I heard the three-year-old boy coming down the hall, screaming and running and clearly unhappy to be here today. A brand-new addition to my caseload, our first session had been one of the more challenging I’d encountered in a long time. He had been overwhelmed by the new environment and I had struggled to calm or engage him in any meaningful way while he ran to the door repeatedly and scratched at me if got too close.

Our second session was going a bit better, but I could see transitioning back out of the building at the end was going to lead to another outburst. Fortunately, his mother made a fantastic suggestion—perhaps he would be willing to follow Delta to the car.

Bingo! He wasn’t interested in holding the leash because he would have to set down the little toys he keeps clenched in his fists, but he was transfixed by Delta’s slowly swishing tail as we walked down the hall and out the main doors.

Now, just a few sessions later, we’ve established this routine. I even met them in the parking lot to help successfully transition into the building a couple times, but because he now seems to have a positive association with coming to speech we can greet each other at the office door instead. And he’s even been willing to momentarily shift a toy to free up a hand and hold the leash for a few steps.

Delta’s contribution to this interaction seems so small but was yet so intangibly helpful. In fact, I’ve found partnering with a speech therapy dog has actually enabled me to be a better clinician for three main reasons…

Lately I’ve seen this word “prehab” (as in pre-habilitation) popping up in social media posts about taking steps to nip in the bud objections to a potential new service provision model. 

It got me thinking…

What can we do to proactively to set the stage for introducing animal-assisted therapy into our work? 

How can we help others to see that the benefits of the human-animal bond can far outweigh the risks of adding a speech therapy dog into our practice if done correctly?

It was middle school English class and time for our book reports.  I had chosen a memoir whose title is lost to time, written by a woman who, with her husband, set out to start a family and ended up adopting twelve children.   Her reasoning?  Four is only one more than three, five is only one more than four, and so on.  How hard can it be adding just one more?

This is not unlike the process by which I ended up with four dogs at one point in my life. 

There was Johnny Utah and my “bonus dog” Jill, who had been best buddies since I met my now-husband Chuck.  Then we decided to adopt Delta together and add to our little canine family. 

Three dogs was pretty doable.  And I was really finding my groove providing animal-assisted speech therapy with partners Delta and Johnny Utah.

The problem is, dogs simply don’t have a long enough life-span. Johnny Utah was eleven, exuberant as always but I knew retirement was imminent.  So I approached Chuck with a proposal—why not get a puppy to start training for therapy dog work? 

It’s only one more dog…how hard can it be?

Shhhh…don’t tell my therapy dogs what I’m about to share with you.  I’m going to dish some dirt.  Spill the tea.  Air our dirty laundry. 

(Okay, can you tell I’ve been teaching idioms at work lately?)

Sometime my speech therapy dogs Delta and Sky are the most dignified, mannerly, and obliging assistants I could ever wish for.  They anticipate my needs, respond with perfect timing to a client’s emotions, and politely step back when we need some space. 

But other times…well, let’s just say my dogs have been known to do some embarrassing things. 

So if you’d like to indulge in a little scheudenfraude and snicker at some of the more embarrassing moments my therapy dogs have introduced to my life, keep reading…

It was with a little sadness that I reflected back over my last five years with Paul as his “graduation day” from speech therapy approached. The client who started this whole journey. The first client Delta met. The one whose bond with her convinced me to explore partnering with a speech therapy dog on a regular basis.

In those first months and years, having Delta present was pivotal in encouraging Paul to engage with me and persist in challenging activities. But over the past couple years, Delta’s role in Paul’s therapy sessions had transitioned. He still greeted her with enthusiasm, but with challenging oppositional behaviors now rarely cropping up, she generally spent her time lying on her bed nearby while he worked away at the table.

It’s only been in meeting other professional therapy dog handlers that I’ve come to realize this a normal, and even desired, outcome of animal-assisted therapy. Let’s explore how a decreased reliance on a therapy dog can naturally evolve as well as how some clients may actually increase their interactions with a therapy dog over time…

Zephyr has been growing—literally and figuratively—into a fantastic speech therapy dog hopeful.   He absolutely loves people but has also learned to accept waiting for permission to go say hi (hence, the “flirting” where he stares at a person and thumps his tail every time they look his direction). 

His response to direction is the best of any dog I’ve worked with to date.

