When your pet becomes your healer - Animal Assisted Therapy

Before I begin talking about animal therapy and its fantastic benefits, I’d like to mention a small acknowledgement. I would love to dedicate this blog to my darling dog Ninja. He isn’t just a loving pet, but my best friend and nothing short of a little brother. Ninja has been with me through the troughs and crests of my life. It is amazing how an animal understands you without ever communicating through a common verbal language.  

The connection between animal and human is evolving since the evolution of the latter. They are not only your partner in every phase of life, but also play a very essential and comprehensive role in your regular life. You forget all your stress and tension seeing that innocent face and wagging tail of such pleasant distraction which never judges you but quietly eases your tensions. Animal aided therapy is in existence since 1940’s and working miraculously from that time. It recently started trending in India after results been appreciated overseas in huge numbers. Therefore, we will be discussing its importance in this blog.

Dog, cat, horse and dolphins are being used in these animal aided therapies as none of them fail to give you the sense of companionship and avoid that part of your life, when you feel isolated from rest of the world. It is scientifically proven that your pet helps in enriching your emotional, physical and social well being, in order to boost your self-esteem and trim down your anxieties. These therapies concentrate on the physical sustenance and psychological support via involving the person in various activities with the animal being used in the therapy. Many worldwide surveys have acknowledged the dog owners with low cholesterol problems and normal blood pressures as compared to non-dog owners. Different animals can be used in different environments for all different kinds of clients. Like over caring dogs are being used for the treatment of mentally and physically tortured people and that same dog will not be used in that same environment to help motivating the children.

Few things need to be kept in mind while going through the animal aided therapy, which are:

• ·         Allergies of some people regarding that animal
• ·         Abreast vaccination of the animal
• ·         Good health of that animal
• ·         Animal should be well trained

You should keep a record of all above said points in order to avoid few undesirable consequences, though not so harmful, but still an obstacle in doing the therapy properly. Otherwise it’s all goo do go for it, because who wants to miss the chance of meeting such an adorable doctor.