Teaming With Your Therapy Dog PDF

Teaming With Your Therapy Dog PDF. I have had the great fortune to work professionally with animals and people since 1986. I had first-hand experience of the power of human-animal connections growing up on an Idaho farm.

Teaming With Your Therapy Dog PDF

The information in this book gives you a solid platform from which to develop your own handling style that supports your dog — a code of conduct for therapy dog handling, if you will. I have almost daily e-mail and telephone conversations with therapy dog handlers who want to know specific things they can do to care for their dogs’ well-being and enhance their therapy visits.

Through this book I want handlers to learn ways to demonstrate their love to and advocate for their dogs every moment of every visit. By being a loving advocate, handlers improve their relationships with their dogs and enhance the effectiveness of their visits. And dogs who feel confident and supported at work feel more comfortable at home, too.

Part of enhancing that loving relationship is recognizing aspects of visiting that cause our dogs stress. Even with the best of intentions and the greatest love in our hearts, we can do things during visits that upset our dogs. Some dogs don’t like having their hair brushed in the wrong direction or simply being petted on the head.

Some dogs don’t like being in a crowded elevator or standing in a tight space between a wall and a hospital bed. These kinds of situations do not cause physical harm to our dogs, yet the experiences are not pleasant for them, either. At the very least it makes them enjoy their work less. At worst it makes them ill, as it did my Qui.

As therapy dog handlers and therapy dog group leaders, we want our dogs to want to visit. We want our dogs to enjoy their work as much as we enjoy sharing our dogs with others. Thus, we handlers need to know how to support our dogs in their work, protecting them from emotional as well as physical discomfort. Supporting our dogs — teaming with our dogs — is what this book is about. By teaming with our dogs, we not only support them, we enhance our relationships with them.

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