Wednesday, April 23, 2008 Literatus: Green way to care By Zosimo T. Literatus, R.M.T. Breakthroughs
“The key to everything,” observed author and humorist Arnold Glasow, “is patience. You get the chicken by hatching the egg — not by smashing it.”
Today, scientists have uncovered one more giftedness among animals — a gift of healing mental illness.
The skin, recent scientific evidence indicates, is the highway to man’s stomach, in itself the proverbial highway to a man’s heart.
The history of animal-assisted therapy (AAT) can be traced to the founding of the European Cooperation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research (Cost) in 1971. It developed from the concept of green care, a philosophy of using environmental interventions to maintain mental health and treat mental illness. It uses farm animals, plants, gardens, or the landscape in recreational or work places to bring about health. Cost Actions, the research projects that studies the therapeutic effect of environmental interventions on humans has around 200 projects running supported by a fund EUR 210 million for its seven-year research programs beginning last year.
Cost is used at present by scientific communities of 35 European countries. The purpose is to cooperate in common research projects supported by national funds. Cost Actions covers basic and pre-competitive research such as the clinical studies on AAT as well as activities of public use.
Green Care in Agriculture is Cost Action 866. It aims to increase the scientific knowledge on the best practices for implementing green care in agriculture in order to improve human mental health and the quality of life. It uses agricultural farms — the animals, the plants, the garden, the forest, and the landscape — as a base for promoting human mental and physical health as well as the quality of life.
A team of three Norwegian scientists — Bente Berget, Olvind Ekeberg and Bjarne Braastad — applied AAT with farm animals for persons with psychiatric disorders in order find out its effects on the patients self-efficacy, coping ability, and quality of life. Berget and Braastad are researchers of the Department of Animal and Aquacultural Sciences at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences in As, Norway. Ekeberg is professor of the Department of Behavioral Sciences in Medicine at the University of Oslo.
Next week, we will know the study, Green Care and AAT more closely.
Meanwhile, Josh Billings hints in his book, Everybody’s Friend, why animals can be such a grace to humans: “A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than he loves himself.”
