How has pet therapy proven to be effective on children with disabilities or disorders in America? Has this therapeutic exercise, benefit in reducing impairment for those considered disabled? Often, we refer to, for example, dogs as companions, as friends, as an emotional or mental support system. But what is pet/animal therapy? It is a goal-directed intervention in which an animal meeting specific criteria is an integral part of the treatment process. Animal-assisted therapy is delivered and/or directed by health or human service providers working with the scope of their profession. Animal-assisted therapy is designed to promote improvement in human physical, social, emotional, or cognitive function. Animal-assisted therapy …show more content…
It is said to be tough to find an appropriate treatment for children with disabilities as they have, a myriad of treatment options. In this article, it is contended that therapeutic horseback riding teaches horsemanship skills such as holding a horse's reins appropriately, controlling the horse with voice commands, and other basic riding skills. The main goals of this kind of therapy include improving balance, posture, gross and fine motor skills, and communication. Yet, studies indicated horse therapy with children to be not effective. Therapeutic horseback riding does not meet the evidence based practice guidelines for improving …show more content…
Some session were video recorded, in some sessions the battery died, data was not recovered from these sessions. Other limitations also involved, were how the dependent variables were measured for only for one participant at a time during therapy. Participants measured in such way most likely to be dismissed before the end of the session because of how problem behavior were observed first. Also noted was how some sessions had to be cut short sometimes because of volunteer availability. To fix this problem, some participants were given the opportunity to ride a horse during two additional sessions, which meant a total of nine full sessions of therapy. Furthermore also noted, because of missed sessions, time, and resource limitations during the study, some participants did not complete nine full sessions of THR. This may have impacted skill acquisition during therapy and in other