College Sets Up ‘Puppy Room’ For Stressed Students

A college in Canada has set up a puppy room for its students who are stressed out from end of semester papers and exams. The puppy room will be open for three days during finals week (December 4-6).

The puppy room at Dalhousie University is being supplied by Therapeutic Paws of Canada, which is bringing in therapeutic dogs to spend time with stressed out students, reports Yahoo! News. Michael Kean, an environmental science student who first came up with the idea, stated:

“It fills a niche that people need right now because students are super stressed.”

Gavin Jardine, vice president of student life at the Canadian college, noted that the event, which was first advertised on the student union’s Facebook page, has gone viral across social networking sites. Jardine stated:

“Our expectations are pretty high right now. We had 1,800 shares, thousands of ‘likes.’ It’s gone viral on Twitter as well.”

The San Francisco Chronicle notes that the Canadian college’s puppy room isn’t the first time a school has encouraged its students to interact with puppies. The University of San Francisco School of Law recently let students “check out” dogs for some quality one-on-one time.

Don LeBlanc of Therapeutic Paws of Canada stated that all of the dogs in the puppy room are coming from loving homes and love attention. There will be several different breeds on hand to interact with the students who sign up to visit the puppy room. LeBlanc stated of using pets for therapy:

“If you do any research at all about the benefits of using pets, you’ll find out quite quickly that it lowers blood pressure. It certainly made a huge difference in my life when I got a dog.”

How would you like your school or workplace to implement a puppy room (or even a kitten room) to help stressed out students and employees?

[Image from ShutterStock]