Preparing Therapy Dogs for Animal-Assisted Services: Governance, Welfare-Centred Preparation, and a Lifecycle Research Agenda Across Selected European and United States Frameworks

Dog-assisted services are employed in healthcare, educational, social-care, and community settings, yet systems for preparing and protecting therapy dogs remain unevenly developed. This narrative review synthesises empirical, conceptual, and governance literature on therapy dog preparation in selected European contexts and the United States. Searches were conducted across academic databases, specialist repositories, and grey-literature sources, with evidence organised thematically around governance, candidate selection, training, handler competency, welfare monitoring, health and zoonotic risk management, and career lifecycle management. The synthesis shows that therapy dog governance remains fragmented, with international guidance, voluntary certification systems, national guideline frameworks, and legally embedded models differing in scope, enforceability, welfare safeguards, handler requirements, and re-evaluation. Across preparation domains, the review identifies a need to move beyond dog-level pass–fail certification toward assessment of the human–dog team within specific intervention contexts. Reward-based and consent-oriented preparation, multimodal welfare monitoring, handler stress recognition, veterinary screening, infection control procedures, workload regulation, and retirement planning emerge as central but inconsistently standardised requirements. The review proposes a tiered lifecycle framework conceptualising therapy dog readiness as a dynamic, welfare-centred, context-dependent process from selection through active service and retirement. Future research should prioritise longitudinal welfare assessment, validated selection and handler competency tools, comparative governance evaluation, positive welfare indicators, and transparent reporting of preparation variables.