PAWS for People brings out the pet lover in everyone

Jogging down a hallway of Cokesbury Village’s assisted living unit, Sunny was on a mission.

Ducking into a patient’s room, he approached the wheel-chair-bound resident cautiously until she slowly extended a frail hand and began scratching his ear. Her face broke into a broad grin as the completely smitten golden retriever flopped down onto the thick carpet.

Sunny, short for Sundance, was visiting the Hockessin retirement community with PAWS for People, a nonprofit pet therapy organization based in Newark.

Human volunteers and their dogs or cats visit Cokesbury Village 14 times in a typical month, said Lynne Robinson, executive director, and their visits are more about hope and healing than they are about milk bones and pet tricks.

“There is a very special connection between animals and people,” she said. “The animals are levelers, they are stabilizers, they are grounding.”

For a hospital patient, visiting pets bring calmness and peacefulness their human counterparts cannot recreate, Robinson said, and the simple act of stroking a dog can have real physical benefits for patients.

Aside from lowering blood pressure and regulating heartbeat – two items on a lengthy list of physical pet therapy benefits – having pets in a room with physical therapy patients helps distract the patients from their often painful exercises, she said.

“When you’re petting a dog, a hundred knee bends goes by in a flash,” she said.

Robinson founded the nonprofit organization five years ago after she rescued a golden retriever, saw the positive effect he had on everyone he met and began taking him on hospital visits by herself. From there, the organization has blossomed and now has 250 volunteer teams who serve more than 100 facilities in Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland and New Jersey.

The reason for the growth is simple: volunteers can see that pet therapy helps the patients, Robinson said.

During the dead of winter, PAWS therapy dogs brought joy to Valerie Allen, of Canterbury Hills, who was undergoing chemotherapy treatments for ovarian cancer at Christiana Care’s Helen F. Graham Cancer Center.

Allen, who has four dogs of her own, was at her weakest point during a draining, 12-day hospital stay, she recalled. When PAWS therapy dogs came by her room, the whole place seemed to brighten up, she said.

“I just looked into their eyes and saw hope,” she said. “I was very afraid about my future and they just seemed to have a calmness that they passed on to me.”

Now in remission, Allen credits PAWS with helping inspire her to push through her difficult treatment.

The visits can bring as much comfort to the PAWS volunteers as they do the patients, Robinson said.

PAWS volunteer Penny Taylor knows that firsthand. The Mendenhall Village resident has spent three years visiting patients in nursing homes and hospitals with her golden retriever, Trinity.

During one visit to the heat failure unit at Christiana Care, she brought Trinity to a patient who had an irregular heart rhythm, Taylor said, but while the patient was petting the dog, her heart rhythm returned to normal.

“The patients give back to me as much as Trinity gives them,” she said. “It’s the best of both worlds.”

All volunteers and their pets are trained and tested by PAWS before they are allowed to make visits, Robinson explained, and they are shadowed by experienced visitors before they go out on their own.

And Robinson continues to look for more volunteers as she expands the reach of PAWS. The group recently started visiting children in the Terry Children’s Psychiatric Center and is also planning to expand into the Milford area, she said.

Whether the pets are listening to children read aloud to instill confidence in students or helping drug rehab patients remember that there is life after recovery, animals can help people rise to new heights, Robinson said.

“There isn’t anything I’ve seen that we can’t make better,” she said.