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Key points
- Spending time interacting with a therapy dog, especially through touch, can be an effective way to reduce stress among students.
- Many campuses offer dog therapy stress-reduction programs for students that are low-cost and easy-access.
- Largely due to the isolating effects of COVID-19, there are now more virtual opportunities for students to interact with animals.
Being a college student is known to be a stressful experience, and elevated stress over time can compromise students' mental health and undermine their academic performance. The sources of this stress may lie in a combination of factors — students leaving home for the first time and "adulting," having to establish new friendships and social networks, and adjusting to heightened coursework and workload expectations. Even when stress-reduction resources are made available to students on campus, students can be reluctant help-seekers. College students often prefer to solve problems on their own, to downplay the severity of the challenges they’re facing, or to seek comfort through maladaptive pathways (think excessive weed or alcohol consumption).
As April is Stress Awareness Month, it is a timely reminder that students need informal and easily accessible opportunities to reduce their stress, especially as final exams approach. Providing low-barrier and easy-access opportunities for students to chip away at their stress helps prevent stress from reaching debilitating levels. Stressed students are likely to be less cooperative, less tolerant of divergent ideas, to develop less close connections to peers and faculty, and are known to withdraw from campus life. One low-cost and low-barrier way that many colleges use to encourage students to reduce their stress is to provide opportunities to interact with therapy dogs.
For example, my university, the University of British Columbia, Okanagan campus, as part of its B.A.R.K. dog therapy program, offers both a weekly "drop-in" session as well as BARK2GO that stations therapy dogs throughout the campus each Wednesday. Such canine-assisted interventions have been found to reduce students’ stress, homesickness, and boost their sense of school belonging.
Low-Cost, Low-Barrier, and Easy-Access
Canine-assisted interactions or canine visitation programs are considered an adjunct source of support for students and are not intended to replace more formal sources of mental health support. Such interactions between students and therapy dogs have been posited to be effective “in the moment” — not having long lasting or enduring benefits. Rather, for students who are seeking to shift their perspective by reducing their stress, spending time interacting with a therapy dog (especially through touch), can be an effective way to reduce their stress. As part of such programs, community volunteer handlers and their certified therapy dogs visit the campus at designated times, affording students an opportunity to push aside their worries and reduce their stress through interactions with the dog-handler team.
No Therapy Dog Program on Your Campus?
Despite their popularity, not all campuses offer a therapy dog program. Increasingly, and largely due to the isolating effects of COVID-19, we’re seeing more and more virtual opportunities to interact with animals. Out this summer is my new book, Virtual Human-Animal Interactions, which will appeal to those keen on understanding how to offer virtual opportunities to interact with animals to reach students studying remotely or who don’t have access to in-person programs.
