It's a well known fact that stroking your cat or petting your dog can relieve anxiety and stress but you might not know that the use of pets in therapy is now becoming widely recognised and used in hospitals, nursing homes and therapists' rooms throughout the world.

It seems that unlike people, with whom we can have quite complex and often unpredictable interactions, animals provide a constant source of focus for our attention, they make us feel safe and accept us unconditionally, simply put we can just be ourselves around pets.

There have been many clinical studies in the past few years on the affects of introducing animals into various care environments and they all seem to be saying the same thing – animals are good for us.

Studies of patients hospitalised for heart problems for example, found that only 6% of patients who owned pets died within a year compared with 28% of those who did not.