While it will be a year or more until I know for sure if he will be just a companion dog for my family or also a new animal-assisted speech therapy partner, let’s take a look at what factors I considered when adding my latest family member…

Out of the corner of my eye I see his blue eyes look up and for a moment our gazes lock. I take a deep breath and feel instantly calmer, smiling at him as I reach into my pocket for a well-earned treat.

To other customers it probably doesn’t seem like Bodhi is working at all. Only I know how much he improves my quality of life for these two years he’s worked as my service dog...

What happens when you take children who have experienced trauma, abuse, or years of social and academic failure and introduce an open-hearted therapy dog to their educational experience?

Speech-language pathologists Kimbra Kern and Noel Tang have watched amazing connections form with even the most challenging of clients—children and adolescents who need intensive support in specialized educational settings due to severe emotional and behavioral difficulties. 

Following up on part one, in which animal-assisted interventionists hared how they include therapy dogs in social-emotional lessons for preschoolers and elementary age students in general education, let’s explore even more possibilities for enhancing children’s development…

A preschooler and a senior citizen connect over their love of animals.  A fifth-grade class learns to identify and express kindness by watching a therapy dog’s examples.  A girl shunned by her classmates finds moments of peace interacting with a special canine.  A teen refuses to participate in a class social gathering until hearing how her favorite four-legged friend would handle the situation and is then able to share the joy of roasting marshmallows with classmates. 

What do these stories have in common?  Despite the incredible range of ages and abilities, all these individuals experienced the power of the human-animal bond by meeting therapy dogs and their determined, creative, animal-assisted therapists or educators!

“Hmm…Now what do I do?”

The question running through my mind was in response to a new client who was strongly disinterested in every activity I had planned for the session, but later I realized it also applied to the next five years of my career.

I’ve been including therapy dogs—a total of four now—into my private speech, language, and reading therapy clinic for a little over five years, and it has changed me professionally and personally. I’ve learned what does and doesn’t work, how to better read each of my dog’s individual communication styles, and even written a book to help other clinicians. My skills in animal-assisted therapy have expanded exponentially, and yet…

I still have moments when I’m at a loss.

Here are three recent challenges I’ve faced while working with my amazing speech therapy dogs:

In Paws for Progess, my new book about therapy dogs written for SLPs, I used stories from real life therapy sessions to illustrate various therapy dog concepts.

Since the book edits have finished, I’ve continued to have what I call “magical moments”; those times when a therapy dog’s presence made the difference between a “meh” session and an “aha” moment for a child.

While I realize it isn’t truly magic—a therapy dog’s novelty, affiliative nature, and regulating presence can explain the increased effort and success children experience—it’s hard not to think of it that way. So here’s three extra vignettes for your enjoyment:

Reading the new 6th edition of the Handbook of Animal-Assisted Therapy, I was struck by the repeated and overarching emphasis on therapy animal welfare. 

Struck in positive way, as I absolutely agree that a content therapy animal is a much safer therapy animal.  But also struck in how little recognition was given to the possible benefits a therapy animal might experience from engaging in this work. 

At the risk of sounding like I’m just trying to justify what I do, I’d like to discuss three features of animal-assisted speech therapy that I think should also receive consideration while having a balanced discussion of therapy dog welfare…

Five years ago I was a newly minted animal-assisted interventionist.  So new, in fact, that I hadn’t even heard that term yet, let alone all the other acronyms that make up this field. I was just flying by the seat of my pants, figuring out ways to incorporate my young Labradane Delta Dawn into speech therapy sessions to help calm anxious kids and motivate practice in more resistant ones. 

There were amazing moments and moments that didn’t go as planned, but I was learning something new every time she accompanied me to work. Partnering with Delta one or two days a week was going well, but I couldn’t imagine her thriving with even more time at work.  However…I did know a dog that was crying out for a job to do. 

A dog that made fast friends with everyone he had ever met...

A dog that literally smiled and made happy sneezes when people came through the door...

A dog that also had an extremely high energy level and very little obedience!

Like the family in the classic children’s book Rattletrap Car, I wondered…"Do you think it just might work?" And Johnny Utah, my eight-year-old Brittany Spaniel, responded with a resounding “Go!”

This past summer I had the delightful challenge of introducing a speech-language pathology graduate student to animal-assisted therapy as she completed her practicum requirements. Stefanie Brandt joined me with experienced speech therapy dog Delta as well as with Sky, who was just starting her therapy dog journey at the time. I was curious to learn Stefanie’s observations after 12 weeks of working with the dogs in a limited capacity while her primary focus was on learning the day-to-day strategies of speech, language, and reading therapy…

“Blue Sky” the boy called, repeating a gestalt phrase he had learned in another context. “Blue Sky, can I have a kiss?”

This being their first meeting, Sky was still a bit hesitant around this tall fifteen year old who moved jerkily and had periodic vocal tics. I was giving her time and watching closely to see if she would actively consent to interacting with him, as she hadn’t yet experienced meeting anyone like him. As I supported her with quiet praise and a hand on her side while making sure the boy didn’t try to hold onto her legs, Sky slowly transferred her front feet from my lap to the boy’s and began to wiggle and kiss his face.

A mutually loving bond between these two blossomed before my eyes.

This moment about a month into Sky’s therapy dog career is seered onto my heart as when I knew she was indeed meant for this work. A natural people-lover, she nonetheless has an active and high-strung temperament, so I’ve introduced Sky into work days extra slowly to ensure she feels safe.

Here’s three challenges and three successes Sky and I have faced together over the past half a year:

Do you work with a perfectly imperfect dog? I happen to own four of them and have used three as speech therapy dogs at my pediatric Speech-Language Pathology private practice. Each one is amazing, entertaining, loving….and sometimes maddening!

