Teaming Up with Therapy Dogs: Susan Hartzler on WGN Radio

Listen HERE to Steve Dale’s Pet World WGN Radio to Susan Hartzler, author of Teaming Up with Therapy Dogs: Skills to Build Healing Partnerships.

We talk about the wide variety of work which therapy dogs are employed and how and why her book isn’t only ab out therapy dogs but also about the handlers. Both are required.

She describes how the notion of therapy dogs first began. Today, therapy dogs can be found in hospitals, schools, and care facilities, but it wasn’t that long ago that many organizations were hesitant to welcome them. Susan talks about the growing demand for therapy dog teams, shares heartwarming stories about the difference her own dogs have made, and explains how the animal-assisted therapy movement all started with one remarkable dog. What therapy dogs do isn’t magic, there’s science to explain it.

On occasion the human handler wants so badly for their dog to be a therapy dog but the dog doesn’t really want it. Other dogs are just naturals.

More Hartzler Books

Hartzler other books include, I’m Not Single, I Have a Dog: Dating Tales from the Bark Side (Dogs in Our World)

Listen HERE from a radio conversation in 2025, as Hartzler discussed how she may be unlucky in love but lucky with dogs, Hartzler talks openly about her life in I’m Not Single, I Have A Dog: Dating Tales from the Bark Side. She explains that she’s fine and content today and accepting that she may from now on only have partners with four legs. And why in many ways, that is a good thing.  And her books, The Peace Puppy: A Memoir of Caregiving and Canine Solace, about how dogs can in some ways guide or at least take some stress of caregivers. And as dogs age, we become their caregivers.

Revealing One Secret to How Dogs May Age

Might blood markers in dogs hold secrets to their aging, and even our own?