About us

Zoothérapie Quebec is a charity registered with the Canada Revenue Agency. By making a donation, tax deductible, you contribute to the development of pet therapy in Quebec and you can help us continue our mission with sick children, the elderly, people with intellectual disabilities or Spectrum Disorder autism, etc.

Located in Montreal, we serve annually over 80 schools or health and social services across the greater Montreal area (children's hospitals, nursing homes, specialized schools and camps, etc.).

Our Mission

Zoothérapie Québec's mission is to promote, develop and provide intervention and prevention programs where the pet is used as an agent of stimulation, motivation and reinforcement with people of all ages and from all conditions.

Our team

Zoothérapie Quebec stands out for its professional approach to pet therapy. Through rigorous hiring protocol, we employ psychologists, psycho-educators, special educators, social workers and occupational therapists, who integrate the dog into their practice.

We believe in a multidisciplinary approach to pet therapy. Thus, our regular employees meet on a weekly basis to update their knowledge, optimize the use of our clinical tools and discuss difficult intervention cases.

Our employees are sometimes accompanied by a colleague during the pet therapy activities. We are thus able to replace on short notice an employee who is absent by another one who already knows the environment and customers.

Each Zootherapie Québec employee participates in the continuing education program of the organization. The workshops address the intervention techniques with our clients, working techniques with the dog, theoretical updates on pet therapy and on our different types of clientele, etc.

Our dogs

Zootherapie Quebec can count on a team of tewnty five dogs to meet the specific needs of its various clienteles. Under the supervision of our canine behavior specialist, each dog is recruited through a rigorous selection and introduction protocol.

In addition to benefiting from complete veterinary care and continuous training, our dogs are groomed regularly to ensure our clients an intervention that meets the highest hygiene and safety standards.

The large number of dogs that we work with allows us to only keep in service dogs that love their work and adopt safe behavior at all times. Therefore, a dog that shows signs of discomfort, fatigue or stress, is retired quickly. This ensures that all dogs are fully prepared to safely interact with the people we visit.

We attach great importance to ethics in the management of our canine team. Our training methods are based on positive reinforcement of desired behaviors rather than punishing undesirable behavior. Each of our employees also benefits from personalized support to optimize the work with the dogs they work with.

Finally, we are working with more than twnty volunteer families who are taking care of the dogs evenings and weekends. Each of these families helps to improve our interventions, through their involvement and participation in continuous training.