Animal Assisted Therapy

Animal assisted therapy (AAT) is a planned, goal-directed approach in which a trained animal becomes part of a person's care or learning. A health, mental health, or education professional leads the session, sets goals, and tracks progress, and the animal, most often a dog but sometimes a horse, cat, rabbit, or other species, helps create a calm, motivating setting. It is usually distinguished from animal-assisted activities, such as a casual visit from a therapy dog, which have no individual treatment goals.

People meet therapy animals in hospitals, hospices, schools, care homes, rehabilitation units, and counseling rooms. Reasons include easing anxiety before a procedure, encouraging movement or speech in rehabilitation, supporting social skills in children, and offering comfort in loneliness, illness, or grief. A therapy animal is different from a service dog, which is trained to perform tasks for one person with a disability, and from a pet, which has no formal training or evaluation.

The research is encouraging in places but weak overall. Reviews report lower depressive symptoms in older adults and social or behavioral gains in some children, yet most trials are small, vary widely in design, and carry a high risk of bias. This page is about human wellbeing with animals. It is separate from treatments given to animals themselves.

People have long lived alongside animals for comfort, but the modern idea of using them in therapy is usually traced to the American child psychologist Boris Levinson. He noticed that withdrawn children opened up when his dog, Jingles, was in the room and began writing about it; the Guinness World Records cites April 1964 for the first use of the term "pet therapy," though accounts place his first observations between 1961 and 1964, and his colleagues were reportedly skeptical.

Institutions followed. Pet Partners, the largest US registry of therapy animal teams, dates its origin to the Delta Foundation, formed in Portland, Oregon in 1977 with physician Michael McCulloch as president, with veterinarian Leo Bustad, credited with coining "human-animal bond," also central to its early work. It became the Delta Society in 1981 and Pet Partners in 2012, and its first registered team was Ann Howie and her dog Falstaff. Today practitioners include licensed therapists, nurses, occupational and physical therapists, and teachers, working with trained handlers and evaluated animals. Standards for animal welfare, screening, and training are set by organizations rather than a single regulator, and rules differ by country, state, and facility. Some sources give different dates for these events.