Therapy pets

According to USA TODAY, thousands of pets and their owners are spending time with the sick, the depressed or the distressed and with groups of children and adults in difficult straits for animal-assisted therapy. Therapy animals, as they are commonly known, usually have a special empathy for people, a friendly demeanor and reliable obedience skills, as well as the ability to motivate, comfort, and soothe people.*

Therapy animals are not restricted to just dogs and cats; even birds and llamas have been trained and registered. And they have expanded outside hospitals and nursing homes to also frequent schools, disaster sites, prisons and more recently war zones.*

Professionals such as doctors, social workers, physical therapists and crisis managers are recruiting teams to spend time with people in their care--and the pet-owning public is responding in large numbers. The Delta Society in Bellevue, Wash., has more than 10,000 teams registered and has experienced a 6 to 8 percent growth a year. Additionally, thousands of people and pets are registered with similar groups or without group affiliation across the country.*

*Source: www.usatoday.com, Ordinary pets to the rescue on human-animal therapy teams by Sharon L. Peters, April 29, 2008.