My work in animal-assisted intervention (AAI ) began in graduate school. I was studying clinical psychology at Virginia Tech and a nearby prison had implemented a prison-dog program (FETCH a Cure 2018). Puppies that would eventually become service dogs were living with inmates for their first year of life. The inmates raised them and began their behavioral training. The program was deemed successful; puppies were healthy and well prepared for service training after their time in prison. People were certain the program was having positive effects on the inmates and wanted evidence. I was fortunate enough to serve as a research assistant, surveying and interviewing inmates in the program. With my first visit to the prison, I was hooked. It was amazing to see men who had been incarcerated and deemed unsafe for society, isolated and hardened by the experience, light up when talking about the dogs in their care. This was true of the prison staff as well; everyone loved the dogs and reported the program was having a positive impact on the inmates. We studied the program, trying to capture this impact.
At the time, prison-based animal programs were popping up in prisons across the U.S. But implementation preceded any scholarship addressing which variables are impacted, for the inmates, the facility, or the animals. This is a theme in AAI work in general; programs are implemented first and then we get curious about the impact they’re having and try to guess what that impact might be. Unsure of just what this program was doing for the inmates, we cast a wide net. We gathered data on psychosocial factors like self-esteem and optimism and assessed symptoms for all kinds of psychological disorders (e.g., depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder). Naturally, we predicted each of these would be improved as a function of the program. To our surprise, these variables did not change much from before working in the program (i.e., pretest) to after (i.e., posttest). It turns out the inmates selected for the program were some of the healthiest, most well-adjusted inmates in the facility. They already had high self-esteem, were relatively optimistic, and didn’t have much in the way of psychological symptoms to begin with.
From this experience, I knew that I wanted to continue research in this area and that it would be an exciting challenge to determine just how animals impact our physical and mental health. This led to my dissertation research which involved investigating another prison-dog program at a different prison. Dogs from an animal shelter were living in the prison for several weeks while the inmates trained them in basic obedience. The dogs left prison with better behavior and were adopted by families in the community. The question was: did the program impact the inmates? Taking a lesson from the previous study, I chose not to measure psychopathology. Inmates selected for the program were likely the best of the best and probably would not endorse symptoms of mental illness. Instead, I measured social functioning and progress in the prison’s therapeutic community. I found improvements in both, from pretest to posttest, in comparison to a wait-list control group. I couldn’t wait to share my findings with my dissertation committee; I had studied this amazing program and found significant results. During my oral defense they acknowledged the significant findings and then promptly raised the question that would eventually become my research program—how? How did working in the program—this AAI—impact social functioning? Why did social sensitivity increase for the inmates in the program while it decreased for inmates on the wait list? This book is written with these questions in mind: what effect do animals have on human health and well-being, and how or why do these effects occur?
Definitions
Animal-assisted interventions (AAIs ) are events, programs, or processes in which people engage with animals for some physical, social, emotional, or cognitive outcome (Animal-Assisted Intervention International 2016). AAI is a broad field that includes AAAs aimed at providing comfort and improving quality of life; animal-assisted education or learning wherein animals are involved in a process to obtain academic or educational goals; or animal-assisted therapy (AAT) in which animals are part of a treatment process (American Veterinary Medical Association 2019). Each of these activities involve engaging animals in a process for the promotion of human health and/or well-being. Throughout the book, I refer to AAI in general; the goal is to spur empirical thinking about interventions that include animals, whether the intervention is an activity or a treatment of some kind.
In the most basic sense, AAI includes human–animal interaction (HAI), which can be defined broadly as any interaction between a human and a nonhuman animal. Anthrozoology is the scholarly study of HAI, including scholars from disciplines within the natural sciences (e.g., biology, environmental studies), social sciences (e.g., psychology, social work), and humanities (e.g., philosophy, history, literature). Anthrozoologists attend to a broad array of interactions between humans and animals, including those that are beneficial to the human and/or animal (e.g., pet ownership, AAI), harmful interactions (e.g., animal cruelty and abuse, animal attacks on humans), forms of entertainment (e.g., zoos, circuses, animal racing or fighting), and interactions where the animal appears to be absent (e.g., wearing fur or leather, eating meat).1 As a clinical psychologist I study HAI as they relate to human health and well-being. Specifically, I study the processes and outcomes of AAI, a practice dating back to at least the 1700s.
History of Practice and Research
While humans surely engaged with animals for some benefit going back thousands of years, employing animals in health as we know it today dates back to the late 1700s. At that time, psychiatric patients were noted to benefit from caring for animals such as rabbits and poultry at the York Retreat in England (Tuke 1813). In 1860, Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing, wrote about animals aiding in the relaxation of children and adults in psychiatric hospitals (Nightingale 1860). Regarding mental health, there are reports of using dogs in psychotherapy dating back to Sigmund Freud. Patients reported he frequently offered comments and interpretations through his dog Jofi (e.g., Grinker 1979). Boris Levinson is credited with carrying out the first formal use of animals in therapy (Levinson 1969), after discovering the effects of his dog Jingles on his patients (Levinson 1962).
Formal AAI research is relatively young, dating back to the mid-twentieth century. Hooker et al. (2002) review the history of using animals in health settings. Levinson presented his findings from using Jingles in child psychiatry at the 1961 American Psychological Association convention. Having recognized companion animals as influential in human psychological functioning, he called for research on the benefits of pets (Levinson 1978). Two psychiatrists at Ohio State University—Sam and Elizabeth Corson—were the first to collect quantitative data, conducting pilot studies with animals in hospital settings (Corson et al. 1975). The research expanded to nursing home settings, revealing physical, psychological, and social outcomes (Corson and Corson 1978). From there, research expanded to investigations of pet ownership and physical healt...