Pets have been crawling, slithering, and hopping through classrooms across the United States for years. But now, schools and researchers are discovering what kids already know: These animals are more than a cute member of the classroom. They are important for learning, too.
Several recent studies have found that spending time with pets helps kids develop social skills and how to handle challenging emotions.
Kayleigh Smith, a middle school art teacher in North Providence, Rhode Island, brought her Scottish Straight cat, Pinecone, to class for the better part of the last school year. Pinecone has been able to achieve what many teachers find difficult to accomplish – getting a room full of middle schoolers to lower their voices.
Spending time with pets can help youth refine their social skills and learn how to handle emotions, according to recent studies. Bringing in a class pet can benefit students – if the animal receives proper care.
“I feel like the class is overall just a lot calmer,” says Ms. Smith.
Pets also can help turn regular lesson plans into silly, educational moments. To make multiplication fun, for instance, Benjamin Shaw enlisted his classroom’s bearded dragon, Mushu.
“Mushu wants to eat five bugs, and there are three bowls, and each has five bugs. How many bugs in total?” Mr. Shaw asked his Dallas-Fort Worth third graders. Mushu has also been the center of habitat and animal anatomy lessons, showing off his scales.
“Our teachers and our families are looking for alternative, hands-on educational content and material where it’s not just to attach to another screen,” says Melinda Thomas, executive director of The Pet Care Trust, a group that helps support school animals.
The organization’s Pets in the Classroom program awarded more than 16,000 grants to teachers across the United States and Canada in the 2025-26 school year to help cover initial pet care expenses.
But as adorable and helpful as these scaly and furry friends are, it’s important to think about having a pet from the pet’s perspective, too.
While “you can easily say the kids would love it [pets], if you leave it at that, you’re really missing out on the bigger picture,” says Laura Ireland, the associate director of the Animal Law and Policy Institute at Vermont Law and Graduate School.
Caring properly for classroom pets requires teachers to ask themselves a lot of questions. Do they have the right habitat? Does the pet want to be held by 20 students in a day? Who is caring for the animal during school breaks or taking them to the vet?
Ms. Ireland also worries about where class pets originate. Some pet stores get animals from disreputable breeders, including enterprises called “mills” that prioritize churning out animals for profit and ignore animal well-being. If the pets come from a source that isn’t good for the animals, what lesson does that teach students?
“Thinking through all those issues … there is a way to do it correctly, but there’s so many ways for it go wrong,” Ms. Ireland says about classroom pets. She recommends to “try to look at things from the animal’s perspective … and then trying to put a voice to that.”
This often means that teachers take on a lot of the pet care responsibilities. So, next time you see a teacher cleaning out a hamster cage, remember to say thank you.