I don't have an articles to give you, but I will tell you that I work in a special ed classroom right now, and animals are all of the students very favorite thing (ironically, except for the one autistic boy, whose favorite thing is trains). Our town has a "challenger" baseball league and one day I took Zoey to one of their baseball games so I could watch them play and they could not get enough of her! Everyone was all over her and treated her like she was their best friend. Ever since then, every day at school one of the kids in particular would come up to me and say "wheres my doggie" (meaning zoey).