Any person with an animal in the home can have their life improved by the general benefits of having a pet.
However, those who take in animals from rescue organizations and shelters often experience additional, powerful benefits:
- Profound Meaning and Satisfaction: Caring for a shelter pet gives an animal a second chance and directly contributes to reducing animal overpopulation and euthanasia rates, fostering a deep sense of satisfaction from helping to save a life.
- Special Bonds: Many report a particularly strong bond with rescued pets, finding uncanny similarities between the animal and themselves or believing the animals are especially grateful for a loving home after experiencing hardship.
- Deep Gratitude: Many express euphoric levels of gratitude for having the opportunity to help the animal. describing the experience as lifechanging for them as well. A refrain heard over and over is "I set out to save the animal, but the animal ended up saving me."
A theme found in practically all of these cases is animal rehabilitation: The animals come into their home with some significant problem that causes them noticeable distress, but through the course of caring for them, that problem is alleviated and the animals get noticeably happier.
We theorize that witnessing and participate in an animal's rehabilitation is the most powerful factor causing these revelatory and transformational experiences, and more importantly, that this experience would have distinctly beneficial effects for people recovering from trauma, as it taps into several aspects of the human-animal bond and can lead to significant emotional and cognitive benefits.
Witnessing the rehabilitation of an adopted rescue animal can have a profound and largely positive psychological impact on the human caregivers involved. This
Furthermore, with proper planning and an animal-supportive home, (an environment/a set of circumstances) where this experience is likely to occur can be reliably constructed.
Even ignoring the most extreme cases, which require professional care to handle, it is extremely common for rescued animals to have lingering health or behavioral problems that are products of their former, harmful environment. Animals are amazingly resilient, though, and these problems are often eventually alleviated simply by moving to a better environment.
This phenomenon can be leveraged to help vulnerable humans while healing animals at the same time.
is that the animals had something wrong with them
,
- Witnessing Rehabilitation: Rescued animals often have health or behavioral problems which are products of their former environment.
profound and
Requires a partnership with a reliable and well-run shelter to identify good candidates for the program.
Competent and empathetic
Fortunately, it is not uncommon to find people with professional experience with trauma recovery working in animal rescue.
Studies of animal adoption programs are replete with accounts of participants describing how
Many of these are the general benefits of having a pet.
However, there are distinct, powerful effects of adopting and animal from a shelter or rescue
HEART is an acronym that stands for "Humans Experiencing Animal Rehabilitation Therapy," which is a specialized type of animal exposure therapy that heavily relies on an animal-supportive home.
to maximize the impact of animal exposure therapy
The specific
Add to HEART: Useful for group environments, short duration when all residents are compatible with it, not permanent in case some residents end up not liking it as much, they see the cat get better and move on before getting too attached.
HEART for Trauma Recovery