The Right Dog

Disclaimer: This blog post is not really about ed-tech.

Dedication: This blog post is dedicated to my dog, Maisey. Maisey is a big, sweet, yellow Labrador. She has been my shadow since we adopted her when she was 3 months old. She is now almost 15 and she has lived a long, wonderful life filled with forest walks, river swims, scritches, snuggles and snickety-snacks.

---

This past year has been hard, no matter how you judge it. Maybe not quite “Anne-Frank-hiding-in-an-attic-for-761-days” hard, but a lot harder than most of us are used to dealing with. And none of us in education have escaped the stress, from superintendents to custodians to students. Our collective mental health has taken a terrible blow. And it is likely that this trauma will continue to reverberate through our system for years to come. Psychologists, psychiatrists and counsellors will all weigh in with ideas for how to help us cope with our feelings. With ways to make our classrooms feel safe and comforting. Ideas for calming anxiety and helping students and colleagues deal with grief and changed life circumstances. There will be webinars, conferences and Pro-D sessions dedicated to dealing with the pandemic’s effect on the education system, its students and its educators. All of this is well and good, and likely as it should be.

But I have another idea for helping schools and their occupants cope. Dogs. Not just any dogs. The right dogs. Therapy dogs. Kind, sweet, gentle, funny, love-everyone dogs. A dog for every school. A dog that will be happy to see students every morning, can run with them at recess, listen to them read at 11, calm them during a test at 1 and be there to hear their secrets and lick away their tears before they go home. A dog with a big enough heart to love even those kids who feel unloved and a calm enough demeanor to win over those who fear animals. The right dog.

You may think I am joking here but I am completely serious. Many studies have been done showing the benefits that dogs can provide. Social interactions with dogs can increase oxytocin, a hormone that, among other things, eases stress. Oxytocin can also decrease anxiety and lower the heart rate. Other studies show that petting a dog can decrease cortisol, a hormone associated with increased stress. A quick search of the internet shows dogs being used to help people in many stressful situations, from university exams to flying to loneliness, hospitalization and PTSD.

Dogs aren’t just beneficial for helping us cope with stress. Helping to care for dogs can teach children responsibility, respect and an awareness of the feelings of others. Children learn to nurture and care for another creature, which increases their confidence and feelings of worth. 

Of course, nay-sayers will come up with all kinds of concerns, such as allergies, fears, dog poop and more. None of these are insurmountable, there are solutions. None of them truly outweigh the benefits of the right dog.