And now he’s enjoying some brief outings to my office to try out the working life.  While we’re a bit ahead of the schedule I had expected, here’s how we’ve been spending the last few months in preparation for a working career…

The session was rough.  Not in a dog-friendly, “r-u-f-f” kind of way, but capital R-O-U-G-H, rough.

For this animal-loving young man, incorporating the therapy dogs has been the biggest game-changer for our work together and usually the most powerful regulating approach I have. 

So how could I capitalize on his love for dogs in general and Delta specifically without allowing direct contact for the moment? 

Keep reading to find two strategies we successfully implemented during this crisis session as well as another I’ve found helpful in sessions with other children.  I’ll also address how I addressed Delta’s (and my) need to decompress after this unusual session… 

“Did you know Taylor Swift’s middle name is Allison?”

The thirteen-year-old girl and long-time client beamed with pride sharing this fun fact, while I simultaneously smiled outwardly and groaned inwardly. I had been trying for ten minutes to get her to start reading a passage about Totem Poles in which we’d already highlighted the words containing /l/ together as part of a generalization activity for improving her articulation. And in that 10 minutes I’d learned about 50 random facts that had nothing to do with speech. Or totem poles.

“Hey, Allison has our ‘tongue up l’ sound in it. Let me hear you say it again,” I tried, but she was already distractedly moving on to describing the latest gymnastics move she had learned.

I had set this session to record on my phone to capture my speech therapy dog Delta’s affiliative behaviors, supporting clients through her physical presence. However, at the end of our 40 minute session, in which very few /l/ word were actually correctly articulated, we watched a bit of the video back together and I was surprised at what I saw.

“What the heck Zeph?” I asked, amused but also sympathetic to his obviously startled emotional state. 

At six months old, Zephyr seemed to be having a fearful response to something that simply didn’t warrant fear.  Was he having a mental break?  Exposing a nervous temperament that would prevent me from realizing my dream of working alongside him to provide animal-assisted speech therapy? 

Or was he simply having a moment of anxiety as part of normal adolescent dog development?

Since he recovered quickly, I didn’t dwell on this incident.  But it did alert me that we might be entering Zephyr’s next “fear period.”  While I’ve gone through this stage with past puppies, I wanted to be more informed in order to feel confident in handling my pup’s upcoming months. 

I reached out to Tim Pratt, a trainer specializing in helping the owners of anxious and reactive dogs.  As a former Queensland, Australia Corrective Services tactical response dog handler and instructor, Tim has 13 years’ experience training and handling tactical response and drug detection dogs in some of the most challenging environments imaginable.  He now runs Diverse Dogs Dog Training and Development to promote the well-being of both dogs and their human companions.

I learned so much dog psychology and practical training advice taking part in a recent online course with Tim that I knew he’d be a great resource to learn more about puppy fear periods…

Usually credited to Noel Burch of Gordon Training International, who began teaching the theory in the 1970’s, the Levels of Competency Model proposes that learners of a complex skill will progress through four levels of development if they desire mastery.   

I first discovered this model years ago while improving my horsemanship. I was at the second stage of the model , conscious incompetence.  This was, nonetheless, improvement from the first stage in which I didn’t even know what to do or what I was missing, unconscious incompetence.

So what’s the difference?  In both stages I was equally bad at the skill, yet the second stage suggests a huge improvement because I was at least aware of how bad I was. 

Sound miserable?  It is!  The transition between these two stages can feel unbearable and you’re likely left incredibly self-conscious.  It’s where you’re most likely to give up, assuming that everyone but you seems to be able to perform this skill naturally while your brain (or body, for more athletic endeavors) just can’t figure it out. 

But there’s good news!  You can’t improve on a skill you don’t realize is difficult.  So owning the stage of conscious incompetence and pushing through to add knowledge and opportunities to pursue the next stage of competence is key. 

“It’s alright to be little bitty.”  -Alan Jackson

In last week’s article, two animal-assisted therapists who work with horses described the challenges of adding these larger therapy animals to their team, as well as the personal and professional joys they bring.  But what if you’re looking for a way to provide animal-assisted speech therapy without the high costs and care an equine requires? 

At the opposite end of the therapy animal spectrum, Gen Ward, a Speech-Language Pathologist and owner of The Speech Express, has found guinea pigs to be a great addition to the speech therapy dogs at her clinic.

