ABSTRACT

A most important decision you will make as part of your animal assisted therapy (AAT) career is the selection of a therapy animal. Your hopes are high that your pet dog, cat, or horse will have the “right stuff” to be a pet practitioner, and beginning your career in AAT depends on it. However, you do not have to delay your own AAT training until you find the “right” pet. In fact, the earlier you start your own training in AAT, the better prepared you will be to select and train a pet for therapy work. Thus, I tell my students that they do not have to have a therapy pet before they take my training course. The training material provided creates a more in-depth understanding of what you will need from a therapy pet so you will be better able to judge a pet’s appropriateness or preparedness for work in counseling. For information on understanding what your pet is communicating, see Chapter 6. For information on evaluating a pet for therapy work, see Chapter 5.