In this article, I will discuss the difference between Service Dogs, Therapy Dogs, and Emotional Support Animals (ESA). I'm getting this information directly from the American Kennel Club website.
What is a Service Dog?
A service dog, as defined by the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act), is individually trained to perform specific tasks and to work with people with disabilities. According to the ADA, disabilities can be physical, sensory, psychiatric, intellectual, or other mental.
The service dog's work must be directly related to the handler's disability. Here are a few examples:
Guide dogs that help blind people navigate in the world.
Hearing or signal dogs alert deaf people to sounds, such as a door knock or someone entering the room.
Psychiatric dogs are trained to detect and lessen the effects of a psychiatric episode.
Service dogs help those in wheelchairs or who are otherwise physically limited.
Autism-assisted dogs are trained to help those on the autism spectrum.
Some service dogs that are trained to recognize seizures will stand guard over their owners during a seizure or go get help.
What rights do service dogs have?
The ADA mandates that service dogs have full public access rights, which means they can go places where animals are typically forbidden. They can be brought into restaurants, stores, libraries, and other public spaces. They must also be permitted in housing even if other pets aren't allowed. Service dogs are also allowed on airplanes and other public transportation.
One thing I want to mention is that there are a lot of fake service dog certifications out there. If you want to know what goes into breeding and training a service dog, the process, and how long it takes, please watch this new documentary on Netflix called Inside the Mind of a Dog. It is mind-blowing how this documentary takes you through the process of breeding dogs, specifically to be service dogs, taking them away from the mother and the litter mates at eight weeks, putting them in an extensive two-year training program, and even then, only a tiny percentage of those dogs can become service dogs and are assigned to an individual for their specific needs.
Not all dogs can be service dogs. If you look online and you get a certification that requires no training, it's not a service dog certification; it's a fake certification, and it might, at best, be a certification for an ESA (emotional support animal).
What is a Therapy Dog?
Therapy dogs play a different helping role than service dogs and emotional support animals. These dogs volunteer in clinical settings, usually with their human teammate, usually the dog's owner. These locations include hospitals, mental health institutions, hospices, schools, and nursing homes. Therapy dogs provide comfort, affection, and even love during their work.
Therapy Dogs are trained to be comfortable in new environments and to interact with different people. They have to have a calm temperament. They can't bark, jump, or pull on the leash, and they're unfazed by unfamiliar noises and movements. They're also comfortable being handled and love people.
Dixie, my dog, is a therapy dog. She's four and a half years old now. She got tested and certified last year, almost exactly a year ago, to be a therapy dog. She gives therapy wherever she goes. If I take her into a store, if I take her to a flea market, sometimes I take her to assisted living communities, and she gives therapy to every single person that she interacts with. Whenever she goes in public, she works for the other people. She's always giving them emotional support. She's always giving them love, always under control, very calm, and letting everybody pet her. She is one of the best therapy dogs that I've ever seen. She's so good at it, and it is her job. It is her calling. This is what she loves to do.
Keep in mind that not all dogs want to be therapy dogs. In addition, therapy dogs don't have many legal rights, although they're defined as comfort dogs and are often used in therapeutic settings. Therapy dogs aren't considered service dogs under the ADA; therefore, they don't have the same legal rights to access public spaces.
There are no uniform, state, or national rules regulating and certifying therapy dogs. The organization that I went through for Dixie is considered one of the best. It is the Alliance of Therapy Dogs.
What is an Emotional Support Animal (ESA)?
Emotional Support Animals (ESA) don't have any specific training that they have to go through to get a qualification for an emotional support animal. They're considered companion animals and can ease anxiety, depression, some phobias, and loneliness. In order to be considered an emotional support dog, a mental health professional must prescribe the ESA for the patient with a diagnosed physiological or emotional disorder, such as anxiety disorder, major depression, or panic attacks.
What rights do emotional support animals have?
Unlike service dog owners, ESA owners have only limited legal rights. Those rights typically require a letter of diagnosis from the owner's doctor or psychiatrist. While they don't have unlimited access to public spaces, the Fair Housing Act mandates reasonable accommodations for emotional support animals, even in buildings that don't allow pets.
For example, in the apartment community that most people live in, they will have breed restrictions such as you can't have a German Shepherd, a Rottweiler, Akita, or other breeds that they consider aggressive. You can get emotional support animal certification from your psychiatrist, and they're pretty easy to get to overcome that obstacle. Some HOAs, especially in condos, have regulations against dogs, period, and you can overcome that by having a certification from your psychiatrist, as your dog is an emotional support animal. Usually, this works. Sometimes it doesn't. It's always a legal issue, and you must present the facts that you need this dog to survive. Keep that in mind when you have to go through this process If you ever do.
Conclusion
In review, there are three types of dogs that I get called to train. People need to understand the difference between the three, but I hope I clarified it. We've got service dogs, therapy dogs, and an emotional support animal. All three are different, but they do have some similarities.
The one thing you want to ensure before you try to get your dog to be any of these three is to make sure the dog is willing to do it. If you want your dog to be a therapy dog and go places and give therapy to others, that's a job for the dog. And the dog has to want to do it voluntarily. They have to be willing to do it. They can't be forced into it. If they're not interested, they won't be a therapy dog.
Only some dogs are qualified to be one of these three dogs, and this is the biggest misconception that many people have when they contact me, and they want their dog to be one of these specialty dogs. They may not be the right breed, they may not have the right temperament, and they may need to be a better fit. So you must remember that when seeking specialty training for your puppy or dog.
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