Comfort dogs are greeting Uvalde students for their return to school.

Comfort dogs are greeting Uvalde students for their return to school. Here’s how canine visitors can help after tragedy   For some students in the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District in Texas, the start of classes came with feelings of fear and anxiety. In May, Robb Elementary – which is now closed and soon may be demolished – was the scene of a horrific shooting that claimed the lives of 19 students and two teachers.   Since then, some students have not felt comfortable returning to a classroom. As parents in Uvalde, Texas, dropped their children off at school last week, some students did not want to get out of the car – but 10 golden retrievers from all across the country who work as comfort dogs were on site, helping ease nerves and provide a distraction, said Bonnie Fear, crisis response coordinator for the Lutheran Church Charities K-9 Comfort Dog Ministry.   Comfort dogs have helped support communities affected by devastating gun violence for years. They were deployed to Newtown, Connecticut, after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. Canines were sent to Orlando, Florida, to provide comfort after the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in 2016 and to Parkland, Florida, after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in 2018.   The Lutheran Church Charities K-9 Ministry teams were at the site of each of those tragedies.   “We get invited, we show up, and we let the dogs do their work,” Fear said. A growing number of studies suggest that spending time with a therapy dog can help reduce a hospital patient’s experience of pain, and among university students, directly interacting with a dog resulted in greater declines in anxiety and improved mood.   Dogs can notice when someone is upset or needs help, according to Julia Meyers-Manor, an associate professor of psychology at Ripon College in Wisconsin, who has come to such findings in her research.   “We know that dogs can reduce stress through petting and even physical presence. We also know that animals can increase attendance at and willingness to accept therapy in both children and adults,” Meyers-Manor wrote in an email to CNN.   Of course, most experts stress that the benefit a comfort or companion animal provides is complementary to the medical or psychological therapy that the person gets.