RESEARCH General Education

DISABILITIES
Case study shows effectiveness of animal-aided therapy

Melissa Mitchell, News Editor
(217) 333-5491; melissa@uiuc.edu

6/1/03

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — When Jimmy first came in contact with Cody, a black, backpack-toting Labrador retriever assigned to assist with the severely disabled 16-year-old’s therapy, he wasn’t exactly afraid of the dog. But he didn’t want to touch Cody, and he cried a lot when the dog got close.

By the end of a nine-week therapy session administered by special education teacher Kathy Heimlich at a residential treatment facility in Springfield, Ill., the teenager – diagnosed with Rubenstein-Taybi’s Syndrome and the cognitive level of a 1-year-old – had learned to walk the dog; pet, feed and water him; play catch; make eye contact with the dog; and use a hand signal to sign Cody’s name. Perhaps more important, Jimmy mastered a number of new motor and communication skills introduced during the course of the nine-week therapy, thanks in no small part, Heimlich believes, to Cody’s presence.

The results were nothing short of amazing, she said, since prior to receiving the therapy, the teenager had been nonverbal, unresponsive to directions and spent much of his day looking out windows and mouthing his fingers.

Heimlich, now a special education teacher with Springfield Public School District 186, worked with Jimmy in 1997 while she was a graduate student conducting research on animal-assisted therapy with Chrisann Schiro-Geist and Emer Broadbent of the Disability Research Institute at Illinois. A previously published study reported quantitative results of the researchers’ work with 14 children at the residential facility. A new report, published in the April/May/June edition of the journal RehabPro, focuses on the same work but takes a case-study approach to exploring the benefits of animal-assisted therapy. The researchers indicated that the case study is representative of the changes noted across multiple participants in two groups of children studied during the experiment.

"For the case study, I chose Jimmy because our initial sessions were so difficult, and the chance of experiencing success with him seemed so remote," Heimlich said. "However, when he started to respond to the therapy, his rapid progress opened even my eyes. I came to realize what a profound effect animal-assisted therapy could have on a child with such severe disabilities."

Among the most notable results, Heimlich said, was "the progress Jimmy made in his ability to communicate. Progress in this area is ultimately dependent on growth in all the other skill areas. By attending longer to others in his environment and attempting to comply with their directions, this student was able to demonstrate that he understood, and more importantly, that he desired to be understood."

Schiro-Geist said past efforts to study the effects of animal-assisted therapy typically have used control groups and more traditional research methods. "This approach – of the child subject being the baseline for change – is more tedious, but often is more effective in proving the efficacy of the therapy. The surprises here were just how powerful the therapeutic intervention can be."