Animal-assisted interventions using dogs, horses, and other animals in therapeutic, educational, and emotional support roles require careful welfare management to avoid exploitation.
Animal-assisted interventions provide genuine therapeutic value to human participants, but the animals involved deserve welfare consideration proportional to their contribution. Therapy dogs who work five days a week in hospital wards, therapy horses who carry multiply-disabled riders in multiple sessions daily — these animals are workers whose needs, stress levels, and long-term health outcomes matter. Programs that build welfare monitoring into their design, limit work intensity, and give animals agency to disengage from interactions are both more ethical and, evidence suggests, more therapeutically effective.