Animal crossing
As human connections were periodically interrupted last year, an emotional beacon emerged in the most unconditional of all relationships: the one we share with our pets. By Sharon Bradley.
has been a challenging one for most but, for some, it brought added sadness. In March, 27-year-old Stephanie Ters from Croydon in Sydney, learnt that, at 12 weeks, her long-awaited pregnancy had come to an end.
In the weeks and months after the emergency surgery that followed her ectopic-pregnancy diagnosis, she found herself at an emotional “rock bottom”. What she and her husband of three years, Andrew, hadn’t reckoned on, though, was the comfort they’d derive from their unfeasibly perky three-month-old Shiranian (shih tzu-Pomeranian mix), Casper, purchased just two weeks earlier. Chocolate box-winsome, with a fluffy white cloud of a coat and blackcurrant eyes, Casper just seemed to know it was his time to shine. “When I got home from hospital, he lay by my side on the couch,” says Ters. “He sensed my mood. He’d lick my face, try to make me smile. Honestly, he’s brought us so much happiness – I can’t explain how much – even during a difficult time.”
The Ters have discovered what almost two-thirds of Australian households already know – that pets can exert a powerfully positive influence on their owners’ lives – and often in unexpected ways. As any mindfulness expert will tell you, our five senses are our anchors in the roiling cross-currents of quotidian stressors – and a pet extends a 24/7 invitation to indulge at least four of those senses at any given moment. This helps us feel grounded, more aware of what’s happening in the present. When we’re in this state of awareness, our blood pressure lowers and the brain’s resident feelgood twins, serotonin and dopamine, go to work bathing our receptors in a calming chemical glow. As a consequence, we’re less likely to suffer from depression and typically have lower triglyceride and cholesterol levels, both indicators of heart disease. In 2007, national longitudinal studies in
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Germany and Australia, during which more than 11,000 respondents were interviewed annually for 16 years, confirmed that pet-owners are, indeed, healthier than non-owners, making about 15 per cent fewer visits to their doctor each year.
Close human relationships, as we know, exert a powerful influence on wellbeing. Indeed, a lack of extrinsic social support is included in the top preventable causes of early death, alongside obesity and smoking. Simple companionship, on the other hand – the most commonly cited reason for acquiring a pet – is an intrinsically satisfying concept, points out the BMJ (British Medical Journal),
offering “shared pleasure in recreation, relaxation and uncensored spontaneity, all of which add to quality of life”. The fact that pets aren’t human confers distinct advantages: they don’t judge, they don’t burn out, their presence in our lives isn’t conditional. In choppy seas, as Ters can attest, a pet provides the safest of all harbours.
Leah Checkley, 34, is a support-unit teacher at Strathfield South High School in Sydney’s west, offering support to the community’s autistic students. For the last two terms, she has had a full-time helper in the form of a two-year-old chocolate labrador called Lo who, along with a SLSO (School Learning Support Officer) if needed, accompanies the children to their lessons. “It’s just incredible the effect she has in the classroom,” says Checkley. “She brings this sense of joy but, also, a great calm.”
Some of the students are reluctant talkers, says Checkley. “If they’re upset, sometimes using words, trying to talk, overwhelms them further,” she explains. “Lo helps them slowly regulate themselves, brings them back to a place where they can talk to a teacher about what has upset them.”
As a dog that’s been specially trained for this role by Assistance Dogs Australia, Lo has a number of specific skills. In response to the command “Lap”, for example, she’ll climb onto the knee of a student in need of a burst of canine comfort; if she’s instructed to “Visit”, she’ll approach gently and rest her head on an anxious knee. “A student will accept that touch from an animal when they mightn’t from another human,” says Checkley. “Repetitive motion, such as stroking and petting soft fur, is deeply calming.”
Dogs aren’t the only animals who can help children access emotional gear shifts. Dr Anna Cohen, a senior clinical psychologist of Kids & Co in Sydney’s Balmain, has spent the past seven years working with young people – “from birth to 25” – who’ve typically shown themselves to be treatment-resistant. Meetings with school counsellors, clinical psychologists and psychiatrists have failed because they typically can’t engage with room-based work. “The children I’m describing are often in a fight-flight response, a primal survival response, which makes it difficult for them to find their thoughts,” says Cohen.
Cohen’s approach, embodied in her Heads & Tails program of equine-assisted clinical psychology based in NSW’s Blue Mountains, is to take them out of a room and into a paddock where a herd of 12 impossibly cute miniature horses, wearing a selection of bubblegumcoloured bridles, awaits. “We use the horses to help settle the child’s body so that they can find their wise mind,” she explains. “They learn how to feel and think at the same time.”
Why horses? “A horse is the ultimate bio-feedback machine,” she replies. “As a fight-flight animal, it lives in a state of awareness and quickly picks up mood incongruence [when a person’s actions in a situation don’t match their mood]. For example, if a child enters the paddock, shouting ‘I’m alright!’ and clearly isn’t, the horse with whom they’re interacting will run away. At that point, the child can begin learning how to regulate their posture to get a more favourable response from the horse. This is especially useful for kids who are constantly getting into trouble with other kids and don’t know why.”
Over time, observing the mirrored responses of their paddock companions to their moods, Cohen’s patients learn about emotional authenticity. “It’s very powerful work,” she says. Word is clearly getting around. Pandemic or not, Cohen and her team receive, on average, about 40 referrals a week.
Of course, a companion animal needn’t be warm and furry with liquid eyes and a wet nose to do its good work. Last November, The Guardian reported that, among other things, 2020 appeared to be the year of the … snail. It began with LA comedian and television chef Nadia Giosia declaring on social media that the mollusc who’d found its way into her apartment inside the pot of a houseplant some months earlier made a perfectly “nice” Covid companion. And Leroy, as she named him, appeared indeed to be thriving on a gourmet diet of cuttlefish bone and cucumber.
Elsewhere in the City of Angels, engineering student Victoria Cottrell had embarked on an unlikely moneyspinner: selling garden snails – the progeny of her amorously athletic adoptee threesome Gary, Turbo and Maurice – at “$8 a pop” on Etsy. In July, even The New York Times Magazine published a Letter of Recommendation for snail ownership.
In Australia, though, dogs continue to be our favourite pet, with more than five million of them currently enriching our daily lives. Lockdown sharpened the ache of longing in nonowners who’d been considering taking the plunge while igniting a sudden craving in those who really hadn’t given it that much thought at all. In June, PetRescue, Australia’s national pet welfare charity, reported that it had seen 15,000 animals – most of them dogs and cats – adopted over a six-week period, three times more than usual, with dogs alone attracting a 119 per cent increase in enquiries. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” co-founder Vickie Davy told Triple J Hack. “It’s the biggest adoption surge in 15 years.”
But will the pet boom lead to a surrender bust as people slowly resume their pre-Covid working habits – including migrating back to their offices? For now, the news is heartening: according to the RSPCA in NSW, the number of animals surrendered each month in 2020 has consistently been lower than the previous year’s figures (536 in October 2019, for example, compared with 472 in October 2020). “People have been pet-owners and held full-time jobs forever,” reasons Davy. “Pets cope, people cope. There’s no reason to assume people adopting pets during Covid will be any less bonded to them; in fact, we suspect they’ll be more bonded due to all the time they’ve spent together at home. Instead, we can expect to see a surge in dog trainers, enrichment toys and doggy day care.”
“A student will accept that touch from an animal when they mightn’t from another human. Repetitive motion, such as stroking and petting fur, is deeply calming”