How do I make my dog a therapy dog?
I find myself answering this question a lot lately, so I thought I’d devote a few words to it here.
First, remember that therapy dogs are not service dogs. There is no legal definition of therapy dog, but it typically means a dog that is trained—and ideally registered and insured—to help provide animal-assisted activities or animal-assisted therapy to people, like visiting patients and their families in the hospital or helping high school students calm down between their exams. Unlike service dogs, who perform specific tasks for individuals with disabilities, therapy dogs have no special legal rights to access public places.
With that said, the first step I recommend is to work toward taking the Canine Good Citizen test. The skills are very similar, and lots of dog training facilities offer CGC prep classes. The CGC test is a great goal for pretty much any trainer and dog, and it’s a helpful way seeing if your dog has the skills before committing the time and money toward starting the therapy dog registration process.
The therapy dog organization I always recommend is Pet Partners, because in my experience, that is the national organization that provides both the standards and support to enable teams to be highly successful in helping others through therapy dog work. Full disclosure: I’ve been a Pet Partners therapy dog handler since 2014 and I became an evaluator for them in 2017. You can find an overview of some of the key information about volunteering as a therapy dog team here on the Pet Partners site. Also, an important thing to note is that, unlike titles for dogs like the CGC, the Pet Partners evaluation is about both the human and the dog. The dog has to demonstrate their own skills and temperament, but the human is also being evaluated. You’ll need to demonstrate that you can interact professionally in a therapy situation and handle your dog effectively to keep everybody (including the dog!) safe.
So what are the steps?
Once you decide that volunteering as a therapy team is something you want to pursue with your dog, the first step is to start a registration on the Pet Partners website. When you start your registration, it may seem like there are a lot of pieces to the puzzle, and there are, but only two or three of them involve significant work.
The second step is for the human to take a course. Therapy dog work involves professionalism, privacy, and a bit of knowhow in how to manage a dog in all kinds of potentially sensitive situations, so Pet Partners offers a course you can take online or in person to prep you. The human needs to complete that before they can be evaluated in person with their dog.
Next, the dog needs to be certified by their vet as healthy. There’s a health form you will need to download and provide to your vet. The gist is that your dog is healthy enough to perform therapy work, is vaccinated properly, and is free from parasites. Your vet may want to see your dog and do additional testing or a vaccine booster, so make sure you communicate with your vet in advance and send them the form. Also, if you choose to go with Pet Partners, be aware that you cannot feed your dog a raw meat diet, and your vet will need to attest to that. I know there are may responsible owners who feed raw, and I have full respect for them, but in order to avoid wasting your time, you should be aware that raw fed dogs are not eligible for Pet Partners registration as therapy dogs.
There are a few other pieces of paperwork to upload, including an ID badge photo that meets the requirements, but they’re all pretty straightforward. The last difficult piece is the evaluation itself, and that’s the hardest part for most teams. It’s a series of exercises to see if the dog is under control and reacts appropriately to common things you might see on a therapy visit. It’s an evaluation of the person and the dog as a team, not just of the dog itself. You can read an overview of each element of the evaluation here in order to get an idea of what you need to prepare for.