‘Basically He’s a Pet, Not a Working Dog’: Theorising What Therapy Dogs Do in the Workplace

Abstract

This article takes the case of therapy dogs who visit hospitals, care homes, schools and universities in Britain and asks whether we should conceptualise what they are doing as work. Marx defined the capacity to work as what sets humankind apart from other animals, but more recent analysts see similarities between animals and humans in their capacity to work. Animal work is often defined through training and the acquisition of skills; for therapy dogs, however, training is not required, and their skills go unrecognised. Drawing on a study of therapy dog visits to a British university and using a methodology that attends to the experiences of the dogs as well as the human actors, we argue that therapy dogs engage in emotional work and body work and that the concepts of ‘encounter value’ and ‘feeling power’ need to be deployed to theorise the work they are doing.