“Caring Canines,” a Boston area pet therapy program, is looking for volunteers to join them!

If your dog is friendly with everyone (including other animals), please consider becoming a Therapy Dog volunteer! Registered therapy dogs are invited to visit nursing homes and other places where people don’t usually get a chance to be around animals.

Our dog Barney was a registered therapy dog (registered with Therapy Dogs International). While I didn’t do a lot with him so far as pet therapy was concerned (we mostly visited my mother and others in her nursing home), I saw what a tremendous difference pets can make in the lives of nursing home residents and others (in hospitals, assisted living arrangements, etc.). In one official visit to a nursing home, Barney and I went to the second floor where the non-ambulatory residents were. There was a man lying on a gurney in the hallway who really brightened up when he saw Barney. He started babbling about dogs he’d had, while I went over to him and invited Barney “up” onto the gurney (front paws only). The man continued to talk for several minutes as he ran his hands through Barney’s thick fur. Before we moved on to meet other residents, the nurse in attendance said that was the first time the man had spoken since arriving at the nursing home the week before.

For more information about “Caring Canines” and therapy dogs, please visit the Caring Canines website.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 24th, 2006 at 4:31 pm and is filed under In the News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.