PALS ("Pet Away Life Stress") Program
The PALS (Pet Away Life Stress) Program offers students the opportunity to participate in animal-assisted interactions designed to promote coping, connection, and relaxation. The Center for Prevention and Outreach (CPO) and Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) work together to coordinate campus PALS activities in collaboration with Pet Partners. This national organization provides training and certification for therapy animals and their humans. PALS events provide stress reduction for our student community and the opportunity to learn about new strategies for managing stress and resources available on campus to support them.
Animal-assisted interactions are consistently shown to decrease anxiety and feelings of self-reported loneliness. Animal-assisted interactions have also been shown to reduce blood pressure, lower heart rate, and reduce stress hormones in human friends. Learn more at one of our upcoming PALS events - check out CPO’s SB Engaged page to see what’s coming up!
We have updated our approach to planning PALS events - we are no longer accepting requests for individual department or organization events. Rather than accepting a limited number of requests from campus departments and student organizations to host individual events for their members, we are working on planning an entire semester of larger-scale events in partnership with various departments on the East, West, and Southampton campuses to ensure broader access to PALS for all students.
We are excited to offer student clubs and organizations the opportunity to co-host scheduled events. Co-hosting would involve helping us greet the volunteers at the parking location and walk them over to the event space, assisting us in managing the flow of people, assisting the volunteers and dogs (providing water for dogs, etc.), and helping to keep the resource table stocked and orderly. Co-host organization volunteers would get extra time with the dogs before and during the event.