Efficacy of Animal-assisted Therapy on Improving the Social Skills of Children with Autism: An interventional case report

Autism is known as one of the pervasive development disorders. The main feature of autism is the qualitative defects in the social interactions and bilateral communication skills, as well as the limited behavior patterns. Therefore, the present study aimed to evaluate the improvement of social interactions in the children with autism using an animal-assisted therapeutic approach in Mashhad in 2017. This pre-post study was performed on three nine-year old children selected by random sampling method from the high-performance autistic children in Mashhad, Iran. The participants were evaluated for three weeks (weekly tests) using the social interaction subscale of the Gilliam Autism Rating Scale-Second Edition. Afterwards, the animal-assisted intervention was performed using a dog for each of the three subjects individually for 12 weeks and the social interactions of children were re-evaluated. According to the findings of this study, all the three participants showed an average of 30% enhancement in the social skills. The results of our study demonstrated that the animal-assisted therapeutic intervention was effective in promoting the social skills of the children with autism spectrum disorder.