Pet Therapy Benefits

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Pets have been known to be a great support system for their owners, which could have potential benefits to one’s mental and physical wellbeing. There have been numerous studies completed that evaluate the benefit of therapy animals and pets, specifically dogs, in our day-to-day lives. We have learned much about the way they help us cope and even how they can impact our stress levels and overall health. In recent years, there has been increasingly more research conducted to specifically find out what kind of impact animals have on those enrolled in higher education, which is known to be a significantly stressful time for many. What I aim to explore is just how much of a benefit these animals, specifically domestic dogs, can provide to college age students and how …show more content…
There is a great deal of research that shows benefits to an individual’s level of stress when exposed to an interaction with a dog. Specifically, the use of trained therapy dogs has been used countless times in the majority of research that pertains to human-animal relations. As stress has been known to be linked to cardiovascular issues in humans, Krause-Parello and Kolassa (2016) aimed to show in “Pet Therapy: Enhancing Social and Cardiovascular Wellness in Community Dwelling Older Adults” that interactions with these trained animals are associated with a significant decrease in systolic blood pressure. (Krause-Parello & Kolassa, 2016) Through use of a cross-over design, participants between the ages of 60-102 acted as both case and control by receiving a visit from a therapy dog and receiving a visit from just a friendly person, a week apart, in random order depending on the subject. Both blood pressure and heart rate were measured throughout the experiment, and both were shown to decrease more after the interactions with the therapy dog versus the visit with a human. (Krause-Parello & Kolassa,