Dog therapy: the long term benefits of working with children and animals

SARAH founded Canine Comprehension to help at-risk students learn with the assistance of dogs and says children and animals work wonderfully together.

Sarah MacDonald’s dog Oscar helps Ryan with his reading. Picture: Lawrence Pinder

SARAH MacDonald is well familiar with actor W.C. Fields’ advice to never work with animals or children.

“Not only do I work with animals and children, I work with children who don’t want to be at school,” says Sarah who founded Canine Comprehension to help teach at-risk students learn with the assistance of dogs. “It turns out they work wonderfully together.”

Having spent five years working as a teacher in Australia and abroad, Sarah was looking for a change of direction a few years back. A pooch lover, she ended up working and studying as a dog trainer, specialising in social rehabilitation.

“I did an animal assistance therapy course,” says Sarah, 35. “A lot of psychologists, counsellors and therapists do this course and that’s when it hit me like a bolt of lightning; the same benefits they’re getting from dog assisted therapy — like the patients trusting the therapist more, serotonin levels going up, blood pressure coming down — we could use that with kids; especially with at-risk kids when we’re teaching them.”

Today’s Australian of the Day and her dogs work with children in schools and support facilities across Melbourne. “We do one-on-one tutoring and we do schools programs,” she says. “We’re also working with residential care kids; children who are not in consistent foster care and a lot of them are refusing school because of trust issues and social anxiety.”

That’s where the dogs come into the picture. “The benefit always is that they build a relationship with the dog and then with the person at the end of the dog,” Sarah explains. “They learn to trust as well so then you can edge in on your tutoring on the back of that.”

Canine Comprehension is also branching out into the mainstream school system, offering workshops to help students communicate better. “It’s about the way kids talk to each other — positive and negative self-talk and they also practice training a dog,” says Sarah. “The dogs have been taught tonal conditioning so they’ll ignore you if you don’t speak correctly, if you’re mumbling or you’re not confident or your timing is bad. So it’s teaching the kids to speak up and show some confidence.”

By bringing her teaching and dog training careers together, Sarah believes she able to accomplish much more than if she’d dedicated herself to just one field. “I get to have a much deeper connection with the kids, especially kids I’ve been working closely with because I can see them grow,” she says. “There’s nothing more satisfying.”

CommBank has partnered with News Corp Australia to champion the Australian of the Day initiative which celebrates people in our neighbourhoods and communities who really make a difference to how we live and who we are. You can read all their stories at australianoftheday.com.au, where you can also nominate someone you know.