Issue link: https://www.massageandbodyworkdigital.com/i/68016
ANIMAL MASSAGE DIFFERENCES, SIMILARITIES "Touch is the earliest and possibly the most important of all the canine senses," writes veterinarian Bruce Fogle in his book The Dog's Mind. Like humans, newborn puppies and kittens require total care. Even horses, who within hours are able to move about, eat, and eliminate without parental care, still get touched throughout their first hours and days. Animals like horses lick their young clean, scent them, and make noises to them so they can later tell which young one is theirs out of the herd. Humans and animals share many similarities in their need for touch. When a professional therapist offers therapeutic massage, both animal and human feel the benefits. From muscle spasms and joint stiffness to injury and age, the animal body suffers like the human body. Animals also suffer the grief of losing a companion, need rehab after surgery, and feel the rigors of competition, overtraining, and overuse. They have daily stressors, including noise and confinement, and despite their typically hairy exterior, an animal's tissues feel much the same in texture and tension as their human counterparts. When animals reach maturity, their muscle response time is often quicker than ours when in the midst of fight- or-flight. The processing and release of tension from an animal's tissues is also a faster process than humans. Smaller animals typically have a faster heart rate than larger animals or humans, and many of them will breathe more deeply and more quickly when releasing a tight muscle. Sometimes animals will arch their backs and contract the muscles of their appendages in a full-body stretch during the massage. Often, they will have what appears to be a muscle energy release in the form of kicks or large twitch responses. Animals are generally better at stretching than most of us. A dog will stretch almost every time it gets up from resting. Dogs and other animals will typically reset their nervous systems, and their hair or feathers, with full-body shakes after a massage. In fact, observing that shake and its progression is one way to tell areas are not completely balanced, as those areas do not move smoothly. a vigorous tail movement is generally warning you to stay away; it is less than open to touch. Yet, rhythmical end of the tail movement may mean it is contented and very much OK with being touched. The same movement for a horse could mean it is swatting flies or, when more actively used, to Humans and animals share many similarities in their need for touch. With animals, the touch strength required during massage is not in direct correlation to the animal's size. Each hair on the animal's body relays sensory input about the world around it. Animals also have the same pressure and pain, as well as the heat and cold receptors we have, but many also have thin muscles within the skin layer that can be used to flick off a fly. INITIATING BODYWORK Bodywork on animals is similar in many ways to infant massage because work must be done without verbal cues. Animal massage practitioners must watch for the body language responses to judge pressure and pain/ pleasure responses to touch, as well as judge coolness or warmth, tension or scarring, muscle spasming, twitching, protective contracture, and adhesions. Each animal species that interacts with others of their kind has a set of body language responses. Practitioners for animals must learn what are the generally accepted responses or movements and their meanings. For example, you may think a dog wagging its tail is showing you that it's friendly and wants to be petted or touched. In reality, a wagging tail only means that the dog is open to interaction, not necessarily touch. A cat making 50 massage & bodywork november/december 2009 look out or back off. The speed of movement, the height of the tail, the amount of tail being brought into the conversation, as well as what the rest of the body posture is saying, comes into play. These are all important cues a successful animal massage practitioner needs to know. Reading the body language conversation ensures that the touch is safe for both the animal and the practitioner. To not do so could mean real trouble for the practitioner. Another important skill for animal massage therapists is understanding how animals survive and process their worlds. Animals live in the present. They very often have memory of the past—good and bad—at the hand of humans, but they do not think about the future. They live today. They have enough food today. They are wet now. They are safe now. The pressure exerted is acceptable or not. So, if the touch application is not OK, we may inadvertently bring forward the fight-or-flight (sympathetic nervous system) response. That is rarely good for the practitioner, because if the animal cannot flee, it has little choice left but to fight to save itself from what it perceives as a threat. For humans, healing occurs while the parasympathetic system is dominant in the system. The same is true