October 15, 2019 —“Lily’s job,” says Heather Strong, Lily’s owner
and Kendal’s Program Manager for Rehabilitation,
“is to help people do their exercises and
make it seem like fun.”
Lily is an eleven-pound, nine year old gray
and white Welsh corgi / Lhasa apso mix. She
has the corgi facial expression, projecting sheer
joy and good will, and the Lhasa apso fluffy tail
curled over her back. Her favorite thing is to
catch a ball, but she is versatile and will companionably
lend moral support to patients who
need encouragement in pedaling, pushing,
stretching, lifting, or any of the other exercises
available in the Borden therapy room. She
comes in every day and goes at her work with
maximum enthusiasm. Like all therapy dogs,
though, she has learned to avoid feet and
wheels, she never jumps on people, and she
wouldn’t dream of making a fuss.
Research has shown that interacting with
therapy animals can lower patients’ blood
pressure, hasten healing, lessen depression
and fatigue, increase happy brain chemicals like
oxytocin and dopamine, and decrease unhappy
brain chemicals like stress-related cortisol.
Articles on the subject from the Mayo Clinic and
Harvard Medical School, among many others,
can be found on the Web.
Hands-on research in animal therapy has in
fact been done by one of Heather’s colleagues
in the Borden therapy room. Ashley Strader,
who received a degree in Animal Science from
Virginia Tech in 2014, did a senior project involving
her own dog, a pit bull mix named
Bama, and residents at an assisted living facility
in Blacksburg. She found that resident alertness
and response increased dramatically
whenever she was accompanied by Bama,
even though she did the same things she had
previously done without a canine companion.
So far, Bama has not come to visit at Kendal,
but Ashley hopes to start bringing her in.
Originally published in the October 2015 Residents’ Newsletter