Checking Out Monty: Yale Law Students Can Reduce Stress With Therapy Dog

March 24, 2011— -- At the Yale Law Library circulation desk, students have been signing up this week to check out Monty, a "certified library therapy dog," for 30-minute sessions of unconditional, stress-busting puppy love.

"The interest in available slots has been high," said Jan Conroy, a spokeswoman for Yale Law School, on Wednesday, the third day of sign-ups.

Beginning Monday, students at the nation's top-ranked law school, a Gothic complex that takes up one city block within Yale University's New Haven, Conn., campus, will be able to spend time (and maybe lower their blood pressure) with the 21-pound brown border terrier mix. In a March 10 memo, law librarian Blair Kauffman expressed hope that the free, three-day pilot pet therapy program would be "a positive addition to current services offered by the library."

"It is well documented that visits from therapy dogs have resulted in increased happiness, calmness and overall emotional well-being," Kauffman wrote in the memo, which directed students to the website of Therapy Dogs International (motto: Paws Awhile for Love), a non-profit organization offering pet therapy in schools, hospitals, nursing homes and disaster recovery sites.

Kauffman told students that he welcomed their feedback "to help us decide if this will be a permanent on-going program available during stressful periods of the semester, for example during examinations."

Therapy dogs have been introduced to help students at Tufts University in Massachusetts, Oberlin College in Ohio and UC San Diego in California survive the pressures of midterms and finals.

The idea of offering sessions with a professionally trained therapy dog came up last September in internal law school discussions with Monty's owner, librarian Julian Aiken. Somehow, word of those discussions got out and landed in the legal blog, "Above the Law," which posted a humorous law library catalog listing for Monty, whose full name is General Montgomery. It said Monty circulates for 30-minute periods.

Despite the gag listing, administrative interest in the program was real.

For now, everyone is waiting to see how next week's experimental Monday with Monty (and Tuesday and Wednesday) works out.