disabilities, can often benefit from interaction with therapy dogs. The pleasure of concentrating on a dog can require these patients to think again about what is going on right here and now.
The use of therapy dogs has grown a great deal in the last decade for a number of reasons. Therapy dogs boost morale. Keeping good morale in long-term care facilities can be difficult, but most people become dog lovers around a well-trained dog. Also, it has long been established that people who have pets live longer and have less stress in general, a boon for patients in long-term care facilities, or people who are recovering from illnesses that enforce inactivity, depression is very common. Dogs help to break up the boredom of the day, and they provide a bright spot to people who often have few other things to look forward to in their lives.
Dogs often help to facilitate greater cooperation within the staff, and people that they take care of. This is partly a function to increased morale, but a good, loving therapy dog manages to elicit cooperation from many.
The training that a therapy dog undergoes is extensive in terms of developing the dog's people skills. After all, in a therapeutic situation, a dog may encounter people whose movement is impaired or erratic, who may lash out at the dog, and who may cry or carry on in ways that are alarming to the dog. Therapy Dogs International and Delta Pet Partners have extended training programs for their canine candidates, but many programs start with Canine Good Citizen certification as the basis.
Therapy dogs also help with social stimulation. One reason therapy dogs boost morale, help with depression, and improve relationships is that dogs invite conversation. People talk to dog owners, and they talk about dogs. Sometimes therapy dogs are the only visitors these long-term care patients have, and the dogs become the reason they get up and interact with others.
Another way that therapy dogs help is by providing an outlet for all people's need for touch. For those long-term patients who have few friends or relatives to visit, therapy dogs provide someone who not only will touch the patients, but who also will touch back if the patient desires. This is also critical for high-functioning autistic children. Therapy dogs are safe to touch and to communicate with.
Therapy dogs are a wonderful way to expose children to nice dogs in a setting where the dogs can help make a positive difference for other reasons. Pediatric oncology units now use therapy dogs at times to help children get through painful procedures. Therapy dogs provide a positive and sympathetic distraction. For children in the READ program (a volunteer program that helps children who are having difficulty learning to read or comprehending what they read), dogs provide a very safe listening audience, and therapists have found that children find it less threatening to explain to a dog what a certain passage means than when asked to explain material to an adult. A statement such as, “I don't think that my boxer understood that last part. Could you explain it to him?” is much less threatening to a child struggling with reading than a therapist or volunteer asking the child to explain the passage.
