Review urges full-career assessment of therapy dog and handler teams

Dogs take part in animal-assisted services in hospitals, schools, social care and community settings. The benefits for people have been studied for decades; the systems for preparing and protecting the dogs, far less. A narrative review published on 16 August 2026 in the open-access journal Animals synthesised the empirical, conceptual and governance literature on therapy dog preparation in selected European contexts and the United States.

The authors organised the evidence into seven themes: governance, candidate selection, training, handler competency, welfare monitoring, health and zoonotic risk management, and career lifecycle. The diagnosis is one of fragmentation. International guidance, voluntary certification systems, national guideline frameworks and legally embedded models differ in scope, enforceability, welfare safeguards, handler requirements and re-evaluation.

The review's central proposal is to stop treating certification as a test the dog passes or fails and to assess the human-dog team within specific intervention contexts instead. Reward-based and consent-oriented preparation, multimodal welfare monitoring, handler stress recognition, veterinary screening, infection control procedures, workload regulation and retirement planning emerge as central yet inconsistently standardised requirements. The authors organise these into a tiered lifecycle framework in which a dog's readiness is a dynamic, context-dependent, welfare-centred process from selection through active service to retirement.

As a research agenda, the article prioritises longitudinal welfare assessment, validated selection and handler competency tools, comparative governance evaluation, positive welfare indicators and transparent reporting of preparation variables. As a narrative review without a systematic search protocol, its conclusions describe a landscape rather than estimate effects.

A study published in 2022, also in Animals, surveyed 111 French handlers through an online questionnaire. For them, therapy dog welfare is multidimensional: it involves physical and psychological welfare, a balance between work and dog life, and the settings and interactions of sessions. Three categories of risk factors were highlighted: the spatio-temporal framework (planning and environment), interactions with beneficiaries, and the handler themselves. The authors draw attention to a sensitive point: interactions with beneficiaries are at the heart of the practice, yet few studies examine them as a stressor for dogs. And because handlers' representations may carry a positive bias, the study argues they should be trained to identify and manage stress in their dogs.

The field's shared language comes from the white paper of the International Association of Human-Animal Interaction Organizations (IAHAIO), published in 2014 and updated in 2018, which defines the modalities of animal-assisted intervention and provides welfare guidelines for the animals involved, with a One Health and One Welfare approach. The organisation announced a 2025 update replacing the term "interventions" with "animal-assisted services", the same adopted by the 2026 review. The document is institutional, not a study, and belongs here as a reference for vocabulary and principles.

For the veterinarian, the most concrete contribution of this body of work is the list of tasks the review identifies as central and poorly standardised: health screening, infection control, workload limits and retirement criteria. These are decisions that pass through the consulting room, and the available evidence says they still depend more on each programme than on a shared standard.