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.