Animal Therapy?

Recent studies and observations at prisons for pedophiles, sex-offenders and other high-rate criminals reveal decrease in the violent nature and otherwise negative behavior in these criminals over time. Close observations at a maximum facility in Orlando reveal that the criminals exposed to or those who interacted with the farm animals around the prison grounds became subtle and a little more friendly than the rest of the inmates. This got prison officials and experts involved with behavioral trends as well as animal ethics thinking, do animals have a calming effect on these individuals, do these animal interactions simulate human interactions, is it a wild stretch to say animal interactions could lead to positive animal therapy?

As the documentary; To love or To kill: Man vs Animal points out, these criminals barely had any human interactions with the outside world as the spent most of their time with fellow inmates and prison guards and the like. This lets us to believe that their interactions with the farm animals they had to feed filled the void of human relationships and obviously it worked for both parties since the inmates became a lot more calm and subtle behavior wise. Animal therapy or anything in that light may sound like a far stretch, but is it really? Why do we get pets, why do we love our pets and get attached to them the way we do? As we learn from the documentary, people are far more trusting of animals as the employ them to be pets and aids around the house rather than hire humans! Handicap people would employ the help of monkey, dogs or some other well trained animal rather than a human being. The same goes to people who just get pets for the companionship. Some people would whole-heartedly admit to the fact that in their busy lives, human-human relationships are hard to build let alone sustain thus resort to animal-human relationships with pets who soon become a part of our lives and more than just a pet.

This goes to show us how much more valuable animals are or could be once we realize this inherent value. This is a slippery slope as i dare say that they are valuable but do not suggest that we use them or continue to use them to further our own agendas. Animals are more than just sources of hide for leather products, food or laboratory test subjects. The world will be a better place if we realized that animals are passive moral valuers whose subject of a life criterion gives them inherent value of their own thus shouldn't be used as mere receptacles or an ends to a means but as passive moral valuers who deserve to be treated with humanely with respect and justice.