Interview with Ashley Drew, Director at Pet Partners of Tucson

My name is Ashley Drew. I'm the Executive Director of Pet Partners of Arizona. We oversee the entire state of Arizona, and we are the gold standard for registering therapy animals. And so our mission is to improve people's health and well-being through the human-animal bond.

We've got a bunch of different things. We've got a picture of one of our therapy pigs doing—

Pig? Yeah.

Is this a pig? Yeah. See, I'm like, what is this stuff?

It is, yeah. So we actually register 9 different species. So we do rats, bunnies, kitties, guinea pigs, pigs, birds, dogs, cats, horses, mini horses, donkeys, mini donkeys, and alpacas.

What?

Yeah. And so we have a Read with Me program where we work on kids' literacy and, you know, their verbal skills, because when they're first starting to learn how to read, sometimes they can stutter or not know how to pronounce words. And, you know, kids can make fun of other kids. And so when they read to an animal, that animal's not going to judge them. And so they can pet them while they're talking to them. Or they can just, as you can see, she's reading to Porkchop, and he's very engaged looking at the book. We also have information on our local chapter here in Tucson. We have offices in Tucson and in Phoenix. And these are some of our local teams in here, and it tells you about how to become a handler, which is what the person does, and then how to become a therapy team where you do an in-person evaluation. And then this tells just a little bit more about us and has a couple more of our teams. We've got one of our miniature horses. We've got a hairless cat. And then we've got obviously tons and tons of dogs, which we have some therapy teams with us today. Awesome.

Hi.

Hi, Lily. So this is Jack, and he's one of our handlers, and this is his beautiful dog Lily. How long have you guys been a therapy team? Um, we've been a therapy team for just over a year.

She got certified when she was 1 with my my mom, and then, um, we got certified about a year later after that. Awesome! And we've been doing work ever since. We like to go to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, University High School, and the University of Arizona.

Awesome!