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Key points
- Therapeutic horseback riding improves balance, muscle tone, and core strength in people with disabilities.
- Children or adults who have experienced trauma often gain trust, calm, and bonding by petting animals.
- Zootherapy is a term coined to explain the harmony we feel at petting farms, aquariums, and zoos.
- National Zoo's PandaCam introduces new inhabitants while exciting our brain circuitry for softly powered joy.
Research proves what we’ve instinctively felt: Animals improve our moods, even our physical health. In fact, there’s another phrase to convey this.
Zootherapy describes the harmony and happiness we feel with domesticated animals and petting farms, as well as exotic creatures found in aquariums and zoos. It joins animal-assisted therapy in the helping lexicon, especially as the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington, D.C., introduces us to two giant panda cubs, its newest inhabitants.
Various therapies align or differ in distinct ways outlined here.
Physical Benefits
Animal-assisted therapy (AAT) is a structured therapy that directly uses animals in a person’s treatment for physical, mental, and/or emotional conditions. There are specific goals and protocols. For instance, those on the autism spectrum or with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder may benefit from equine therapy. Therapeutic horseback riding (THR) aids balance (a learned motor skill requiring practice), overall coordination and flexibility, muscle tone, and core strength. Sidewalkers and leaders assist in THR. All ages can partake, with benefits for a range of disabilities, including stroke recovery.
Hippotherapy, with licensed therapists, does not involve riding but supports the development of muscle groups, which particularly helps those with disabilities. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services approximated in 2019 that 54 million people in this country lived with a disability. Low levels of physical activity have been linked to poor overall health outcomes. Most of these animal-assisted therapies require eight to 10 sessions to see results and require the expertise of those with specialized training.
When a child or person of any age grooms a horse, dog, or other domestic animal, it physically helps to develop or maintain fine motor skills.
Psychological and Emotional Advantages
For children or adults who have experienced fear or trauma, petting an animal you know or have been introduced to promotes calm and bonding. In counseling, we often recommend exposure therapy to challenge one’s fears and work on how we think differently about situations.
All of these therapies play a part in lowering anxiety, helping with PTSD and depression, and building self-confidence. One study involving an emergency department in Canada, which used visiting therapy dogs in a controlled trial, found clinically significant changes in pain as well as in anxiety, depression, and well-being when participants engaged with the therapy dogs compared to the control group.
Findings like these may explain why some physician offices have aquariums in their waiting areas. Patients report a sense of calm, and office staff may see lower stress markers, such as blood pressure, after spending time watching fish swim.
Social Perks Prevail
Socially, animals play a key role in assisted living facilities where elderly patients deal with isolation, loneliness, dementia, or other neurological disorders. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) reported studies on mental and physical human costs of isolation and loneliness and the possible amelioration through human-animal interaction (HAI). HAI has shown value, through pet ownership or AAT, in managing mental health conditions and merely through offering an enhanced sense of control, security, and routine that, by default, provides affection, distraction, and likely neurochemical responses such as increased oxytocin, dopamine, and endorphins (feel-good chemicals).
NIH News in Health featured the benefits of human-animal interactions in its February 2018 issue, stating in this pre-pandemic publication that roughly 68 percent of U.S. households had a pet. The unconditional love, the report stated, does more than provide companionship: “Pets may also decrease stress, improve heart health, and even help children with their emotional and social skills.” It went on to discuss classrooms in which dogs aided the focus of children with ADHD, and how guinea pigs brought calm to children with autism, who then engaged better with peers.
Options When You Don’t Own a Pet
All is not lost here if you do not own a pet. Even an occasional zoo or aquarium visit may lower stress, per a study where heart rate, mood, and other physiological and psychological parameters were assessed. Results suggested that visitors felt happier, more energized, and less tense after their experiences with animals.
Further yet, you may still reap vicarious boosts to mood and lower stress via the Internet. We know anecdotally that calming television lowers stress; with the advent of YouTube channels featuring zoos and aquariums, you, too, can experience an abundance of enjoyment and endorphins, from just about anywhere with an Internet connection.
The Smithsonian National Zoo begins its PandaCam on January 24, 2025, as part of the public introduction of Qing Bao and Bao Li, 3-year-old giant panda cubs who came aboard the Panda Express in October 2024 to begin their 10-year stay in Washington, D.C.
Touring the Panda House, you'll see screens and images generated by dozens of cameras—the waking moves and whereabouts of these newest Chinese ambassadors who exude adorable “soft power.”
Neuroscientists speculate that a panda bear's toddling gait, generous cheeks, supersized eyes, and trademark black patches excite our brain circuitry, much like we feel when we interact with human infants or youngsters. It’s ironic that this facial mask likely evolved to repel predators in the wild, but these eye patches have a mesmerizing, opposite effect on us humans.
And when the Giant D.C. PandaCam shows how those bears use their strong jaw muscles to devour a stalk of bamboo, or when they scurry up a tree or tumble down a snowbank, there’s something within most of our hearts that melts, lifting our own facial muscles into a broad, happy smile.
© 2025 by Loriann Oberlin, M.S.
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