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Life got you feeling down? A donkey could be the solution to lifting your spirits.
This is the gist of a new study published in the journal Science Reports, which found that teenagers who spent as little as three minutes petting and caressing rescued donkeys and miniature horses immediately felt less anxious, sad, and lonely, while also feeling calmer.
It may not literally cure your depression, but the work shows that interacting with these animals can significantly enhance your mood.
“It was lovely to see that interacting with nature could make such a positive difference so quickly,” study co-lead author Rebecca Calisi-Rodríguez, an associate professor of neurobiology, physiology and behavior at the University of California, Davis, told the Washington Post.
The therapeutic potential of animals, of course, is nothing new. But the researchers wanted to focus on something that other studies on animal-assisted mental health interventions have overlooked: how the animals’ reacted to the different ways people treated them.
“You can’t stand in a pasture watching a child and a donkey interact and pretend only one of them is having an experience,” Calisi-Rodríguez said in a statement about the work. “They’re watching each other, they’re responding to each other, they’re both making choices. That realization became the heart of my work and the heart of this paper.”
To explore this, the researchers divided the 61 teenagers into two groups. One was told to gently stroke the donkeys’ and miniature horses’ backs, and the others were told to scratch their necks, which mimics how equines groom each other. All of them were taught to recognize two behavioral cues. If the donkey wriggles its lips, it’s feeling pleasure. If the donkey walks away, it wants to be left alone.
Unsurprisingly, the donkeys wriggled their lips more during neck-scratching and usually walked away when they were petted on the back. The interesting bit is what this did for the teens. All of the teens reported feeling calmer regardless if they scratched or petted the animal. But the ones who saw the donkeys wriggle their lips experienced bigger decreases in loneliness, the study found. And even the ones whose donkeys walked away from them had bigger reductions in sadness.
The important part, it seems, is being in tune with the animal.
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