Volunteering With Your Pet: How to Get Involved in Animal-Assisted Therapy With Any Kind of Pet

"Dr. Mary Burch's Volunteering With Your Pet is a necessary manual for anyone who wishes to join the growing number of volunteers who are bringing comfort and well-being into therapy settings by supplementing conventional medicine with the healing potential of contact with animals." —Dr. Aaron Katcher, Associate Professor Emeritus Oral Medicine and Psychiatry University of Pennsylvania This is a book for anyone interested in working with their pet to help others: clients in nursing homes, students at all grade levels, people with physical or emotional disabilities—even prisoners. Today there are countless opportunities to use animals as catalysts to better health. Volunteering With Your Pet gives in-depth information on getting started, including how to evaluate your pet and yourself to determine what kind of setting and work in which you'd be best. A section on which pets do what and why has chapters on activities for dogs, cats, horses, farm animals and other critters; another section explains what to expect in various therapeutic settings. Numerous case studies show how you and your pet can make a difference.

Mary R. Burch, Ph.D. is an internationally recognized expert in this field. She is a certified behavior analyst who has had her work with therapy fogs featured in US News & World Report, Newsweek and the Reader's Digest. Her first therapy dog was the Delta Society Therapy Animal of the Year in 1992. She was the chairperson for the Delta Society committee to develop standards for therapy dogs and currently lectures on pet therapy in the U.S., Canada and Mexico.