Photo by Sam Lion
Alison Keenan wrote Piper Finds Her Special to help children acquire a love for reading while letting them know the important work that therapy dogs do.
Piper Finds Her Special by Alison Keenan is a fun read for kids who especially have a hard time getting through a book or can’t get themselves to enjoy the process. Piper Finds Her Special is the story of a therapy dog discovering her special purpose in life, which is to help children work out their anxieties and apprehensions with reading.
Reading is a very important skill to have, and it behooves every parent and educator to instill a love for it early on.
That’s why Alison Keenan wrote Piper Finds Her Special: to advocate for reading, literacy, and books!
Let’s talk about the premise of the book: a therapy dog doing its job.
What is a therapy dog?
This is a dog that has been trained for the particular purpose of offering affection, comfort, and support to its owners or patients who need them. You can find a lot of therapy dogs working in the hospital, nursing homes, hospices, schools, and libraries. They are sometimes deployed in areas where disaster has recently struck.
You might have heard of service dogs, and you might even be wondering right now if therapy dogs and service dogs are one and the same.
They are not.
A service dog has been trained specifically for a particular purpose, which ranges from guiding the optically disabled to identifying diabetes. Service dogs have specific tasks that usually have to do with helping disabled individuals live their daily lives. An extension for their services is special access to locations where otherwise, dogs are not allowed.
In comparison, therapy dogs don’t have special access since they do not offer physical services as compared to service dogs. They are also not the same as emotional support dogs, which are trained to assist the mental well-being of individuals with mental health issues.
Therapy dogs are generally type-casted into two roles:
- Therapeutic visitation dogs—these are therapy dogs that go to work in institutions, e.g., hospitals, nursing homes, and childcare centers, to interact socially with patients. They usually have owners who take care of them and provide them with shelter and food.
- Animal-assisted therapy dogs—these are therapy dogs that normally live in the institutions that they live in; they are trained to provide constant emotional support for on-site patients and are sometimes assigned specific tasks such as helping patients walk around the institute.
Therapy animals have consistently been shown to greatly alleviate stress, anxiety, depression, and other distressful mental states. The presence of affectionate animals, especially dogs, helps patients regulate their bad moods and magnify their good moods.
By having therapy dogs, patients have a chance to practice and develop social skills by providing a comfortable atmosphere and a handy companion in oftentimes unpleasant or awkward situations, such as talk therapy, doctor’s appointments, etc.
What Makes a Therapy Dog?
Theoretically, any dog has what it takes to be a therapy dog. There are no limits to which breed can be trained to become one. However, there are traits that they should possess that put them above most dogs:
- They should be intelligent. They know how to help navigate their patient through spaces and differentiate between commands effortlessly.
- They should be sharp and focused. They know how to behave and keep calm, pulling back their excitement and agitation.
- They should be friendly and gentle. They know how to socialize with other therapy dogs and interact with their patients.
- They should be clean. They know how to keep themselves clean or are of a breed that is predisposed to cleanliness.
Read more about authors and their works at the Authors’ Lounge.
