Therapy and emotional support animals provide measurable benefits to humans but face their own welfare challenges from intensive working schedules and stressful environments.
Animal-assisted intervention welfare sits at a point where human therapeutic benefit and animal welfare can come into genuine tension. The therapeutic value of AAI is well-documented, but the welfare of the animal providing the therapy is easily overlooked when therapeutic programmes are driven primarily by client need. Therapy animals cannot choose to withdraw from stressful situations and depend entirely on their handlers to read stress signals and act on them. Research shows that therapy animals in programmes without adequate welfare monitoring experience chronic stress that accumulates over sessions. Effective AAI welfare requires handler training in animal stress recognition, mandatory rest and recovery periods, environmental management to reduce stressor exposure, and a programme design philosophy that treats animal welfare as a non-negotiable foundation rather than a secondary consideration.