What is Pet Therapy?
Pet therapy is a guided interaction between a person and a trained animal. Pet therapy can help to reduce anxiety, help facilitate a more welcoming environment, and support people in times of crisis to name a few benefits. For more information see: Empirical Support for Therapy Animals Interventions
What Are the Requirements for Pet Therapy Animals?
Muffin is a registered therapy horse with Pet Partners (therapy animal organization). Some of the equine requirements are reliably potty trained, welcome interactions with strangers, current on rabies vaccination and be responsive to handler’s directions and cues. For more information see https://petpartners.org/
Muffin Care’s Program
Muffin is the therapy horse helps to educate the community on our drug awareness messaging and support individuals in recovery. Drug awareness can be a difficult topic to discuss with our community versus our fire safety messaging. Muffin helps to reduce stigma and facilitate our drug awareness messaging. Substance use and misuse is in our communities we should be talking about it and conversations about resources should not be shunned.
Common Muffin Questions
What kind of horse is Muffin?
American Mini Horse
Is Muffin a boy or girl?
Muffin is a mare, which is an adult female horse.
Where does Muffin live?
When Muffin is not working, Muffin lives just outside the city in pasture with her other horse friends. (Molly- black and Morgan-Riley -buckskin).
How did Muffin become a therapy horse?
It was a huge amount of training and lots of exposure to new things. The firefighters were a big help with Muffin’s training. See Pet Partners website for therapy horse requirements.
