Who doesn’t talk to their dog? There’s something in our dog’s social pack-animal brain that inclines them to be attentive and attuned to our vocal cues and body language and there’s something about being human that appreciates a good listener. Now we have some intriguing information from Jennifer Emmert, PhD, who manages our Animal Assisted Therapy programs, that the benefits of talking to a dog go beyond therapeutic value.
Jennifer recently led a study of one of our most cherished programs, Puppy Dog Tales, which uses specially trained dogs to coach children who are struggling to learn to read. In this program, students read out loud to a dog and its handler, who visit them on a regular basis at school or at a library. For some of these kids, English is a second or even third language. Others have learning disabilities, are held back by severe shyness or anxiety, or are otherwise considered “at risk” in the school system.
What she found in her research, conducted at a local school, E. R. Taylor Elementary, was that the children who read to the dogs made remarkable gains in literacy, in addition to the benefits to their emotional health.
Measuring the progress of 60 children overall—30 who read with the dogs for one 15-minute session a week over 10 weeks, and 30 others who practiced reading without a dog’s help—she learned that the experimental group improved by an average of 31.3 words per minute in oral fluency (words correctly read per minute), versus 9 words per minute for the control group.
Animal Assisted Therapy is driven by the idea that the animal-human bond of loyalty and affection is powerful in ways we can barely comprehend. We field more than 100 animal-owner teams, which make about 250 visits a month to hospitals, nursing homes, community centers, and youth facilities, enriching the lives of 75,000 San Franciscans a year. Not just dogs—there are therapy cats, birds, rabbits, chinchillas, even reptiles. One of our most popular animal therapists was a bearded dragon, a particularly serene lizard known for his calming effect.
Many people find a visiting animal disarming: they warm up to it, and then they warm up to each other. In a school, it seems the canine reading buddies silently encourage a child to overcome the reticence he or she feels around a human teacher. They never correct your pronunciation or make fun of the way you talk. The third- and fourth-graders Jennifer studied showed progress in so many ways: their confidence grew, their anxieties diminished, and there were fewer classroom outbursts or pupils who had to be excused in the middle of class time. Some ADHD children seemed to get better at just sitting still. Best of all, the students who read with the dogs showed an interest in practicing reading and began to look forward to it.
Our Animal Assisted Therapy program just celebrated its 30th anniversary. Puppy Dog Tales teams are much in demand in the community, and the SF SPCA is always looking for dogs and volunteers who would be a good fit for the program. It’s no walk in the park: animal-human teams need to undergo thorough training and screening, including a rigorous “Canine Good Citizen” certification to make sure the dog has the right temperament. But if you know an especially sympathetic canine, or if you want to support our animal therapist teams in some other way, please get in touch.