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As featured in the September 2026 issue of Pets Magazine. Read the September issue here.
In the latest Pets Mag Podcast, Marie Carter-Robb speaks to renowned psychologist, author and longtime advocate for the human-animal bond, Dr Dale Atkins, whose work has featured on TODAY in the US.
Her new children’s book, Dear Deer (Mascot Books, June 2026), grew out of a remarkable real-life encounter with a trapped fawn and explores what children can gain when they step away from screens and reconnect with animals and the natural world.
It began with a rustling in a pond. Dr Dale Atkins was walking through her local park when she noticed the commotion – ducks paddling back and forth, back and forth – and then, beneath them, a baby fawn, caught fast as the water rose around it.
“I was really concerned, and I was trying to think quickly: what can I do? How can I help?” As she stood there, a doe stepped out of the trees, no more than six feet away. The mother looked at Atkins, then down into the pond, then back again, several times over. “I thought for sure that she was trying to connect with me to see if I could help.”
So Atkins did something that, by her own cheerful admission, might have looked a little unhinged. “I really spoke in a natural voice, and I said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll do my best. We’re gonna get it out.’ If anybody had seen me talking to the deer, they would have thought I was insane.”
It took two and a half hours to free the fawn. The doe watched every minute of it. Two days later Atkins found them again in the woods, the fawn nursing, and the mother looked from her baby to the woman who had helped and lifted her tail. “I said, ‘This is a story.'”
“That unstructured time is what makes creativity. It also builds resilience because you have to figure things out… sometimes you fall and sometimes you trip, but then you are aware, so you learn.”
She told it to her nephew, who begged her to write it down. The result is Dear Deer (Mascot Books), a picture book in which two children, rather than Atkins herself, come upon a fawn in trouble and have to work out how to help without doing harm. “I really wanted to have them have the experience,” she says, “to make it about children and nature and their connection to nature.”
That connection, she believes, is fraying. The book is really an argument for what Atkins calls, with obvious delight, “green time” – the hours a child might once have spent outdoors, unwatched and unhurried.
“They’re losing so much,” she says of children raised on screens. “They’re losing the ability to connect with a real living being in its own environment. They’re losing the ability to understand what patience is about… to look and to observe and to notice and not be rushed. Nature doesn’t rush us. It really gives us the opportunity to just observe.”
She worries about the physical shape of it too, the child curled over a tablet, “looking down instead of up and out and around”, and the dulling of senses built for birdsong and a turning season. But the loss she returns to is the vanishing of unstructured time. “That unstructured time is what makes creativity. It also builds resilience because you have to figure things out… sometimes you fall and sometimes you trip, but then you are aware, so you learn.”
For years Atkins and her dog Samson worked as a therapy team, visiting schools and hospitals. Children who found reading an agony would read aloud to Samson, who listened, she says, “like, ‘This is the most interesting thing I ever heard'” – and their words came out fluent. In one dementia unit a woman who had long stopped speaking looked at the dog and called him Buddy. Her son later explained that she had owned a dog by that name as a girl. “There is something deep and connectable that happens when we are with a trusting animal.”
Animals, she argues, offer something screens cannot, particularly for children who feel anxious or alone. “We are all connected,” she says. “What most animals do, particularly pets, is pick up on the energy of the person that they are near, and very often they know exactly what that person needs.” She points to research suggesting that simply stroking a dog or rabbit can lower blood pressure, while being trusted by an animal can steady a child who is frightened of being judged.
The lesson, for Atkins, does not end with childhood. Nature is where she thinks people go to change a mood or find perspective, “walking through grief outdoors”, and she also points to treatment programmes that incorporate substantial time in nature. “Nature is the greatest teacher and the greatest healer.”
It teaches, too, by showing us ourselves. She describes a flock of Canada geese at the park, utterly content until a second flock came in to land, at which point the first turned as one, heads down, and made it very clear the newcomers were not welcome. “If I had a group of kids with me, I would have said, ‘Anybody know anybody like that? What are these geese afraid of? What might your friend be afraid of?'”
Watch closely enough, she suggests, and you grow less quick to judge, more curious about why any creature behaves as it does. Which is rather the point of Dear Deer, and of stepping away from the screen in the first place. “This is about feeding the heart and feeding the soul,” she says. “It is not about learning. It is about experiencing and becoming human.”
Watch the full conversation:
https://www.petsmag.co.uk/podcast/?episode=17-dr-dale-atkins
For more information about Dr Dale Atkins and Dear Deer, including where to buy the book, visit:
www.drdaleatkins.com
