Learn About AAT - AAT

What is animal - assisted therapy?

Animal - assisted therapy (AAT) is where trained therapy animals assist a medical/human service professional to motivate and help a child or an adult learn or improve various skills like social skills, verbal skills, physical skills, cognitive skills and it also helps to speed up the recovery process. AAT is used to help clients deal with emotional / behavioral problems by using therapy animals as part of the treatment process.

There is a tailor-made program for each client and the whole process is documented and evaluated. AAT can be integrated into individual or group therapy with a wide range of age groups and persons with varying disabilities. AAT can be used to help people with almost any kind of mental, emotional and physical illness /disability.

AAT is always used in conjunction with other therapies. In AAT, a professional as part of his/her own speciality uses the animal to help the client. For example, a clinical psychologist working with children uses the therapy animal in the context of play therapy, behavior therapy etc.

At Animal Angels Foundation each of our clients goes through a pretherapy, mid-therapy and post-therapy evaluation. All therapy sessions are documented through quantitative and qualitative data as well as video recording is done of the first and last sessions to observe the improvement in the client.

For example, in an AAT session to improve the speech/ vocabulary of a developmentally challenged child, the therapist uses the throwing of the ball to therapy dog, Casper as a motivator. Since the child is very motivated to Casper and enjoys playing the game, the therapist requests him to say the word “ball” every time he wishes to play with Casper. Once the child masters this, the therapist then makes the child move on to simple sentences like “I want the ball”.