Hi there and welcome to the first installment of a weekly series on Oscar’s Therapy Dog Training!

When people hear that Oscar is a therapy dog, we usually get a lot of questions about what exactly he does as therapy dog, why we decided to become pet therapy volunteers, and how he became a registered therapy dog. So, we decided to have a special section of the blog that would be dedicated to posts and comments on this topic.

Maybe you’re interested in becoming a pet therapy team, maybe you’ve had a therapy dog visit you in your time of need or maybe you’re just looking for a feel-good read. In any case, we hope you enjoy our therapy dog exploits. Our first several posts will be dedicated to telling the story of how Oscar became a Therapy Dog…Enjoy!

As soon as Oscar was old enough, we signed him up for Puppy Kindergarten with Andrea Arden Dog Training, where they mostly taught us how to behave like good dog parents. We also learned that training is quality 1-on-1 time that can really help to forge a bond between you and your dog. In our case, it also helped strengthen the bond between the people…we both love spending time with Oscar and we previously had very few leisure interests in common.

Since we enjoyed Puppy Kindergarten so much, we started looking for other challenges to tackle. We were making some good progress on trick training when we saw a commercial for the Westminster Kennel Club’s Angel on a Leash program during their annual Dog Show.

Now at this point, we had started to notice that Oscar seemed to elicit some pretty strong reactions from people on the street. There were the regular friendly encounters with dog lovers or people who would oooh and aaahh over a cute little dog. But we also noticed that even people who didn’t stop to say “hi” would look at Oscar and smile.

In fact, it was rare that we didn’t get AT LEAST a smile. And on Oscar’s end, as soon as he recognized the slightest bit of interest from a 2-legged being, his little stub of a tail would start to wag and he would enthusiastically go over for a sniff or to give some kisses. Finally, Oscar (although he had his crazy moments) was pretty calm for puppy. So when we saw the Angel on a Leash commercial, it seemed like a perfect fit.

After doing some research, we found out that there are two major organizations that provide training programs for animal-assisted activities (AAA) and animal-assisted therapy (AAT) - The Delta Society and Therapy Dogs International (TDI). We learned that you must be registered with one of these organizations in order to participate in Pet Therapy programs at most hospitals, nursing homes and other facilities and that registration also provides coverage under the organization’s liability insurance. Finally, we learned that dogs must be at least one year old to register - alas, Oscar was too young!!!

Tune in next time to learn what we did to get ready to start Oscar’s therapy dog training.