Therapy animals provide documented benefits to humans in hospitals and care settings — but their welfare must be actively protected.
Therapy animal welfare depends entirely on the vigilance of handlers who monitor for stress signals and advocate for session termination when the animal shows discomfort. The welfare risk in therapy work is not the individual visit but cumulative stress from repeated deployment in environments the animal cannot control or escape. Animals who are over-deployed, handled by too many unfamiliar people without choice, or kept in sessions beyond their stress threshold suffer welfare compromise that is difficult to see from outside the handler-animal relationship. Welfare-first therapy animal programs explicitly limit deployment frequency, require regular behavioral assessments, and commit to retirement when animals show sustained stress responses to previously neutral stimuli.