Washington – Patric Kelly, 8, was sitting on a chair at Bond Mill Elementary in Laurel, Md., flanked by John Deit rich, a volunteer with Fidos for Freedom Inc., and Xander, a male Australian shepherd. Patric read from “Bully Trouble,” a short story about two friends getting back at their tough-guy nemesis, Big Eddie, by allowing him to steal a sandwich doused in hot sauce.
Patric was soon to learn that revenge was a dish best served spicy.
“Then he took a big bite,” Patric read aloud. “His face turned red. Tears rolled down his cheeks.” Patric turned the page. “Ow-ee!” Big Eddie and Patric cried as Xander listened placidly.
“When we first started working, he was a little quieter,” Deitrich said of Patric. But there’s something about canines that put young people at ease – which is why Deitrich and his dogs were in the classroom in the first place.
Apart from being popular pets, dogs have been trusted helpmates since their domestication at least 15,000 years ago. (Archaeologists have found prehistoric graves where humans and dogs are buried together.) But using dogs for therapy has become more popular recently, with humans turning to their four- legged friends for help recovering from child abuse, dealing with long-term illnesses and, since at least 1999, teaching struggling children to read.
“We call it a bridge effect,” said Kathy Klotz of Intermountain Therapy Animals and the organization’s Reading Education Assistance Dogs program. “They seem to make the connection that lets people move ahead. … You bring a dog, and suddenly they just start spilling things to the dog.”
With reading, Klotz said, dogs are the best kind of audience.
“Nobody is great at reading aloud. It’s adults’ greatest fear – public speaking. It’s really terrifying for a lot of kids in school,” she said. With dogs, “there’s nothing frightening. … There’s this totally accepting, nonjudgmental presence.”
Intermountain Therapy Animals, based in Utah, is among the first and largest groups doing this kind of therapy in a structured way, with 1,300 teams providing services in every state except the Dakotas. Many other groups perform assistance and therapy work locally.
Klotz said there wasn’t much quantitative evidence that dogs actually help children read because testing standards vary from state to state. But some children who had trouble reading have advanced as much as four grade levels in a single year, she said.
Mary Jalongo, a professor of education at Indiana University of Pennsylvania who has studied the effect of reading-assistance dogs, said the main result of a dog’s presence was to increase a child’s enthusiasm for reading. “We’re not dreaming here; we don’t think that dogs are some kinds of miracle workers. But the dog is what I would say is a pleasant motivator.”
