What Animals on Care Farms Reveal about the Human Need to Tend

A sheep does not offer reassurance. It does not track your mood or modulate its behavior to reduce your distress. It is hungry, or it is not. And yet J. Fath's 2025 doctoral thesis builds a careful empirical case that structured contact with farm animals produces measurable psychological benefit for adults experiencing mental health difficulties — not through the animal's empathy, but through something else entirely.

Fath employs realist evaluation methodology, which asks not simply does animal contact help, but how, for whom, and under what conditions. Outcomes emerge from the interaction between the context a person brings and the mechanisms that animal care activates: a sense of purpose that extends beyond oneself, externally structured routine, and a non-verbal responsiveness that bypasses the social performance anxiety that makes human interaction exhausting for people in psychological distress.

These findings are not a vindication of animal-assisted therapy as a technique. They are an account of what happens when a human being is genuinely needed by something that cannot pretend otherwise.

The dignity of being necessary

The human person is constitutively vocational — called into relationship with God, with others, and with the created order.¹ The capacity for care is not incidental to human nature but expressive of it. When a person feeds an animal, moves at its pace, and reads its body language, they exercise a form of attentiveness related to prudence: practical judgment that attends to particulars and acts accordingly.

This matters because depression and anxiety disable this outward-directed attentiveness. The inward turn characteristic of melancholia — what Aquinas treats as the failure of the irascible appetite to engage the world — is interrupted by a creature that will not wait for you to feel ready. The goat is not impressed by your reluctance. This is therapeutic not because the goat is kind, but because the goat is real, and your response has actual consequences.

Fath identifies a responsibility mechanism: participants report a felt sense that something depends on them. This is the recovery of a vocational orientation — being genuinely needed, which is distinct from being emotionally supported. Support is received; vocation is exercised. A therapeutic relationship, however well-conducted, cannot fully substitute for the experience of being an agent rather than a recipient.

What the body learns

Fath's findings point also to a somatic dimension. Participants describe physical regularization — sleep, appetite, diurnal rhythm, and energy levels shift as they take on the structured demands of animal care. This aligns with what Bruce Perry's Neurosequential Model predicts: that patterned, repetitive, bottom-up sensory engagement is among the more reliable routes to regulatory stabilization after trauma or chronic stress.² Fath's realist lens adds a layer Perry's frame does not supply: the meaning of the repetition matters to the outcome.

Feeding the same animal each morning is not mere behavioral activation. It is the enactment of a small covenant. The animal's recognition of your approach — the shift in posture, the vocalization, the movement toward you — returns relational confirmation that cannot be faked. For people whose trust in human relationships has been eroded by trauma, this non-verbal confirmation can restore a sense that the world responds when they act in it.

Aristotle, and Aquinas after him, understood that virtue is formed through repeated acts.³ The person who rises each morning to feed an animal is, in a modest but real sense, practicing fidelity — the sustained will to honor what one has taken responsibility for.

The created order as arena for formation

Fath's methodology specifies that unstructured or passive animal contact produces weaker effects. What works is stewardship — taking on actual care for a creature whose welfare depends on sustained attention.

Genesis describes the human person as placed in the garden to tend and keep it (Gen 2:15). Dominion in the biblical sense is not exploitation; it is the extension of care across the non-human world. The care farm instantiates this at a scale small enough to be immediately experienced: one animal, one person, one morning.

An animal that needs quiet to approach will teach a person with anxiety-driven hypervigilance something psychoeducation achieves less efficiently: that slowing down produces a real response in the world, not just a subjective feeling of calm.

What urban residents can do

Fath's research is set in rural or peri-urban care farms, creating a practical gap for city dwellers. But the mechanisms he identifies do not require a farm.

The responsibility mechanism is available through pet ownership, shelter volunteering, or urban community gardening, where plants also die if neglected. What matters is not the species of creature but the genuineness of the dependency relationship.

Practical options include:

Volunteering at an animal shelter two or three mornings per week on a regular schedule. Regularity matters: open-ended availability produces weaker effects than committed recurrence.

Community-supported agriculture programs, which offer physical contact with soil, plants, and sometimes animals — a genuine dependency relationship rather than a commercial transaction.

Attentive pet care: Fath's findings suggest therapeutic value scales with the degree to which a person is genuinely present to the animal's state — reading its behavior, responding to its needs, adjusting their own conduct accordingly.

None of these practices is primarily therapeutic. They are expressions of a right relationship to the created order — one in which the human person exercises genuine responsibility for what has been entrusted to them. The psychological benefits Fath documents are what flourishing looks like when a person lives in accordance with their nature: attentive, responsive, outwardly oriented, and accountable for something beyond themselves.

When mental health is framed this way — as the restoration of a person's capacity to tend, rather than the reduction of symptoms — the care farm is not an unusual intervention. It is a structured opportunity to do what human beings are constitutively ordered to do.

References

Vitz, P. C., Nordling, W. J., & Titus, C. S. (2020). A Catholic Christian meta-model of the person: Integration with psychology and mental health. Divine Mercy University Press.

Perry, B. D., & Szalavitz, M. (2006). The boy who was raised as a dog: And other stories from a child psychiatrist's notebook. Basic Books.

Aquinas, T. (1948). Summa theologica (Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Trans.). Benziger Bros. (Original work published 1274). I-II, Q. 49–54.

Fath, J. (2025). Exploring the impact of care farm animals on people with mental health difficulties through a realist evaluation approach [Doctoral thesis]. University repository.