Current Rules and Regulations for Dogs Working in Assistance, Service, and Support Roles

The legal landscape for dogs working in assistance, service, and support roles is complicated and contradictory. Regulations permit access to public places, allow subsets of dogs' emergency transport and treatment, provide elevated protections for K-9s and assistance animals from criminal acts, and make it a crime to fraudulently represent a service animal. Federal and state agencies provide different regulations for dogs to access public places. Identification and verification of the working animal are not standardized. Working dog legislation is a changing landscape that requires veterinarians to be up to date on laws and regulatory guidance.

The role of therapy and service animals in the lives of persons with disabilities

Over the past 20 years, a great deal of attention has been paid to the psychological and physiological impact that animals have on the lives of people with disabilities. The focus of this paper is to demystify the mechanisms that are affected as a consequence of these interactions as well as to describe the value of various types of therapeutic working animals. For human-animal interactions to become more legitimised, more rigorous empirical research needs to be undertaken to demonstrate the value of such interactions as well as the need for changes in the public policy impacting them.