Animal Assisted Therapy Essay

Animal-assisted therapy has helped many people over the years and still helps them today. One case where it helped someone was when a dog lover was unresponsive in hospice and had not shown any signs of movement for weeks. When the dog was put beside the unresponsive man, the dog put his head on the man's hand. Surprisingly the man started to gently scratch the dog's head, showing that the dog had helped him wake up more. Animal-assisted therapy has many benefits once the animals are trained and meet the requirements. The animals used in animal-assisted therapy have to meet certain requirements. Some of those are that the animal must be a specific age, sometimes a certain animal depending on the place or person and their health must be good.

The more time spent with them, the more a relationship will grow. Spending a significant amount of time training the animal is also a good way to make sure the animal learns quickly and proficiently. Another way to make sure the animal is trained well is to start adding distraction when they get a handle on a trick (Bielakiewicz 1). After learning the basic skills like sit, stay and heel the animal can enter in obedience trials. These trials time the animal on how fast he responds to a command. Some people actually compete in obedience trials but it is not always for competition. There are different levels to these trials that need to be passed by the animal going to be used in animal-assisted therapy. In the last level the animal must do the commands without a leash on but the handler can still praise them (Bielakiewicz 168-73). A fun way to make sure the animal listens to commands without having to look for hand movements is to try saying them without moving. This may not be fun at first but over time it should be and it helps the animal out a lot in the end. This also helps train the animal in obedience. There are some other similar ways to challenge your dog to train them for obedience trials. Some people put out food to tempt them while training them to see if they’ll resist the food or not. Once the animal can do that they should be trained perfectly in