Animal-assisted therapists are incorporating a variety of furry and feathery friends into their work and seeing the benefits of the human-animal bond on their clients young and old alike.

But what does it actually look like having a miniature horse or a room full of guinea pigs helping a client in a therapy session?  I’ve asked a few pioneering animal-assisted therapists exactly that, and here is what they offered… 

In part one, we’ll delve into the details of working with equines, and in part two we’ll discover the ins and outs of keeping guinea pigs in a busy clinic.

A now four-year-old Brittany spaniel, Sky is the highest energy dog partner I’ve worked with.  Most of the time she’s an absolute delight.  But…

she can also be tightly-wound and a bit much to manage!

Sky’s temperament is incredibly similar to that of the late Johnny Utah and it brings me great joy to see her wagging tail and enthusiastic ear prick whenever she is actively included in sessions. 

The constantly wired brain and body is the same, only younger and therefore with greater stamina.  And sometimes this gets tricky…

So what are my priorities in these early months when Zephyr is still a puppy with a relatively short attention span, a rapidly growing body, and an open mind?  In a nutshell, body handling, luring and socialization.  Let’s look more closely at why each of these are great targets to address early in a therapy pup’s life…

What do Dr. Suess and a professional dog trainer have in common? 

They both recognize that life is not easy and straightforward.  Sometimes we get stuck. 

And sometimes it takes help to get unstuck. 

I consider myself lucky to have curated a great team of professional guides to help me when I get stuck on a challenge in my therapy dog journey.  At various points I’ve called on each of them for help “un-slumping” when I just couldn’t figure out a solution on my own.  

“Hold her head!  Hold her head!  Don’t let her bite me!” the third grade boy shrieked repeatedly, hiding behind his mom.

I felt flummoxed.  It turned out that yes, he loved animal facts, devouring documentaries and books about animal life cycles and migrations.  In fact, his preferred topics on this day, once settled, was an extinct species of porpoise and the unique properties of brine shrimp. 

However…he’d never actually had close encounters with a live dog before. 

I’m always grateful that my therapy dogs are resilient enough that situations like this one don’t rattle them for long, but ideally I’d like work days to be joyful for my canine co-therapists.  While most sessions with my therapy dogs run fairly smoothly, I’ve definitely found a few ways to refine my animal-assisted speech therapy over the years

So here’s the lesson I took away from this situation, plus two more changes I’ve made since becoming an animal-assisted interventionist:

Therapy dogs can play a number of different roles within animal-assisted speech therapy sessions, but I have been most grateful for their ability to help switch an anxious or resistant child from a state of fight-or-flight to a calmer state.

Having worked with kids with emotional and behavioral challenges most of my career, the foundational truth I always focus on is that if a child isn’t calm they can’t be expected to learn. Whether it’s a speech sound, grammar skill, or coping strategy, a child who is feeling panicked simply won’t retain the lesson no matter how well explained. My view of these kids flipped entirely when I learned to think of oppositional behaviors as panic attacks turned outward. My different speech therapy dogs have been able to help anxious kids in different ways.

Poor Bodhi was a wreck.

Always sensitive to loud noises, this thunderstorm had been rolling over our house all night, leaving him trembling and restless.  Nothing my husband or I did seemed to help. 

Then, just as he seemed to be relaxing a bit the hail hit, pounding the metal roof of our little house in an absolute cacophony. That was it.  Bodhi jumped down, plastered himself behind the toilet, and refused to come out or acknowledge us in any way.

The next morning, still wide-eyed and with tail drooping low, he tentatively ate his breakfast and clung to me as I set about morning chores.  When a distant plane quietly roared overhead, far enough away I wouldn’t have otherwise even noticed it, Bodhi bolted back to his hiding spot behind the toilet.  I worried I’d never get my happy little pup back.

Fortunately this story has a happy ending.  Bodhi did indeed gradually return to his normal self, still jumpy with loud noises as always but otherwise carefree and cuddly. 

So what does any of this have to do with working with animal-assisted speech therapy? 

Bodhi’s story illustrates the concepts of “flooding” and “trigger stacking”, which along with anthropomorphism are situations we need to try to avoid while building up a therapy dog’s working skills and confidence... 

While it will be a year or more until I know for sure if he will be just a companion dog for my family or also a new animal-assisted speech therapy partner, let’s take a look at what factors I considered when adding my latest family member…