Animals and humans have always had a special bond. This relationship has been known to improve several aspects of human life. Animals provide companionship, assistance, livelihood and unconditional love. Animal Assisted Therapy (AAT) is defined as using a trained animal/practitioner team as a therapeutic modality to work on patient- specific goals. The main focus of AAT is to improve one’s physical, cognitive and psychological rehabilitation by combining animals and conventional methods to assist in rehabilitation.
Analytical methods such as case studies have found conclusive evidence of physiological and psychological benefits in human interaction with animals in rehabilitation. Studies done on AAT have found that contact with animals reduces blood pressure, anxiety, heart rate, and depression and lowers cortisol levels in anxious patients (Barbara, 1995; Cole & Gawlinski, 1995; Nagengast, Baum, & Megel, 1997; Odendaal 1999).
Sensory Integration Dysfunction (SID, also called sensory processing disorder) is a neurological disorder causing difficulties with processing information from the five (vision, auditory, touch, olfaction, and taste), the sense of movement (vestibular system), and/or the positional sense (proprioception). For those with SID, sensory information is sensed, but perceived abnormally. Unlike blindness or deafness, sensory information is received by people with SID; the difference is that information is processed by the brain in an unusual way that may cause distress or confusion.
