Call It ‘Puppy’ Love
Trained therapy animals help patients and their families overcome trauma and cope with illness
Child psychologist Aubrey Fine uses animals to get children to open up in the face of trauma, illness. Image courtesy Dr. Aubrey H. Fine
The young girl stepped quietly into the psychologist’s office with her parents. She had been labeled a “selective mute,” someone who would talk at home but never in public, and her parents hoped that perhaps this doctor could help.
Once the girl was settled, “Puppy,” a rescued golden retriever trained to help the doctor, approached and settled her head across the girl’s lap.
The youngster began to pet the gentle dog, a small smile playing across her face. Her expression of contentment was replaced by one of sadness when Puppy, responding to a signal from the doctor, left her side. “If you want her to come back, you just have to say “Puppy, come,’” the doctor said. The moments passed. Then, finally, in a low voice, she said, “Puppy, come.”
A brief victory, but one happening more and more as evidence mounts that the bond between humans and animals can bring about therapeutic success in a variety of illnesses and disorders.
“We, Puppy and I, began to open the child up,” the doctor, child psychologist Aubrey Fine, says. “The dog and the patient did not speak our language; they had a common language of mutual silence, a physical communication that in many ways enhances the emotional relationship. Puppy melted the ice.”
Dr. Fine, a professor at California State Polytechnic University for 25 years, has become an international ambassador for animal-assisted therapy. He authored “The Handbook for Animal Assisted Therapy” (Academic Press, 2000), and his new book, “Afternoons with Puppy” (Purdue University Press, 2007) with writer Cynthia Eisen, is coming out in October. (See www.afternoonswithpuppy.com.) He also is a featured speaker at the 130th conference of the American Humane Association at the end of this month in Alexandria, Va.
“I fell into this field serendipitously,” he says. “I never had animals as a child, only as an adult. I have learned so much from them.”
At the conference, and then again at the annual conference of the Humane Society of the United States in December, Dr. Fine will describe the many theories on why people adore animals.
People, Dr. Fine says, need to be needed and need to be wanted. It is why people love being parents, to be loved and to care for others. Animals help us through times of isolation, loneliness and our life transitions. They fill voids.
“Older people often feel their lives do not have value to others,” he says. “All of a sudden, when they are taking care of an animal, they have a purpose, a reason to get up in the morning.”
We all anthropomorphize with our animals by describing their behaviors as human actions, Fine says. The dog comes to me because he loves me, for example. “The science side of me questions this and is a bit more skeptical,” says Dr. Fine. “Nevertheless, the humanistic side within me often overturns these beliefs and helps me to not question our connection with animals, but rather to cherish the loving bond that we are blessed to have.”
Dr. Fine has used his rescue dogs as therapy dogs for patients going through life events such as divorce, and with autistic and depressed children. He takes children at risk and matches them with animals that once also were at risk. “By rescuing a dog you are giving it a second lease on life; this is equally beneficial to a child.”
But even people who are not making their way through an episode, event or disorder that prompts them to seek medical help benefit from having an animal. “Look at the busy person. Animals help them escape the trials of daily stress,” Dr. Fine says. “Look at the owner who cannot wait to get home to take the dog for a walk.”
Animals often serve as a social lubricant, he adds. He had one patient, a middle school girl with chronic depression and severe anxiety disorder, who arrived at his office dressed in an over-sized Army jacket and a hat slouched over her eyes. She was so nervous she was shaking, he says. Connecting with people seemed beyond her capability. Another of his therapy dogs, a black lab named Heart, took over. Heart had been trained as a guide dog but became a therapy dog when he was diagnosed with a heart murmur.
The dog “acted as a shield for the child. Heart helped her transition,” Dr. Fine says.
A few years later, as a high school senior, the girl dropped in to say hello. She was smiling, cheerful and when Heart ran to the front, the girl dropped to her knees and hugged Heart, crying. “You were the one who taught me to talk again,” she told the dog.
Dr. Fine has had his own personal experience with how powerful of a resource an animal can be. He got Magic, a golden retriever, two days after his wife had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Magic had a special relationship with his wife, and was there during her treatments and rehab. “Magic gave her the purpose to get up in the morning.”
Increasingly, experts are turning to a variety of species of animals to help humans. For more information on the bond between animals and us and the use of animals as therapy, try www.healingwithhorses.com, www.petsandpeople.org, www.animaltherapy.net and ww.petsmo.com.
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