Golden Retrievers Therapy Dogs (Everything To Know)

To understand whether your golden will do good in this role, learn about the traits of a perfect therapy dog and evaluate your dog’s compliance with the requirements.

Therapy dogs must undergo special training and assessment to obtain a certification, so the process isn’t always quick and straightforward.

However, the effort is worth providing real value to the disabled, lonely, depressed, and other people in need of friendship and affection.

What Makes a Good Therapy Dog?

To understand whether golden retrievers can serve as therapy dogs, we should first outline the traits that make a good therapy dog. Therapy dogs help people with anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues feel better.

Therapy dogs are also helpful for lonely people, such as seniors in elder homes, kids in hospices, and anyone else needing emotional support. Naturally, such a dog must be empathetic to understand human emotions.

Therapy dogs attend public places and must be friendly to everyone. They cannot be aggressive towards strangers, anxious about social interactions, or afraid of noise.

Therapy dogs must be gentle, mainly if they work with kids, elders, or people with special needs. Some dogs aren’t suitable for therapy dog work despite being friendly because they cannot adequately evaluate their strength.

A perfect therapy dog must be affectionate. Cuddling and petting release serotonin and dopamine hormones in the human body, which are responsible for the feeling of happiness and contentment. A dog that hates being touched can never become a therapy dog.

Lastly, a therapy dog must be intelligent and obedient. It must understand what’s acceptable, read human body language, and obey the owner’s commands regardless of the distractions.

Are Golden Retrievers Sociable?

Now, let’s see how golden retrievers fit the description of a perfect therapy dog. These dogs are highly sociable. They are natural-born extroverts who want to be friends with everyone and get along with kids, elders, and animals.

Responsible golden retriever breeders put a lot of effort into socializing their puppies, reinforcing their inherited personality traits. They ensure their dogs are accustomed to unfamiliar people, animals, sounds, and environments.

A friendly dog will never be aggressive for no reason. Anxiety is a common cause of dog aggression, so breeders significantly reduce the risk of unwanted behavior by eliminating anxiety.

A golden retriever can safely attend public places without threatening to hurt anyone.

Are Golden Retrievers Empathetic?

Empathy refers to a dog’s ability to understand human emotions by reading body language, tone of voice, and facial expressions. Dogs can also analyze human emotions by smelling hormones.

All dogs can read human body language to some extent. But the ability to understand human emotions doesn’t yet mean that a dog will care. Golden retrievers genuinely want to help people in need.

These dogs will never leave a child crying or a person amidst an anxiety attack. They will do everything in their power to make a suffering person feel better.

Emotional intelligence is also vital for the dog to communicate its needs. Golden retrievers have no difficulty showing their owners how they feel and can signal when they get overwhelmed.

Are Golden Retrievers Gentle?

Golden retrievers are known as gentle giants. Despite their large size, they can adequately evaluate their strength when interacting with smaller animals, kids, and people with special needs.

A golden retriever will never knock over a child or hurt them during play as long as the dog gets enough exercise. This trait makes golden retrievers perfect therapy dogs for nursing homes, hospices, and orphanages.

Golden retriever gentleness arises from their emotional intellect and genetics. These dogs were bred to retrieve waterfowl and evolved to have a soft bite that doesn’t damage objects in the mouth.

Are Golden Retrievers Intelligent?

According to American Kennel Club, golden retrievers are among the most intelligent dog breeds, along with poodles, German shepherds, and border collies. But while German shepherds are intelligent, they are nowhere as gentle and affectionate.

Canine intelligence is measured based on how fast a dog memorizes commands, how often it obeys them, how well it communicates with people, and how well it solves complex tasks.

Golden retrievers excel at every point. They are highly obedient because a stubborn dog would never make a good hunting companion. Goldens also have an excellent memory and learn new commands quicker than an average dog.

Golden retrievers have excellent problem-solving skills, which makes them ideal working dogs. However, this trait can also be helpful for therapy dogs that need to deal with complex human emotions.

Are Golden Retrievers Affectionate?

Golden retrievers love cuddles. They like to look into the owner’s eyes, lick their hands, paw them, and otherwise show their attachment. These dogs strongly bond with people and genuinely suffer when left alone.

And while some dogs are only affectionate with their owners but hate being touched by strangers, goldens have enough love for everyone. They happily let strangers pet them and believe there can never be too many cuddles.

Because of this trait, golden retrievers are excellent therapy dogs for people who feel lonely or scared.

Legal Protections & Limitations

If you’re considering making your golden retriever a therapy dog, learn about the legal protections for therapy animals. Although therapy dogs provide support to people with special medical needs, they are not classified as service animals under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Service dogs are legally entitled to attend any public place with their owners regardless of the pet policy. They can go to restaurants, schools, libraries, and hospitals and fly as long as the owner can provide proof of their disability.

Therapy animals lack this right. They provide emotional support to people in need but don’t undergo special training and don’t perform essential daily tasks for their owners.

For this reason, therapy animals cannot attend places with a no-pet policy. Simply put, therapy animals have no legal protections whatsoever – they are considered regular animals and must comply with the federal legislation regarding pets.

Therapy animals cannot travel on board unless they fit the airline’s pets-on-board policies and cannot accompany the owner to restaurants and hospital facilities.

The Fair Housing Act, which protects people with disabilities from discrimination in obtaining housing, doesn’t refer to therapy animals but only to service dogs, so property owners can refuse to rent out a property to therapy dog owners.

Therapy Dog Requirements

While therapy dogs have little to no legal protections, they have plenty of requirements. This may not seem fair, but therapy dog requirements are in place to protect people with special medical needs.

A therapy dog must display a high degree of obedience and intelligence. It must be sociable, calm, and affectionate, never engaging in aggressive or destructive behavior.

Therapy dog health requirements include up-to-date vaccinations, flea and worm treatments, and health clearance.

Training is imperative to therapy dogs. Ideally, the dog should undertake the American Kennel Club Canine Good Citizen Program and obtain certification because it’s a prerequisite for many therapy dog programs.

However, some facilities will happily accept dogs with different certifications. The dog’s size doesn’t matter, but certain breeds are preferred over others, and golden retrievers top the list of the best therapy dog breeds.

The dog must be at least one year old to serve as a therapy dog, but there’s no upper age limit. If the dog can help people feel better at ten years old, it can continue working.

How To Register a Golden Retriever As a Therapy Dog

The registration and certification requirements for therapy dogs and emotional support animals are surrounded by numerous misconceptions. Many people confuse therapy pets with emotional support animals and think they don’t need to be certified.

But unlike emotional support animals that only help the owner, therapy dogs work with strangers and, therefore, must obtain certification.

Two internationally-recognized organizations providing training, temperament assessment, and certification for therapy dogs are Pet Partners and Therapy Dogs International.

However, there are also local organizations that can help you certify your dog as a therapy animal. Do a bit of research to find one that best suits your dog.

Registration is not required for therapy dogs. Certification provided by the training organization is sufficient to prove your dog’s right to serve as a therapy dog.

However, many websites online offer to register a dog as a therapy animal for a small fee. Websites claiming that they can register a dog as a therapy animal without temperament and training assessment are a fraud.

Note that not only your dog will be assessed to obtain a certification. Your abilities as the dog’s handler will also be tested to ensure that you can control your pet. You should prove that your dog obeys your commands.

Canine Good Citizen certification involves ten tests – accepting a friendly stranger, sitting politely for petting, permitting grooming, walking on a loose leash, sitting and staying by command, coming when called, behaving well with other dogs, reacting to distractions, and supervised separation.

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