Animal-assisted therapy (AAT) uses animals to support human mental health and wellbeing. The welfare of therapy animals — often overlooked in the focus on human benefit — requires systematic attention.
The irony of animal-assisted therapy is that the animals providing therapeutic benefit can themselves experience welfare compromise if their needs are not carefully managed. Therapy work exposes animals to unfamiliar people, unpredictable environments, high-stimulation settings, and interactions they may find stressful. Dogs in therapy settings may show subtle stress signals — lip licking, yawning, turning away, reduced tail movement — that handlers untrained in animal body language miss. Fatigue and emotional exhaustion are real risks for animals doing intensive therapy work. High-quality AAT programs treat animal welfare as co-equal with human benefit: monitoring for stress indicators, limiting session length and frequency, providing choice and control where possible, and allowing animals to disengage from interactions.