When I’m faced with a challenging behavior, I take some comfort in knowing that I have options for how to handle it. I can: throw my hands up in defeat, train a more useful response, or manage the behavior.

Ok, so maybe the first option isn’t very productive, but let’s be honest, sometimes it’s the knee-jerk response we all have when our fight our flight response kicks in…

What’s the difference between these two hug scenarios?

Consent is the biggest factor, but also the actual physical components of the hug. Yet social media posts abound of cute photos of kids hugging dogs, sometimes physically lifting them off the ground in their enthusiasm.

While it’s easy to anthropomorphize our therapy dogs and assume they welcome hugs because we do, the reality is that dogs communicate and experience the sensory world differently than humans.

So how can we incorporate a therapy dog safely into a session while:

· respecting their welfare,

· keeping the situation safe for all involved, and

· providing for the sensory and emotional needs of our clients?

Let’s explore good therapy dog etiquette to improve our animal-assisted interventions:

The realization hit me and I felt like an idiot. After all, the whole reason I first delved into animal-assisted therapy was to help my clients establish a calm, focused state to better learn new concepts. Yet here I was, asking my young therapy dog Sky to learn a new skill when she was tired, satiated on the food rewards I was offering, and probably a little overwhelmed.

Over the past five years of working with four speech therapy dogs of widely different temperaments I have learned to better recognize when I am inundating my furry co-therapist with too many ideas. Fortunately they’ve been very forgiving of mistakes I’ve made as I learned largely through trial and error.

Here are three situations I now approach very differently in order to minimize the stress my therapy dog and I feel at work and hopefully contribute to a longer, happier career:

Oh Delta, you’re soooo lazy today!” I groaned, hamming it up for the giggling first grader as my canine co-therapist barely lifted her legs high enough to make it through the hula hoop we were holding together.

Working on symmetrical lip protrusion for the “j” sound as part of post brain-surgery speech rehabilitation, the little girl clearly didn’t care that Delta’s trick was sub-par. In fact, the unexpected nature of Delta’s poor performance and the laughter it elicited may have even made this activity more memorable.

While Delta does indeed know several tricks,  I’ve found the kids on my caseload are rarely critical of how she performs.  They are far more impacted by the bond they share with her as they practice emerging self-regulation and communication skills.  There are certain skills that do come in handy across a day of animal-assisted speech therapy, however.  Here’s my personal favorites, the ones I call upon most often, and the treats I rely on to reward Delta’s hard work:

What’s the number one question I get from clinicians interested in adding a speech therapy dog to their practice?

“What if something happens…will my liability insurance cover me?”

It hasn’t been a straightforward question to answer, but recently an exciting opportunity opened up to allay those fears a bit.  I’ve also spent a lot of time considering what else can be done to make sure we never get to the point of having to call upon liability insurance, and I’d like to share these thoughts here…

Have you ever started on a venture and been surprised where you wound up? When I first brought my dog Delta to work, I really thought it would be for the occasional special session for children who were struggling to make progress toward their communication goals. Fast forward a few years and those early experiences with Delta have propelled me deeply into the world of animal-assisted interventions, leading me to: work with four different therapy dogs to date, write a book for other SLPs, and start the Speech Dogs website to provide resources and education about the topic. Here’s a few surprising things I have discovered on the journey:

I’ve always been a bit different…and I actually like that about myself. So when people in my life off-handedly dismissed my idea of writing a book about animal-assisted speech therapy, it didn’t stop me from trying. Contrary? Oppositional? A “drive for autonomy”?

Call it what you like, I’ve just always been one to pursue my interests come what may. And guess what…I’m a new author!!!

Paws for Progress: Integrating Animal-Assisted Interventions into Your Speech-Language Pathology Practice was a two-year process. In book publishing that’s actually pretty quick. Here’s three critical factors I found in moving from rough ideas to a finished product:

“She did it,” I thought to myself, gratefully leaning down for an enthusiastic puppy kiss from my little Sky.

Though she was the fourth dog I’d taken through the CGC training and testing process, I didn’t know if I would be successful this time.

The first time through the six-week preparation course with my three-year-old Brittany spaniel I had opted to sit out the actual test. I knew energetic Sky needed more work on impulse control and energy regulation, but even now after a second six-week class she was not yet consistently keeping her feet on the floor for polite greetings. Additionally, while she didn’t have any difficulty being apart from me when we had started this process, we had spent so much time together over the past six months that she had started to display a little separation anxiety.

I knew that regardless of the outcome of this attempt, however, we had built important, functional skills for our future work together. Here’s what we learned from training for the Canine Good Citizen Test:

“Simple doesn’t mean easy.” It’s a platitude I’ve heard many times in many contexts. A platitude I’ve largely ignored until this week, when my passion to combine the power of therapy dogs with my chosen field of Speech-Language Pathology seemed to hit stumbling block after stumbling block. Those four words exactly encompassed the emotional roller-coaster I’ve been on this week working with a new speech therapy dog recruit, reviewing skills with my experienced dog, and studying for the C-AAIS exam.

“What’s your evidence?” It’s a question I ask my older clients often as we work through comprehending social communication contexts or more complex reading passages. But it’s also a question lobbed at animal-assisted intervention in general, and, more specifically, animal-assisted speech therapy.

Evidence-based practice (EBP) is the foundation of our field. Yet it gets tricky when it comes to quantifying the effects a speech therapy dog has on our clients. Here’s three challenges I think researchers will face as studies on animal-assisted interventions become more common: