By Liz R. Kover
Animal Assisted Activities Director Marleys Mutts Dog Rescue
Partners for life
It's a Dog's Life
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The benefits of canine intervention in so many activities with children are well-documented. Dogs in library programs motivate kids to open up and read aloud, lending soft, nonjudgmental ears; service dogs help children with autism and other disabilities or illnesses navigate their world with a sense of comfort and connectivity; facility dogs become part of incentive-and-rewards systems at schools, motivating kids to practice exceptional behavior; and comfort dogs provide loving security to children as they face their perpetrators in court.
Surprisingly, we are only beginning to tap into the benefits of dogs as exercise partners! Considering the fact that the partnership of primitive humans and wolves originally involved persistence hunting that employed the long-distance running capabilities of our ancestors, it only makes sense to assume that there is a genetic predisposition to (our) having dogs as workout buddies! Some even suspect the very survival of our species depended upon it at one crucial time in our shared history.
University of Pennsylvania professor of anthropology, Pat Shipman, goes so far as to suggest that around 40,000 years ago, when early modern humans entered prehistoric Europe, a powerful alliance between man and wolves likely drove our cousins, the Neanderthals, to extinction. While the Neanderthals continued hunting mammoths and elk on their own, humans and wolves developed a coordinated hunting strategy that allowed both species to dominate the European continent, and then continue spreading onto other continents, and eventually across the entire globe!
In other words, early humans' relationships with wolves engendered our peak physical fitness, and our ability to communicate and cooperate in social relationships. Wolf-dogs essentially kept us healthy, viable, alive and thriving when we needed the competitive edge most! This very dynamic is what I hope to bring to life in a program I call Frisky Fitness. The course integrates dogs into a specialized P.E. curriculum, where students are paired with canine companions for participation in physically active games and activities. The eight-week pilot program kicks off at Sierra Middle School in Bakersfield this February. The ultimate goal is to help combat both the childhood and pet dog obesity crises through facilitating what I like to call "human-canine co-evolution in real time". We will use the power of the human-canine bond to instill a love for exercise in kids that, if I do my job right, will last beyond the class, and throughout the kids' lives.
Liz Kover is an Animal-Assisted Activities Director, Marley's Mutts Dog Rescue Service Dog Trainer and with Good Dog Autism Companions.
