Service animals aren’t pets. They are highly trained dogs that assist individuals with disabilities by performing various tasks. These dogs are essentially a need for disabled individuals to live an accessible life, just like wheelchairs and crutches.
With everything service animals can do, from providing mobility assistance to bringing medication, they can significantly increase the quality of their handler’s life. Because of this, service animals have public access rights that permit them to enter public spaces, such as restaurants and government buildings, even if they don’t allow pets.
If you have a dog and ask how to get your dog certified as a service dog, our article is here to answer. Read on to learn everything about making your dog a service animal.
What Is a Service Animal – the ADA’s Definition
Service animals are protected under the Americans With Disabilities Act. According to federal law, service animals are dogs trained to perform a task directly related to a disability, such as retrieving objects from the ground or providing deep pressure therapy during a panic attack.
Additionally, service dogs can be any dog, with no restrictions on breed or size. That means even dog breeds banned in some states, like pit bulls to tiny Chihuahuas, can become service animals.
Do Service Animals Require a Certification?
Service animals don’t need any certification. The law only requires them to have received proper training directly related to an individual’s disability.
As long as the dog is trained for service animal work, they won’t need any certifications or documents to become a service animal.
However, businesses can ask the following questions to determine if a dog is a service dog:
- Is the dog a service animal required because of a disability?
- What work or task has the dog been trained to perform?
Besides these two questions, businesses cannot require the service animal to demonstrate their training or ask about the handler’s disability.
Service Animal Training
For your dog to be “certified” as a service dog, they must undergo service animal training. To make your dog a service dog, you must first decide on the type of training, as there’s a wide range of service animals upholding different duties to help their handlers.
For example, if you have a physical disability, you can train your dog to become a mobility assistance animal. However, your dog’s size, age, and physical capabilities will determine their suitability for this type of service animal work. The same goes for guiding dogs, bracing dogs, balance support dogs, and others that engage their bodies to help their handlers.
Compared to these service animals, training your dog to become a psychiatric service dog might be easier and more suitable as they don’t always need to use their bodies to help their handlers. Some of the psychiatric service dog tasks include providing deep pressure therapy, bringing medication, and alerting the handler or others.
Since these tasks don’t depend on the service animal’s size, psychiatric service dog training is more accessible for dog owners with psychiatric conditions compared to those with physical disability.
However, this doesn’t mean that anyone can train their dogs to become a service animal. Regardless of the tasks involved, service animal training requires an experienced owner who knows what they’re doing. If you have no experience training dogs, you might need to seek help from a professional trainer to make your dog a service dog.
After Training Your Dog to Become a Service Dog
With everything we’ve covered, asking how to get my dog certified as a service dog isn’t the question you should be asking. Instead, you should focus on your dog’s trainability and suitability for service animal work.
You won’t need certifications as long as you have the time and resources to train your dog to become a service dog or hire a professional dog trainer. Service animals don’t need any documentation to prove their status. They only need to receive proper training to help their handler with a disability.
However, you can register your dog in service animal registries, like USServiceAnimals, to have your dog in their database and get a registered Service Animal ID Card with your dog’s details. This can be useful to show people that your dog is a registered service animal, though the law doesn’t require handlers to present any document when entering a public space that normally doesn’t allow dogs.